Last week, Maggie went to the largest science conference in the Western Hemisphere for four days of wall-to-wall awesomeness. Every day, she learned amazing things, watching scientists from all over the world talk about their work. Check the bottom of each post to find links to earlier posts in this series!

One of my favorite parts of the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference happens at the end of each day, after the panel discussions are over and the convention floor has been locked down. That's when the parties start.

Now, obviously, everybody likes parties. But these are better than most. The AAAS parties are where a delightful mixture of scientists, journalists, academic journal editors, and university public relations officers gather to compare notes, talk shop, and tell each other about the awesome science they learned during the day.

I already mentioned how hard it is to decide which panels to see and which lectures to attend. At any given time there will be three-to-five different things you'd like to watch, all happening simultaneously. During the day, you're forced to choose. But at night, the parties are where you get the chance to learn about all the things you didn't get to see for yourself. You arrive, are handed a glass of wine, and all your friends run up to find out what you learned that day. It is a wonderful, nerd-tastic experience, and I want to share it with you.

On Sunday, February 19th, I took a small video recorder to a AAAS wine and cheese party. I found some people with neat stories to tell and convinced them to share those stories on camera. Together, these 11 short videos—none longer than 4 minutes or so—will give you a taste of what a AAAS party is like. It'll also give you an idea of just how many subjects AAAS covers. This video collection contains cool facts on every topic from dolphin rights, to GM crops, to international political intrigue. Just kick back, pour yourself a glass of wine, and ask, "So what did you see today?"

First up: Freelance journalist Neil Savage, who learned some fascinating stuff about the plethora of ways technology helps us gather information about ourselves—and how we might protect that information in the future.

Dr. Carin Bondar, biologist and blogger, has a short message for you about the future of the oceans.

Continuing the ocean science theme, science blogger Eric Michael Johnson talks about why civil rights for dolphins is a real, serious issue. You can read more about this session in a Macleans article written by Kate Lunau.

Popular Science editor Susannah Locke has a couple of interesting tidbits: One about some uninvited visitors in your bloodstream; and another fact about GM crops versus traditional breeding methods.

Jessica Thomas, who works for the American Physical Society, learned something amazing about physics of cell behavior and how this could be used to treat cancer.

When you learn to speak can have long-reaching consequences on your life. Freelance journalist Erik Vance talks about his own experience as a late-talker, and what he learned about how parents can help late-talkers succeed.

Alexandra Witze is a contributing editor for Science News. She went to a seriously awesome lecture (I can say this because I was there, too) by a researcher who creates volcanic explosions in his lab.

Eric Sorensen writes about science for Washington State University. He learned that you don't remember your life nearly as well as you think you do.

When is a kilogram not a kilogram? Jennifer Bogo, editor at Popular Mechanics, explains what she learned about how units of measurement are changing.

Alan Boyle, science editor at MSNBC.com ponders the potential side effects of trying to use science to make the natural world too convenient.

Finally, Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, tells the amazingly true story of how fish farts almost caused a diplomatic crisis between Russia and Sweden.

PREVIOUS DISPATCHES FROM AAAS

It's that time again. Maggie is back at the largest science convention in the Western Hemisphere for four days of wall-to-wall awesomeness. Each day, she'll tell you about some of the cool things she learned watching scientists from all over the world talk about their work. Check the bottom of each post to find links to earlier posts in this series!

Fifteen years ago, Dr. Harry Kestler got a call from a colleague in Florida who had inadvertently stumbled across a very unique family. An African-American woman had brought her sick child into the hospital only to discover that the child was HIV-positive and experiencing symptoms of AIDS. Further tests showed that she, herself, had HIV. As did four of her five children. It was a family tragedy. But in the midst of that, Kestler's colleague had noticed something odd.

The woman knew how she must have been infected—her ex-husband had been an intravenous drug user. But that had been more than 20 years ago. She, and her oldest child, had had HIV for over two decades without developing any symptoms. And her second-oldest child—who shared the same father—wasn't infected with HIV at all.

I've written here before about long-term non-progressors—a rare class of people who can be infected with HIV and live for decades without the virus ever developing into anything serious. Their secret: mutations in their genes that prevent HIV from binding to cells, which means it can't invade the cells or replicate.

Yesterday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, I visited the student poster session, a place where undergraduate college students present research projects they're involved in and compete against one another to earn their poster a spot in an upcoming issue of the journal Science. There, among undergrads from MIT, Harvard, and other prestigious institutions, I met some surprising entrants. Eric McCallister—a student at Ohio's Lorain County Community College—and Megan Sheldon and Conner Anderson—two teenagers who go to high school at the same community college. All three of them are working with Harry Kestler to study the mutations that protect HIV non-progressors against an otherwise deadly virus. Unique researchers studying a unique family.

