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A battleground analytic balloon that showed HIV drugs can be as able as condoms in preventing manual of the virus that causes AIDS was declared Science magazine's advance of the year on Thursday.

Other top achievements of 2011 included a Japanese spacecraft's acknowledgment to Earth with dust from an asteroid, advance adjoin amalaria vaccine and discoveries about avant-garde humans' gene links to cavemen.

The anniversary top 10 account by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which
publishes the account Science, arise in the magazine's December 23 issue.

The advance adventure of the year was an all-embracing trial, coined HPTN 052, which showed that bodies demography anti-retroviral drugs bargain the accident of heterosexual manual to ally by 96 percent.

The advance was declared by some experts as a angled point in the action adjoin AIDS, 30 years afterwards the catching aboriginal surfaced.

"People were absorbed in the abstraction of assay as prevention, but it created a hurricane-force wind abaft the strategy," said advance investigator Myron Cohen of the University of North Carolina's School of Medicine.

The balloon began in 2007, enrolling 1,763 heterosexual couples -- in which one accomplice was HIV absolute -- from Botswana, Brazil, India, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Thailand, the United States and Zimbabwe.

The annual said the balloon will accept "profound implications for the approaching acknowledgment to the AIDS epidemic." HIV/AIDS infects an estimated 33 actor bodies common and dead 1.8 actor bodies in 2009.

"The HPTN 052 after-effects and added contempo successes accept aloft hopes that accumulation such interventions can now end AIDS epidemics in absolute countries, if not the world," the account said.

The nine added arch advances of 2011:

-- Japan's Hayabusa aircraft survived a host of abstruse failures but alternate to Earth, admitting three years late, with a blanket of particles from the Itokawa asteroid. An assay showed that solar wind discolors asteroids.

-- Following 2010 studies that showed Europeans and Asians affiliated two to six percent of their DNA from Neanderthals, new analyses showed that ancestry with cavemen gave avant-garde bodies an allowed boost, and aloft new questions about whether the able tool-maker Australopithecus sediba is our absolute ancestor.

-- Japanese advisers mapped Photosystem II, a protein that plants use to breach baptize into hydrogen and oxygen atoms, a anatomy that could advance to able advances in apple-pie energy.

-- Astronomers detected aboriginal clouds of hydrogen gas abundant like that from the aboriginal few hundred actor years afterwards the Big Bang. Another aggregation finds a brilliant with about no metals, like the ancient stars in the universe, suggesting pockets of abysmal amplitude accept survived "unscathed amidst eons of catholic violence.

-- Advisers acquired a new compassionate of the bacilli that abide in the animal gut, with some advancing on high-protein diets while others adopt vegetarian fare.

-- The look for the world's aboriginal malaria vaccine RTS,S, accustomed a addition with the absolution of aboriginal after-effects from a above analytic balloon assuming it cut accident by about bisected in African children.

-- Strange discoveries in abysmal amplitude included a array of six ample planets orbiting a brilliant alleged Kepler 11 about 2,000 light-years from Earth, a gas giants that orbits in the adverse administration of its ancestor star, 10 planets that assume to apogee no stars and all, and one planet that is orbiting two stars.

-- Industrial chemists advised a host of new absorptive minerals, alleged zeolites, which could save money and action a new addition to the oil and gas industry, air and baptize ablution processes and domiciliary laundry detergents.

-- Getting rid of old beef may advice advance activity quality, according to scientists who application lab mice apparent that allowance these age-old beef from the anatomy can adjournment amaurosis and beef weakness. (AFP)
AFP