NASA finds signs of water on moon
PASADENA, Calif., Sept. 24 (UPI) -- U.S. space agency scientists announced Thursday they have discovered water molecules in the polar regions of the moon.
NASA said instruments aboard three separate spacecraft revealed the water molecules in amounts greater than predicted, but still relatively small. Hydroxyl, a molecule consisting of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom, also was found in the lunar soil.
NASA said its Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument aboard the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayann-1 spacecraft reported the initial observations. Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, as well as its Epoxi spacecraft, provided confirmation.
Brown University Professor Carle Pieters, a NASA investigator, said when scientists say "water on the moon," they are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles.
"Water on the moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the moon's surface," he said.
Roger Clark, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist in Denver and a NASA team member, also said the amount detected so far is relatively small.
"While the abundances are not precisely known, as much as 1,000 water molecule parts-per-million could be in the lunar soil," Clark said. "To put that into perspective, if you harvested 1 ton of the top layer of the moon's surface, you could get as much as 32 ounces of water."
Negative H1N1 test may not be negative
ATLANTA, Sept. 24 (UPI) -- A positive rapid test for influenza is helpful, but a negative result does not rule out pandemic influenza A H1N1 infection, U.S. health officials said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report said Thursday two school outbreaks of pandemic influenza diagnosed last May at Greenwich Hospital in Connecticut afforded an opportunity to examine the performance of a rapid diagnostic test in detecting the pandemic virus formally called swine flu.
Dr. James R. Sabetta of the Greenwich Department of Health and the Connecticut Department of Public Health compared the results from rapid tests with the reverse transcriptase -- polymerase chain reaction assay.
A low sensitivity of 47 percent was found for the rapid test. The performance could not be explained by the clinical features of the patients or by the timing of the specimen collection, the report said.
The results affirm recent CDC recommendations not to use negative rapid test results for the management of patients with possible pandemic influenza A H1N1
NASA finds frozen water on Mars
PASADENA, Calif., Sept. 24 (UPI) -- The U.S. space agency says its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has detected frozen water just below the surface of mid-latitude Mars.
NASA scientists said the spacecraft's observations were obtained from orbit after meteorites excavated fresh craters on the Red Planet. Scientists controlling instruments on the orbiter found bright ice exposed at five new craters that range in depth from about 1.5 feet to 8 feet.
NASA said some craters show a thin layer of bright ice atop darker underlying material. The bright patches darkened in the weeks following initial observations, as the freshly exposed ice vaporized into the thin martian atmosphere, the researchers said.
One of the new craters had a bright patch of material large enough for one of the orbiter's instruments to confirm it was water-ice.
"The finds indicate water-ice occurs beneath Mars's surface halfway between the north pole and the equator, a lower latitude than expected in the martian climate," said Shane Bryne of the University of Arizona, a member of the team that captured the images. Byrne said the ice is a relic of a more humid climate that existed several thousand years ago.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Molecule might block the spread of cancer
NEW HAVEN, Conn., Sept. 24 (UPI) -- U.S. and Chinese scientists say a piece of genetic material with no previously known function might hold the key to being able to stop the spread of cancer.
Researchers at Yale University's School of Medicine and Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, found in a study of mice an RNA molecule that can bind to and block the function of proto-oncogenes -- genes that have the potential to trigger cancer.
The researchers, led by Professor Alan Garen at Yale and Xu Song in China, said one mechanism that stops cell proliferation is a family of tumor-suppressor proteins. The TSP protein they discovered, called PSF, is virtually identical in mice and humans, they said.
The Yale team said it succeeded in preventing the formation of tumors in mice by either increasing the amount of PSF or decreasing the amount of the non-coding RNA in a cell.
"The tumor cell stops proliferating and the tumor regresses in a mouse model of cancer, suggesting that both procedures could be the basis of a clinical protocol," said Garen.
The study appeared in the Sept. 11 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
