Tuesday, October 31,2000 Page 5 )er of songj . whereasil vat, angn | s tr;idema«' production I ich adds ii| tracks. Hoi e to guest rl ole Pilots fa .Icterminat! i'tAool I scienc TT S? U M THE BATTALION The sky’s the limit Students’ missile carrier ranked third in national competition By Rosalynn Vasquez j The Battalion What began as a class project for six Texas A&M senior aerospace engineering students be came a nationally recognized accomplishment. Students in Dr. John Valasek's aerospace vehi cle design class placed third out of 30 universities nationwide in the 1999-2000 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Under graduate Team Aircraft Design Competition for the design of a cruise missile carrier. The team members were given a request for proposal (RFP) to design an aircraft cruise missile carrier that would carry 10 AGM-86C cruise mis siles to a combat area, launch them at a target and then aircraft return to the base without becoming a target itself. . The idea is based on the recent conflicts in the Middle East. ! The team calls themselves Aggies Providing Excellence (APEX) and consists of team mem bers Dallas Hopper, Blue Bradley, John Cox, Jar- fad Jensen, Theerayaut Kausakul and Joel Townsend. ’ Valasek, faculty adviser for the team an aero space engineering professor, said in order to do this, the team encompassed a “cradle-to-grave” airplane design — meaning that the ideas were generated from scratch. I The project took an academic year to complete. The first semester was devoted to creating the de signed during the second semester ,the team built a wind tunnel model and tested its performance with the flying model. The design team showcased its final report in the critical design review portion of the competi tion, where it received feedback from NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Boeing Commercial Air plane Group and Lockheed Martin Tactical Air craft Systems. The RFPs and final reports are sent to profes sional engineers in the industry to be judged on technical content, organization and presentation, originality and practical application. Valasek said aerospace companies are careful ly looking into conducting preliminary design studies on the RFP submitted this past year . “This is a vehicle which very conceivably can be built and used by the U.S. military,” Valasek said. “It is a very realistic project to work on be cause it is a real-life, real-world situation.” Hopper said the key to the team’s success was collaboration. “Teamwork is one of the major parts of this pro ject,” he said. “If you cannot divide the work be tween people who are specialized in a certain area, you overloaded one person, then the whole team fails.” This is the first time in 15 years that an aero space engineering team from A&M has won an award in the competition. Other universities competing in this competi tion included Massachusetts Institute of Technol ogy, Ohio State University, Purdue, Virginia Tech and University of Kansas. “This experience has made me feel more capa ble and less scared of the real world, ” Hopper said. The team was awarded the Stan H. Lowy Award from A&M’s aerospace engineering de partment. The award is given for exemplifying excellent technical merit, innovation and team work. i — COURTESY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF AEROSPACE ENGINEERING Members of the Aggies Providing Excellence Team (Team APEX) add finishing touches to their design as faculty adviser Dr. John Valasek looks on.Theteam placed third in national competition. Gulf Coast states face deadly fever HOUSTON (AP) — Thanks to a damp climate and proximity to the Caribbean and Mexico, the Gulf Coast states are threatened with an epidemic of dengue fever, a poten tially deadly mosquito-borne illness common in many developing coun tries, a public health researcher said yesterday. “It has become a problem in all the Gulf Coast states, particularly in warm, wet urban areas like Houston, Miami and New Orleans,” said Frank Cortez-Flores, a researcher at California’s Loma Linda University School of Public Health. There are four varieties of the dengue fever virus and no vaccine for any of them, Cortez-Flores said Monday at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene’s an nual meeting in Houston. The mildest form is characterized by flu like symptoms and a rash on the feet or legs. About half die who contract the most serious form, dengue hem orrhagic fever, he said. The disease is among the leading causes of childhood death in Thai land, Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines and India, he said. Cortez-Flores said Texas, where several outbreaks were reported in the 1990s, has the most cases in the nation in part because of poor hy giene, sewer systems and water drainage in its 1,500 colonies, sub standard settlements along the border where about 400,000 people live. He said many people have had a mild form of dengue fever but are un aware of it, mistaking it for the flu. They remain carriers for life and if bit by a mosquito can spread the disease. “Mosquitos are flying syringes, and mosquito control measures are the backbone of dengue prevention and control,”he said. One Texas man died in July of dengue hemorrhagic fever, the first in the