UPI NewsTrack Health and Science News

NASA prepares for Moonbuggy Race

HUNTSVILLE, Ala., March 13 (UPI) -- The U.S. space agency is transforming part of its Marshall Space Flight Center into a lunar landscape for the 15th annual Great Moonbuggy Race.

By the end of the month about a half-mile of cement footpaths at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration facility will be ready to test the engineering savvy and physical endurance of about 400 high school and college students in the April 4-5 event organized by NASA in Huntsville, Ala.

Students from 20 states, Puerto Rico, Canada, India and Germany, will race lightweight moonbuggies they designed, based on the lunar rover used during the 1971 Apollo 15 moon mission. The vehicles will encounter 17 course obstacles that will be built to resemble moon-like ridges, craters, sandy basins and lava-etched "rilles."

Each rover is piloted by two students: one male, one female. The drivers must conquer each obstacle without exceeding the race's 15-minute time limit -- a new rule this year.

"That camaraderie is exciting to see," said Tammy Rowan, manager of Marshall's Academic Affairs Office. "The race doesn't just pit schools against one another. It's a shared experience for students who love math, science and engineering."

Some ovarian cancers resistant to chemo

HOUSTON, March 13 (UPI) -- U.S. medical scientists have determined recurrent low-grade ovarian cancer is less responsive to chemotherapy than more common ovarian cancers.

University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center researchers said their retrospective study is the first to analyze how women with a rare type of low-grade ovary tumors respond to chemotherapy. The findings also confirm clinical impressions that such tumors are chemoresistant.

Dr. David Gershenson, a professor and the study's lead author, said the results support a growing body of research that shows low-grade ovarian tumors behave differently than their high-grade counterparts, both genetically and clinically.

"In order to make meaningful advances in treatment, women with low-grade ovarian tumors must not be grouped together with those with more common ovarian tumors," said Gershenson. "They require unique consideration and more targeted treatment options for a better chance of survival."

Low-grade serous carcinoma, representing about 10 percent of all serous ovarian cancers, is characterized by a young age at diagnosis -- an average of 42 years, versus more common ovarian cancers that are generally diagnosed at about 60 years of age.

The findings were reported this week in Tampa, Fla., during the annual meeting of the Society of Gynecologic Oncologists.

Atomic structure of gold is determined

CHAMPAIGN, Ill., March 13 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists have developed a technique that can characterize the atomic structure of gold and other nanocrystalline materials.

"Without the necessary structural information, our understanding of nanocrystals has been limited to models that often treat the surface of a nanocrystal as an extension of a bulk crystalline surface," said University of Illinois Professor Jian-Min Zuo, the study's corresponding author.

Zuo and colleagues used a technique they developed called nano-area coherent electron diffraction. It works by illuminating a single gold nanocrystal with a coherent electron beam about 40 nanometers in diameter.

The electron beam is scattered by the atoms in the nanocrystal, resulting in a complicated diffraction pattern made of speckles. When deciphered, the researchers said the diffraction pattern describes the structural arrangement and behavior of the atoms, and the number and lengths of chemical bonds in the nanocrystal.

The study that included Weijie Huang, Laurent Menard, Jing Tao, Ruoshi Sun and Professor Ralph Nuzzo is to appear in the April issue of the journal Nature Materials and is available at the journal's Web site.

New drug found to treat sepsis in mice

LA JOLLA, Calif., March 13 (UPI) -- U.S. medical scientists studying sepsis in mice have made a discovery that might lead to new drug targets for the deadly disease.

"We have identified a key connection of signaling pathways in the cascade of events leading to sepsis," said Scripps Research Institute Professor Wolfram Ruf, who led the study. "This defines a crucial point where the immune system spirals out of control to cause severe sepsis (an overwhelming bacterial infection of the bloodstream) and where there is an opportunity for therapeutic intervention."

Ruf, postdoctoral fellow Frank Niessen and colleagues identified a new "cross talk" involving the vascular coagulation system and certain cells in the immune system. By disrupting that cross talk, they were able to rescue mice from death due to sepsis.

The scientists said although there's no guarantee their preclinical success will translate into human therapies, the proof-of-principle experiments might improve the diagnosis of heterogeneous sepsis syndromes and yield potent drugs for treating people who suffer from sepsis.

The research appears in the journal Nature.