I wonder what effect the fear of HIV's existence has had on reducing the number of accidental pregnancies and what effect that has had on slowing world population growth.

Initially? Probably few, because it was viewed as a 'gay disease' due to its initial prevalence in that population (who prior to HIV/AIDS had less of an incentive to use condoms- as condom use was mainly to prevent pregnancy).

Sex education in the 90's however did try to make it clear that anyone could contact HIV (although there are still disproportionately infection rates high among men who have sex with men), which may have given some people greater incentive to use safer sex methods overall and preventing pregnancies.

HIV does not prevent pregnancy.

I think he is talking about increased condom usage relating to the fear of getting HIV having an indirect effect on the number of accidental pregnancies.

This just reminds me of an old experiment that tried to use artificial group selection to make Tribolium insects ( http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/73/12/4604.pdf ) restrain their breeding, when instead they just ended up cannibalizing others' eggs (focusing on the females). People say HIV is a good excuse to fear having sex at all, conspiracies about the Vatican suggest it was developed for such a purpose, but nope, people just use condoms. Humans are as silly and fascinating as all the other life around here.

I don't think that was what he was saying, I don't understand why he is being downvoted. He was thinking that a fear of HIV may prevent unplanned pregnancy in the populace, and that theory has merit.

Ack, I see that now. Interesting, though - I think the comment being downvoted to -1 (at the time) predisposed me to negatively misinterpret it.

Retroviruses generally are.

I think it's much more subtle than that. 'Powered' is a poor metaphor I think. I believe what they're referring to is the actual reverse transcription process. Retroviruses carry its own reverse transcriptease, and must use the cell's own resources to do the actual transcription (they need to get the dNTP to build actual DNA strands). The 'big deal' about this discovery is that HIV can use rNTP to preform reverse transcription instead in cases where there isn't enough dNTP, which presumably (I'm not an expert in this field) is one of the reasons why it is so successful compared to other retroviruses.

Yeah, looking at the journal article the linked article refers to, it appears that this is the case.

http://www.jbc.org/content/285/50/39380.full

Agreed, title should be "HIV found to also replicate via RNA-only pathways" or something like that.

A retrovirus is an RNA that uses the host to make it's corresponding DNA.

White blood cells--which HIV takes over--don't contain DNA building blocks (dNTP) because white blood cells don't replicate. So HIV can't make it's corresponding DNA.

Instead, it just replicates using rNTP to produce more RNA. I think (correct me if I'm wrong) rNTP is available because it's used in ATP synthesis.

  (retrovirus (dNTP) DNA)
  (hiv (rNTP) RNA)

I believe rNTPs are available because they are used in transcription.

rNTP, not RNA.

rNTPs are the monomers of RNA