If you're not from the United States, you might not realize what a big deal this is. Research like this does not normally happen at community colleges. Instead, those schools are usually treated as a second-class system—a way for people to knock out two years' worth of college courses for less money, or just earn a two-year associates' degree. Lorain has partnerships with multiple traditional universities and allows students to take all but 30 credit hours of a four-year degree at the community college. They graduate with a full bachelor's degree from the four-year university. Because of that, the school offers more advanced classes than you can usually find at a community college, and it attracts highly-credentialed, research-oriented professors like Harry Kestler.

If you've heard about HIV non-progressors much at all, you've probably heard about one specific mutation called Delta 32. It's the most commonly talked about. "Basically, if you have this deletion mutation, there are 32 base pairs that should be in your gene sequence that just aren't there," Megan Sheldon told me. (Again, take a moment to process the fact that Megan is 17.) "When you loose those, it means you don't have this specific receptor on your cells and HIV can no longer bind to them."

Delta 32 mutations have been used to cure one man of HIV. In 2007, doctors killed off all the blood cells in the body of a man named Timothy Ray Brown, replacing them with a bone marrow transplant from a donor who carried the Delta 32 mutation.

If you're homozygous for Delta 32—that is, if you carry two copies of the gene that creates this mutation—you simply can't get HIV. About 1% of caucasians are homozygous, Sheldon said. If you're heterozygous, and have one copy of the gene, then you can contract HIV, but it will move very slowly, often taking 10 or even 20 years longer to progress into full-blown AIDS than would otherwise have happened.

Now that you know that, let's go back and talk about that anonymous family in Florida. They seem like they fit the patterns we're talking about here. But they didn't have the Delta 32 mutation. Their mutations were completely different. In fact, all three of the family members studied—the mother, and her two oldest children—had different mutations from one another. They represented three different paths to protection.

Eric McCallister, the college student who getting his bachelor's degree through that Lorain/university partnership, is doing research on blood samples from the second-oldest child—the one who never contracted HIV. Right now, he's trying to prove that this particular mutation—a shift in a single base, compared to the 32 base pair deletion you see with Delta 32—is, in fact, responsible for the child's ability to fend off HIV.

If he can prove that, though, it would be a big deal. I already mentioned that scientists have used Delta 32 mutations from one person to cure HIV in another person. This is not a cheap procedure, a safe procedure, nor a widely available one. The new mutation that McCallister is studying has the potential to remove one of the many roadblocks to curing HIV this way.

As with Delta 32-based treatments, doctors would still have to kill off all the blood cells in a patient's body. But, instead of needing to find a bone marrow donor who is both a match to patient and a carrier of Delta 32, McCallister says the single-point mutation could be induced in a sample of patient's own bone marrow. You'd remove some of their bone marrow, make the change, and then, after their blood cells had been killed off, transplant the altered version of their own marrow back into them.

As McCallister tries to prove he's found a better option for HIV treatment, his teenage colleagues are trying to document Delta 32 mutations in a more diverse swath of the population. Megan Sheldon, and her 16-year-old research partner Connor Anderson, got involved because they go to high school at Lorain County Community College. Every year, the school accepts 100 high school students through an application/lottery system. Those students attend class with college students through all four years of high school, graduating with both a high school diploma and an associates' degree. They'll have two years worth of college credits already knocked out.

Right now, Sheldon said, most of the research on Delta 32 mutations has been done in caucasian populations. When we say that the homozygous mutation is present in 1% of white people, that's not the same thing as saying that it's present in other populations. The truth is that we just don't know because those populations haven't been as well documented.

Sheldon and Anderson want to get a better idea of the rates of Delta 32 mutations within different racial and ethnic groups. Their current poster is basically a proof-of-concept, showing that they are capable of doing the research necessary to reach this goal. For their first study, the teenagers took blood samples from 50 students and teachers at a local high school. The data was completely anonymized. Although they want to study demographics of the mutation in the future, Sheldon and Anderson don't know anything about the people the current samples came from.

What they do know: Out of that 50 people, five were heterozygous for Delta 32. If any of those five contract HIV, they would be long-term non-progressors, going far longer without symptoms than other infected people.

PREVIOUSLY FROM AAAS:

It's that time again. Maggie is back at the largest science convention in the Western Hemisphere for four days of wall-to-wall awesomeness. Each day, she'll tell you about some of the cool things she learned watching scientists from all over the world talk about their work. Check the bottom of each post to find links to earlier posts in this series!

Each year, the American Association for the Advancement of Science holds a conference. Scientists from every discipline you can think of attend. They come from all over the world bearing fascinating studies they're dying to talk about, and Power Point presentations they'd probably rather I didn't critique. The result: The worst part about this conference (besides the aforementioned poorly done Power Points) is trying to choose which session you want to see. There's often as many as a dozen occupying the same time slot. Usually, three or four of those will strike me as something I MUST find out more about.

