UPI NewsTrack Health and Science News

Oil and blood pumping have similarities

HOUSTON, Dec. 3 (UPI) -- U.S. medical and energy experts say they are exploring synergies that have been identified in moving oil and pumping blood.

The second annual "Pumps & Pipes" conference Monday will bring scientists and engineers together at the University of Houston, to discuss the similarities.

Organizers said much like moving oil through a pipeline, the heart must pump blood through the body. Both systems need clean, well-functioning pipes (or blood vessels), free of blockages or corrosion, to efficiently function. And, both industries also are crucial to the nation's economy and future.

"I strongly believe the solutions to many of our problems already exist in 'someone else's toolbox,' but a forum is required to bring together this expertise," said Dr. Alan Lumsden, chairman of cardiovascular surgery at The Methodist Hospital System in Houston.

Lumsden said the conference will "engage engineers from the energy industry with cardiovascular physicians who share common goals: using imaging to identify targets, navigate catheters and drills into those targets, maintain flow in pipelines and blood vessels, prevent these tubes from clogging, repair them when they break down and improve the pumps when the pressure fails."

The conference is sponsored by ExxonMobil, the Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center and the university.

U.N. urges radiation to spur plant growth

UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 3 (UPI) -- The U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency is urging increased use of radiation to produce high-yielding plants to help people avoid hunger.

IAEA officials said the nearly century-old technique called mutation induction is safe and cost effective and the plants it can help create are adaptable to droughts, floods and other harsh weather conditions, and can be bred to be resistant to diseases and pests.

"Selecting the crops that are better able to feed us is one of humankind's oldest sciences," said Mohamed ElBaradei, IAEA director general. "But we've neglected to give it the support and investment it requires for universal application."

The IAEA said it, along with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, have assisted in creating more than 3,000 crop varieties of nearly 200 plant species through nuclear technology, including barley that grows at altitudes of up to 16,400 feet and rice that thrives in salty soil.

The organization said mutation induction can help to alleviate the current food crisis that involves 850 million hungry people worldwide.

FDA forms partnership with WebMD

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 (UPI) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and WebMD say they are collaborating in expanding consumers' access to the federal agency's health database.

"We are enthusiastic about this collaboration with WebMD because it will enable us to reach more consumers with accurate, science-based information that can help them improve their health," Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach of the FDA said. "This is an important step forward in our effort to form partnerships to help bring timely safety alerts and other public health information to a wider audience in the most effective and convenient way."

The FDA said WebMD attracts nearly 50 million unique visitors each month, providing consumers with health news and information.

The partnership includes creation of an online consumer health information resource on WebMD.com (www.webmd.com/fda) through which people can access information on the safety of FDA-regulated products, including food, medicine and cosmetics.

The terms of the FDA-WebMD partnership are available at http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/oc/ohrms/advdisplay.cfm.

ESA operates two satellites in tandem

PARIS, Dec. 3 (UPI) -- The European Space Agency says it has paired its European Remote Sensing-2 satellite with its Envisat satellite in their second tandem operation.

ERS-2, the space agency's veteran spacecraft, and Envisat, the largest environmental satellite ever built, both carry Synthetic Aperture Radar instruments that provide high resolution images of the Earth's surface.

"By combining two or more SAR images of the same site, slight alterations that may have occurred between acquisitions can be detected," ESA said. "This technique, known as SAR interferometry, … has proved to be very useful for applications such as glacier monitoring, surface deformation detection and terrain mapping."

ESA engineers configured the first SAR tandem mission, which took place from September 2007 to February 2008, and the current one that began Nov. 23, to ensure the satellites both acquire data over the same area just 28 minutes apart. Such a short separation, the ESA said, allows for detection of changes that occur quickly, such as the movement of some glaciers.

The current tandem mission is to run until Jan. 27. Both ERS-2, launched in 1995, and Envisat, launched in 2002, have exceeded the time they were intended to remain in orbit.