UPI NewsTrack Health and Science News

NASA satellite fails to reach orbit

WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- The U.S. space agency says its Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite failed to reach orbit after its early Tuesday morning liftoff.

In a brief statement, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the satellite, launched from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, failed to separate from its launch vehicle.

The satellite was to have been the first spacecraft dedicated to studying atmospheric carbon dioxide from space. NASA said it was to have collected approximately 8 million measurements of carbon dioxide concentration over Earth's sunlit hemisphere every 16 days.

Officials said a Mishap Investigation Board will be immediately convened to determine the cause of the launch failure.

New method of brain stimulation created

CLEVELAND, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say they have developed a new wireless method of brain stimulation using light-activated semiconductor nanoparticles.

Case Western Reserve University Associate Professors Ben Strowbridge and Clemens Burda, who led the research, said that by using semiconductor nanoparticles as tiny solar cells, they can excite neurons in single cells or groups of cells with infrared light. That, they said, allows for a more controlled reaction and closely replicates the sophisticated focal patterns created by natural stimuli.

The scientists said electrodes used in previous nerve stimulations don't accurately recreate spatial patterns created by the stimuli and also have potential damaging side effects.

"There are many different things you'd want to stimulate neurons for -- injury, severed or damaged nerve to restore function -- and right now you have to put a wire in there, and then connect that to some control system. It is both very invasive and a difficult thing to do," said Strowbridge. "The long-term goal of this work is to develop a light-activated brain-machine interface that restores function following nerve or brain impairments."

The study that included Phillip Larimer, Todd Pressler and Yixin Zhao is reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

Mountain range found under ice sheet

WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- A U.S.-led, international team of researchers has discovered the existence of a mountain range deep under the massive East Antarctic ice sheet.

The seven-nation team produced detailed images of the last unexplored mountain range on Earth, said Michael Studinger of Columbia University, the co-leader of the U.S. portion of the project.

"As our two survey aircraft flew over the flat white ice sheet, the instrumentation revealed a remarkably rugged terrain with deeply etched valleys and very steep mountain peaks," Studinger added.

"The season was a great success," said Douglas Wiens of Washington University in St. Louis. "We recovered the first seismic recordings from this entire part of Antarctica and operated seismographs over the Antarctic winter at temperatures as low as minus 100 Fahrenheit for the first time. Now, we are poring over the data to find out what is responsible for pushing up mountains in this part of Antarctica."

The initial data also appear to confirm findings that a vast aquatic system of lakes and rivers exists beneath the ice sheet.

The data will help scientists determine the origin of the East Antarctic ice sheet and the role the sub-glacial aquatic system plays in the dynamics of ice sheets, which are useful in predicting potential future sea level rise.

The project includes researchers from Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan the United Kingdom and the United States.

Bacteria manipulated to produce vaccines

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- A U.S.-led international team of scientists has successfully manipulated bacteria to grow mutant sugar molecules that can be used against them in vaccines.

Ohio State University Professor Peng George Wang, who led the research, says the achievement means such vaccines, if proven safe, could be developed more quickly, easily and cheaply than many currently available vaccines used to prevent bacterial illnesses.

Currently, most bacterial vaccines are created with polysaccharides, or long strings of sugars found on the surface of bacterial cells, the scientists said. The most common way to develop such vaccines is to remove the sugars from the cell surface and link them to proteins to give them more power to kill bacteria. The researchers said their new technique makes a small alteration to the sugar structure and produced the polysaccharide by simple fermentation.

"We are showing for the first time that you don't have to use complicated chemical reactions to make the alteration to the polysaccharide," said Wang. "All we need to do is ferment the bacteria and then the polysaccharides that grow on the surface of the cell already incorporate the modification."

The research that included scientists from the University of California-Davis; the National Research Council of Canada; and China's Institute for Biological Sciences, Shandong University and Nankai University appears in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.