stemceller writes to tell us that a team of researchers at the University of Alberta claims to have discovered a gene capable of blocking HIV thereby preventing the onset of full blown AIDS. “Stephen Barr, a molecular virologist in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, states his team has identified a gene called TRIM22 that can block HIV infection in a cell culture by preventing the assembly of the virus. ‘When we put this gene in cells, it prevents the assembly of the HIV virus,” stated Barr, a postdoctoral fellow. “This means the virus can’t get out of the cells to infect other cells, thereby blocking the spread of the virus.’”

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Filed under: Industry, Housing

With all the negative headlines that the subprime lending industry is getting lately — and deservedly so — it’s easy to forget about how important it is. Without question, the availability of credit can be an extremely potent force in the battle for upward mobility.

For 25 years, Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank have been doing subprime lending right: making small loans to people in developing countries to give them a chance to start their own businesses and provide for their families — About 97% of Grameen’s borrowers are women.

This weekend’s Wall Street Journal reports that “Mr. Yunus has now brought Grameen to this borough of New York City. Since taking off in January, Grameen America has lent out a total of $145,000, with interest rates at around 15% on the declining loan balance. The money will be used for everything from taxi registrations to sewing machines.”

Reading Mr. Yunus’s interview with the Journal – where he opines on the American subprime mess — I can’t help but feel crotchety about how badly we’ve messed up lending in this country. Yunus has built an institution with an extremely low default rates based on loans to driven entrepreneurs.

Here, liberal lending standards have served a different purpose — letting people buy homes with no money down and ARMs, lest they not be able to replace their SUV each year in an effort to come up with a down payment. What’s that? You’d rather spend money on consumer goods than mortgage payments? No problem! One negative amortization loan, coming right up!

Grameen works hard to provide people willing to make sacrifices with the credit needed to fulfill their dreams and give their children a better life. The entitlement and shortsightedness of the American consumer has led debt — one of the most powerful wealth-building tools in the world — to become an instrument for acquiring a superior Coach purse.

We ought to be ashamed of ourselves.

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Filed under: Consumer experience, Citigroup Inc. (C), KB HOME (KBH), Toll Brothers (TOL), Economic data, Comfort Zone Investing, Housing, Federal Reserve

Ted Allrich is the founder of The On the internet Investor and author of the recently released book: Comfort Zone Investing: Build Wealth And Sleep Well At Night. In this weekly column, he’ll offer advice to investors who are just getting started.

It’s not all bad out there. Some stocks are doing much superior with individual results carrying them higher. Others are being carried by a sea change in the industry. Here are the news and stocks that provide some of the light in the current darkness.

(please note, this column was written Wednesday, Feb. 27).

On Monday, the rumor that started the rally on Friday continued. Several banks were going to form a consortium to save the insurance company AMBAC. On top of that there was a renewed bid for Take Two by Electronics Arts, this time with a higher price tag. Take Two rejected the new offer, but it sparked a rally. The market went up over 100 points. That was on top of the almost 100 point rally from last session, one that saw a 200 point turnaround in an hour.

On Tuesday, data showed housing prices might be leveling off, even though some areas of the country are still feeling pressure. The Miami area reported the worst decline, down 18% from last year. Housing stocks took off on the news. KB Home (NYSE: KBH) and Toll Brothers Inc. (NYSE: TOL), two ends of the housing market, were up over 6% on the day. On Wednesday TOL announced its losses, and the stock continued higher.

Of course, there was lots of bad news as well. Consumer Confidence was at 75, the lowest reading since the Iraq War began in 2003, and with that exception, the lowest reading in 15 years. Producer Prices (wholesale prices) were up 1% on a seasonally adjusted basis. Excluding energy and food prices, they were up .4%, twice what was expected. That puts the Fed in a quandary. If inflation gets too strong, it will have to raise interest rates, just as the consumer is already being hit with higher prices on everything else. Higher rates would stop any housing recovery dead. On Wednesday, Fed Chief Bernanke stated he was all for lowering interest rates as long as inflation is under control.

The ray of hope in all of this is that in spite of the bad news and economic difficulties consumers are enduring now, investors are grasping quickly onto good news and letting bad news go. They’re looking forward (as they always do) and have renewed expectations that the housing market will, in fact, recover, and maybe sooner rather than later. However, if interest rates get hiked, that optimism will disappear. For the moment, it’s coming through.

To further bolster the housing market, the Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (I’m not making this up) gave approval for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy jumbo mortgages. That’ll put new money into a sector of the market (one that TOL in particular is in) that previously didn’t have access to Federal money.

Other good news: IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced another major buyback of stock, $15 billion worth. That’s on top of a similar repurchase they’ve recently finished. Earnings are higher for Huge Blue, thanks to the global aspect of its business. Management also raised its guidance for earnings for 2008 based on how well business is doing. Since it’s still a force in the tech world, investors took these announcements as a reason for confidence in the future, at least in the tech industry.

Other stocks that are starting to get back in favor: the financials, and banks in particular. Bank stocks were downgraded again in the last few days by several brokerage firms. One of them suggested that Citigroup (NYSE: C) might trade as low as $16 before all write-offs are written off. The stock faltered for a little but is now trading higher, above where it was when the analyst’s report came out.

It’s still anybody’s guess how the housing and financial stocks will fare as more bad news comes out. If interest rates go higher, that’ll injured both of them. But investors don’t believe that will happen, or if they do, they’re thinking both industries will cope with it. We might be very near the bottom for housing prices, at least for some parts of the country. While prices have gone down dramatically in some areas, there’s a sense that many of those sectors are beginning to see stabilization. First comes stabilization, then comes higher prices.