Friday morning, I picked a session that I hoped would provide some background and context on issues you and I are already talking about. Birth control—and, specifically, who should have access to it—has become a major issue in the current presidential campaign. Along with that has come a lot of confusion and misinformation about how birth control works, how effective it is, and what we know about its potential side effects. My first session of the day: Fifty Years of the Pill: Risk Reduction and Discovery of Benefits Beyond Contraception.

The first thing I learned: If you're taking an oral contraceptive, there's a good chance that you're doing it wrong.

Only 50% of the women who use the pill actually use it correctly—never missing a day and taking the pill at the same time of day every day. In fact, in 1998, University of Michigan nursing professor Deborah Oakley did a study with a small group of nursing students that found that even women who think they use the pill consistently, often don't. Before the study, Oakley asked the women how often they missed their birth control pills. They told her one out of every 10. Then, she gave them electronic packs that recorded actual usage. "The reality: Their pill missage rate was 2-3x what they thought it was," says Ronald Burkman, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Tufts School of Medicine.

Burkman was one of the speakers on the panel, and he told me that inconsistent usage affects both how well birth control works and how well we can study its side effects. That's because "inconsistent usage" doesn't just refer to forgetting to take pills or not taking them at the right time. Those are the things that can lead to unwanted pregnancies, but there's a bigger picture as well. Women don't use birth control in a monolithic way. For instance, in my own life, I've used 3-4 different kinds of hormonal birth control—all with different formulations and dosages. And even though I used the pill for the first time when I was 18, I've not been on a hormonal birth control consistently since then. For various reasons, women go on and off of this medication. And that makes it difficult to study the side effects of birth control in a really granular way.

In general, we know that birth control is pretty safe. Even the scary-sounding side effects, like heart attack, are incredibly rare. What's more, pregnancy is more dangerous. For example, even though birth control slightly increases the risk of heart attack, pregnancy (and particularly the period immediately following pregnancy) increases your risk far more. Burkman said that studies show somewhere between 2 and 14 cardiac events per 10,000 woman-years of birth control use. Meanwhile, for every 10,000 pregnancies, 20-50 women will have some kind of a cardiac event. (That's true for all the big risks of birth control, Burkman said. The absolute increase in risk is tiny, and you're safer with birth control than you are with pregnancy.)

We know this because of two different kinds of studies. One type of study compiles the medical information of thousands of women who use birth control, aggregating the amount of time they each used it. That's what is meant by "10,000 woman-years of use". There might be 200,000 women in the study, and between them, they've used the pill for 10,000 years.

The other type of study follows individual pill users over the course of their lives and records what happens to them. At this point, we have data following pill users over 39 years. Those studies actually show some interesting benefits to birth control use. Compared to women who never took the pill, the pill users had increased bone mass, fewer cases of endometriosis—when uterine cells start growing outside the uterus and cause a lot of pain—and fewer cases of pelvic inflammatory syndrome, bacterial infections in the reproductive system that can lead to scarring and infertility.

But, at the same time, there's really not much data that breaks out the risk analysis by type of birth control user. If one woman takes birth control for 2 years, and another takes it for 20, we don't really know much about how their relative risks differ. That's because 2 years of use (or 20 years of use) doesn't mean the same thing for one woman that it means for another. How do you know who has been using the pill consistently during that time and who hasn't? How do you compare women who've used two completely different types of pills? Different chemical formulations have different effects on the body.

During the Q&A portion of the session, a woman told the panel that she was concerned about what happened to women who used birth control for 15 years straight, starting in their mid-teens. "It can't be safe," she said. "I've personally known too many people with fertility problems and blood clots."*

The truth is that we have enough data to say she's wrong. We can look at the aggregate studies and see that birth control is safe, that it's safer than pregnancy. We can look at the longitudinal studies (the ones that follow women over the course of their lives) and see that birth control doesn't cause fertility problems. But, frustratingly, we can't give that woman the exact kind of data that she's looking for. We can't point to a study of 30-year-old women who have been on birth control since they were 15 and tell you what happened to them.

There's a possibility that that could be easier in the future, as more women use forms of birth control that are harder to use inconsistently—things like the monthly ring, the three-year implant, or the 5-10 year hormonal IUD. But these still aren't easy studies to set up, and you still can't compare a ring user to an implant user, and expect that to say something about women who use the pill. The data we have today is good—but it's not granular. We can speak about women who use the pill in general. But we can't tell you much about particular women.

CHECK OUT OUR COVERAGE OF AAAS 2011 and AAAS 2010: