GREENBELT, Md., March 24 (UPI) -- A gamma ray burst of historic proportions has been observed U.S. space agency's Swift satellite.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronomers said the Wednesday gamma ray explosion shattered the record for the most distant object that could be seen with the naked eye from Earth.

NASA said most gamma ray bursts occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel and their cores collapse to form black holes or neutron stars, releasing an intense burst of high-energy gamma rays and ejecting particle jets that travel through space at nearly the speed of light.

"This burst was a whopper," said Swift principal investigator Neil Gehrels of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It blows away every gamma ray burst we've seen so far."

Scientists said the event was recorded Wednesday in the constellation Bootes at a distance of 7.5 billion light-years, meaning the event occurred when the universe was less than half its current age and Earth had yet to form.

NASA said the burst was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever recorded, making it the most intrinsically bright object ever observed by humans.

Scientists look to the ocean for new drugs

SAN DIEGO, March 24 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists are developing technologies aimed at using marine organisms to produce natural biomedicines to treat various diseases, such as cancer.

Two studies by Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers at the University of California-San Diego, each involving mass spectrometry, are being used to identify potent natural marine compounds.

The research is led by William Gerwick of the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at Scripps and Pieter Dorrestein of University of California-San Diego's Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

The scientists have used a new mass spectrometry technique to investigate the inner workings of marine organisms.

"Sea hares, for example, eat cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) and we know for a fact that they assimilate their chemistry," said Gerwick. "With sponges, there are communities of organisms living within them. What we need to find out is: within those communities, who really possesses the genes to make the critical compounds?

"That's a fundamental question with lots of implications," he added. "It's been very difficult to answer, but now we are showing that mass spectrometry offers some new ways to interrogate these kinds of issues."

The research is detailed in two journals: The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Molecular Biosystems.

Chemists create 'designer enzymes'

LOS ANGELES, March 24 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists have created "designer enzymes" in what is called a major achievement in computational chemistry and protein engineering.

Led by UCLA Professor Kendall Houk and University of Washington biochemist David Baker, the scientists expect such designer enzymes to have applications for defense against biological warfare by deactivating pathogenic biological agents, as well as creating more effective medications.

"The design of new enzymes for reactions not normally catalyzed in nature is finally feasible," Houk said. "The goal of our research is to use computational methods to design the arrangement of groups inside a protein to cause any desired reaction to occur."

In a previous study appearing in the March 7 edition of the journal Science, the chemists reported another successful chemical reaction that uses designer enzymes to catalyze a retro-aldol reaction, which involves breaking a carbon-carbon bond.

The latest research, which included UCLA graduate student Jason DeChancie and former postdoctoral fellow Fernando Clemente, is detailed in the online edition of the journal Nature.

Britain marks robotic first in Antarctica

CAMBRIDGE, England, March 24 (UPI) -- British Antarctic Survey scientists have completed the first series of flights by autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles conducted in Antarctica.

The researchers, in collaboration with Germany's Technical University of Braunschweig, said the achievement opens a major new technique for gathering scientific data in the harshest and remotest environment on Earth.

"Apart from takeoff and landing, when the UAVs are controlled by radio, the aircraft are completely autonomous, flying on their own according to a pre-programmed flight plan," said Phil Anderson of the BAS. "Each flight lasts for 40 minutes, covering around (28 miles) and taking 100 measurements a second, so waiting for the UAV to return safely after its research mission was very exciting."

Using UAVs to gather atmospheric data is a major step forward, allowing scientists to study areas that are too costly to reach using ships or conventional aircraft, Anderson said, adding, "The future of much atmospheric research will be robotic."

The British Antarctic Survey, based on Cambridge, operates five Antarctic research stations, two royal research ships and five conventional aircraft.