state to die this year from the disease. He is thought to have con tracted the disease in Bangladesh. Last December, a South Texas girl died from the fever, which state health officials believe she contract- “Mosquitos are flying syringes, and mosquito control measures are the backbone of dengue preven tion and control” — Frank Cortez-Flores Loma Linda University researcher ed in Mexico. Last year, there were 51 cases confirmed by the state health depart ment, and 16 in South Texas. Other cases are believed to have been con tracted in Brazil or Mexico, w'here about 7,000 dengue cases were re ported in northern Mexico in 1999. The last major epidemic in Flori da was in 1935, when 15,000 Mia- mi-area residents were infected. Since then, fewer than 100 cases have been reported because of mos quito eradication programs. Florida public health officials, however, have said they fear an increase in cases because the disease is preva lent in the Caribbean and because of a large influx of international travel ers to the state. Science in Brief Chemical safety database set up Texas A&M’s Mary Kay O’Con nor Process Safety Center has re ceived $500,000 to create a na tionwide data system for chemical safety and chemical accidents. This center is part of the Texas En gineering Experiment Station on campus. U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay from Texas, who was instrumental in se curing the start-up funds, said in a press release that this is a great victory for A&M and for the pre vention of chemical safety acci dents around the country. The data system is a part of a new initiative by the University to identify national chemical safety goals, implement programs to reach those goals and establish a way to measure progress toward the goals. Tests developed for heart patients Researchers from Texas A&M’s chemistry department are studying factors other than high cholesterol levels, that contribute to coronary artery disease A new screen test, known as lipoprotein fingerprinting, pro vides information on the cardio vascular health of the patient and can be as unique as an individual fingerprint. Doctors can determine the most effective therapy for their pa tients by observing this fingerprint pattern. New treatments for breast cancer being studied WASHINGTON (AP) — Vicki Freeman lay perfectly still inside a tube-like machine as ultra sound waves beamed deep into her cancerous breast. Little bursts of heat signaled the beams were cooking her tumor to death — without a mark or cut to her skin. Freeman is one of the first women to try a nov el medical experiment to see if this “focused ul trasound therapy” might one day offer a noninva- sive alternative to breast cancer surgery. It will take years of study to prove whether cooking tumors works. But as women already clamor for less disfiguring breast surgery, pilot ex periments at Houston’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospi tal signal the latest in a growing trend: research on ways to make cancer removal not just less inva sive, but to quit cutting patients altogether. “If you think about surgery, it’s sort of me dieval,” said Dr. Darrell Smith, a Harvard Univer sity radiologist conducting Brigham & Women’s study. “We’re trying to get more elegant in the way we do this. It’s kind of Star Trek in a way.”Yet it raises a serious safety question: Are doctors trying to make tumor removal too minimal, particularly for diseases like breast cancer where surgery can work very well? After all, scientists already know that some younger women undergoing lumpec tomies get too little tissue cut out for cosmetic rea sons, leaving them more vulnerable to cancer’s re turn than if they had properly sized lumpectomies. Plus, if nonsurgical methods do prove safe, they will require more complicated machinery — and thus will be more expensive — than a simple lumpectomy. But some radiologists insist noninvasive tech nologies should eliminate just as much tumor as a surgeon’s knife. A small Flarvard study, to be un veiled at a radiology meeting next month, suggests focused ultrasound can successfully cook away be nign breast tumors called fibroadenomas, bolster ing hopes for the new cancer experiments. And while breast cancer offers an easy-to- study target, the ultimate goal is to one day help harder-to-treat brain, liver or soft-tissue cancer, or other disorders like uterine fibroids, where surgery is not optimal. “We know from basic science and animal re search that it can work. Now we have to show it’s' feasible,” said M.D. Anderson’s Dr. Marc Fen- stermacher, who treated Freeman. To do that, Fenstermacher and Smith will test 30 women destined for surgical removal of small breast tumors. Patients lie inside a specially out fitted MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, machine. Guided by the MRI’s continual sharp picture of the tumor, doctors position ultrasound focusing equipment called transducers, built into the MRI table, to beam into the tumor. On the MRI, the tu mor lights up as 10-second blasts heat it to more than 140 degrees. 1. 1 NOW LEASING mitJO &CE RANCH Nine Duplexes with Paddocks (3 Bedroom, 2 Bath) 42 Stalls (30 stall barn and 12 runs) Lighted 150 x 300 ft. 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