Alabama
The development of NASA's next-generation crew launch vehicle, the Ares I rocket, took another step forward Thursday as Alliant Techsystems, or ATK, successfully tested a critical piece.
Rich pecan pie is a long-time favorite dessert of the holiday season. But this year, the amount of pecans harvested will be dramatically down due to substantial damage from the 2004 hurricanes. Pecan growers in Georgia and Alabama, two of the primary pecan growing areas were already expecting a light production year due to reduced nut set on many cultivars. ''But then the hurricanes came late in the growing season and caused tremendous damage to pecan crops in these two states.''
Hurricane Ivan made landfall early this morning near the Alabama-Florida border, doing significant damage to coastal communities in its path. NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans were west of the worst of the storm, and initial reports indicate there is little or no damage to those facilities. Now, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., is making preparations for high winds and rain as Ivan moves inland.
Sailing through space? The concept could soon be a reality. NASA could soon travel through space with the use of gigantic solar sails -- some as large as a football field. The sails use the Sun's energy to propel a spacecraft -- much the way wind pushes sailboats across water. ''We are making the stuff of science fiction into reality,'' said Les Johnson, manager of the In-Space Propulsion Technology Projects Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The excitement surrounds the recent deployment of two solar sails -- each nearly 33 feet in length along one side -- by NASA engineers and their industry partners. The successful deployments reach a critical milestone in the development of a unique propulsion technology -- one that could enable future deep space missions.
Researchers have found that a complex hormonal disorder affecting the reproductive and metabolic function of premenopausal women may be considerably more common in the United States than previously believed from earlier, smaller studies. According to the new study, about 6.6 percent of premenopausal women in the United States have PCOS, an estimate that is comparable to those found in the European studies. The analysis was based on the results of medical histories, physical exams and lab results of 400 women undergoing pre-employment physicals -- a factor that likely makes this a more representative sample than those previously studied.
With a microscope and computer monitor, researchers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., watch fluorescent bacteria flow through tiny, fluid highways on a dime-sized lab on a chip. Lab-on-a-chip technology allows chemical and biological processes -- previously conducted on large pieces of laboratory equipment -- to be performed on a small glass plate with fluid channels, known to scientists as microfluidic capillaries.
Children with cerebral palsy who are severely impaired showed significant improvement in their motor skills using a new experimental physical therapy regimen, said researchers. The study ? the first randomized, controlled trial of its kind conducted on children ? appears in the February 2 issue of the journal Pediatrics. All treated children in this study outperformed the children in conventional therapy across all measures of success, including how well they could move their arms post-therapy and their ability to do new tasks during research and at home with their families.
Some men may not be willing to use condoms regularly even after seeking treatment for a sexually transmitted infection and acknowledging their protective value, according to a new survey of clinic patients. Two-thirds of the men with a primary sexual partner and one-third of those without a primary partner said they were not ready to use condoms consistently.
Using several telescopes including NASA?s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have captured the untimely demise of a galaxy that was once like our Milky Way. The result is a dramatic look at C153, a galaxy being ripped apart as it races 4.5 million mph through a distant cluster of galaxies. The Marshall Center manages the Chandra program.
The rate at which ozone is being destroyed in the upper stratosphere is slowing, and the levels of ozone-destroying chlorine in that layer of the atmosphere have peaked and are going down -- the first clear evidence that a worldwide reduction in chlorofluorocarbon pollution is having the desired effect, according to a new study. "This is the beginning of a recovery of the ozone layer," said Professor Michael Newchurch of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), the scientist who led the ozone trend-analysis research team. "We had a monumental problem of global scale that we have started to solve."
A research team led by The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center has tested a novel "viral smart bomb" therapy that can completely eradicate brain tumors in mice, while leaving normal brain tissue alone. The therapy, known as Delta-24-RGD, is thought to be the first treatment for malignant glioma, the deadliest form of brain cancer. It is a new-generation "replication-competent oncolytic" adenovirus therapy ?? defined as a therapeutic virus that can spread, wavelike, throughout a tumor, infecting and killing cancer cells. There is no adequate treatment for these deadly brain cancers and, before this study, few experimental therapies tested in animals have shown much improvement.
American children whose genetic roots strongly reach back to Africa are less sensitive to insulin-a factor important in the development of type 2 diabetes-than those whose ancestors hailed heavily from Europe, according to study results released today. Rather than relying on broad categories of race, such as black or white, researchers in diabetes and obesity from the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the University of Alabama at Birmingham analyzed a group of children for 20 key genetic markers found far more often in those of African descent than those of European descent. They found that the more African-origin markers in children's genetic makeup, the less their bodies responded to insulin-and the more insulin in their blood.
Two versions of an oral drug that halts the deadly action of smallpox and related orthopox viruses have been shown by researchers in Alabama and California to be effective in cowpox-infected mice, whether given three to five days before or two to three days after infection. The study evaluated the dosage regimen and effectiveness of four different ether lipid analogs of cidofovir (CDV), a compound that blocks the activity of variola, the virus that causes smallpox, cowpox, vaccinia and other orthopox viruses. Shown most effective in treating lethal cowpox infection in mice were hexadecyloxypropyl-CDV (HDP-CDV) and octadecyloxyethyl-CDV (ODE-CDV). In addition, the study pinpointed the time period for effectiveness when the drug is administered prior to or after infection.
Doctors have found that a positive-pressure method commonly used to treat obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) also alleviates symptoms of nocturnal gastroesophageal reflux (nGER) in many patients suffering from both disorders. The results of their study are published in the Jan. 13, 2002, issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine. The researchers believe that the treatment, called continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) likely alleviates nGER by preventing acid from regurgitating from the stomach.
Poor, black teen girls who think their boyfriends want a baby are 12 times more likely to wish they were pregnant compared with similar teens who expressed no desire to become pregnant, according to new research. Girls in the study who wanted to become pregnant were almost four times as likely to have a partner who was at least five years older than themselves. They were also twice as likely to report feelings of low self-esteem and low family support, and twice as likely to feel that their partner would disapprove of using condoms.