It isn’t all bad news out there. You just need to find those sparkles of light that are doing well in spite of the tough times, or will be within a few months.

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Investigators at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have discovered a dance of proteins that protects certain cells from undergoing apoptosis, also known as programmed cell death. Understanding the fine points of apoptosis is important to researchers seeking ways to control this process. In a series of experiments, St. Jude researchers found that if any one of three molecules is missing, certain cells lose the capability to protect themselves from apoptosis. A report on this work appears in the advance online publication of Nature.

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Roland Piquepaille writes “Janus particles, which take their name from a Roman god with two faces, are microscopic ‘two-faced’ spheres whose halves are physically or chemically different. Now, U.S. researchers have shown that some of these Janus microparticles can move like stealthy submarines when an alternating electrical field is applied to liquid surrounding them. This could lead to new kinds of self-propelling microsensors or means of targeted drug delivery.”

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Filed under: Rants and raves, iPhone, Workspace, Housing, Recession

An extensive report in the Atlantic that concludes many suburban developments might turn into slums discusses the role reversal occurring between the city centers and their outlying communities. They attribute a wide range of factors leading to this conclusion. These include a shift in demographics and life styles, the economy and sub-prime loan debacle, driving times and fuel prices, and the over supply of product and tighter lending practices.

The post war baby-boomers are an ever decreasing factor in the home market as their children move out. Those kids are getting married later in life and having smaller families so demand is shifting.

Traffic congestion and commuting long distances is right up there with taxes and mosquito’s in terms of being unpleasant, so those that can afford to move closer to work are doing so. This is also being stimulated further by the rapid increases in gas prices affecting all of us. For many years developers have been building homes in the suburbs because of cheaper land costs, but rarely has there been parallel growth in local jobs so most people had to hit the roads.

Now with lender requirements becoming stiffer and less capital available in general, it is harder to finance homes in areas where prices are less stable. In some communities where the amenities are less, and jobs are less, but the home prices have been inexpensive, people of lesser means have aggregated over time. This has lead to poorer care of the properties, more absentee landlords, and more gangs and crime. These are qualities long attributed to older urban areas. Now these areas are on the mend.

There has been a renaissance in many cities and property values have gone up much more rapidly than in the suburbs and been more stable during the current downturn in housing prices. All indications are that this condition will continue for a while.

Developers feel much safer investing within urban centers doing infill projects knowing what they produce will be somewhat limited in supply, rather than building outside of town where a competitor can build on the next parcel, and the next, until supply and demand are out of balance. This too is to blame for the current situation and also leads right back to the abundance of cheap capital and ridiculous lending standards.

As an architect, investor, and sometimes developer I see this trend first hand, and I expect it to continue for a generation to come, at least. The one exception is those areas where enough of a nucleus has been established that the suburban area has at least become a satellite or a node (read — ‘mini city’) allowing for a distinct community with jobs and a solid tax base.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money.

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stoolpigeon writes to tell us that Elon Musk recently announced a delay to the projected summer launch for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule. “Falcon 9 is the centerpiece of SpaceX’s project for NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) project. NASA is hoping to be able to draw on new and cheaper commercial rockets to service the International Space Station once the shuttle fleet retires in 2010. If the trial flight of Falcon 9 early next year is a success, payload-carrying COTS missions could follow in quick succession. But the delay is worrying some observers who note that SpaceX’s other rocket project, the Falcon 1, has failed during its only two launch attempts. The first Falcon 1 caught fire and crashed, and the second failed to achieve orbit due to problems during stage separation. A third Falcon 1 launch is planned for April.”

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stoolpigeon writes to tell us that Elon Musk recently announced a delay to the projected summer launch for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule. “Falcon 9 is the centerpiece of SpaceX’s project for NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) project. NASA is hoping to be able to draw on new and cheaper commercial rockets to service the International Space Station once the shuttle fleet retires in 2010. If the trial flight of Falcon 9 early next year is a success, payload-carrying COTS missions could follow in quick succession. But the delay is worrying some observers who note that SpaceX’s other rocket project, the Falcon 1, has failed during its only two launch attempts. The first Falcon 1 caught fire and crashed, and the second failed to reach orbit due to problems during stage separation. A third Falcon 1 launch is planned for April.”

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ScienceDaily is reporting that researchers at the University of Edinburgh and Southampton in cooperation with partners from Japan and the US have shed some light on the Standard Model of physics using a new computer model. “The project’s enormously complex calculations relate to the behavior of little particles found in the nuclei of atoms, known as quarks. In order to carry out these calculations, the researchers first designed and built a supercomputer that was among the fastest in the world, capable of tens of trillions of calculations per second. The computations themselves have taken a further three years to finish. Their result shows that the Standard Model’s claim to be the best theory invented holds firm. It raises the stakes for the riddle to be solved by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which will switch on later this year. Physicists’ efforts to confront Standard Model predictions using the most powerful computers available with the most precise experiments offer no clues about what to expect.”

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ScienceDaily is reporting that researchers at the University of Edinburgh and Southampton in cooperation with partners from Japan and the US have shed some light on the Standard Model of physics using a new personal model. “The project’s enormously complex calculations relate to the behavior of tiny particles found in the nuclei of atoms, known as quarks. In order to carry out these calculations, the researchers first designed and built a supercomputer that was among the fastest in the world, capable of tens of trillions of calculations per second. The computations themselves have taken a further three years to finish. Their result shows that the Standard Model’s claim to be the best theory invented holds firm. It raises the stakes for the riddle to be solved by experiments at the Big Hadron Collider at CERN, which will switch on later this year. Physicists’ efforts to confront Standard Model predictions using the most powerful computers available with the most precise experiments offer no clues about what to expect.”

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