UCF in the News

At the intersection of military medical technology development, academia, and industry sits the U.S. Army Medical Materiel Development Activity. No other venue gives so bright a spotlight on that convergence than the recent Military Health System Research Symposium, hosted by the Defense Health Agency each year in Kissimmee, Florida. MHSRS is a forum to bring together professionals from three distinct yet connected worlds to share ideas, drive synchronization of efforts, and build cross-organizational relationships. As attendees gathered to tour, network and learn, they may have noticed a novel and perhaps curious sight for such an august exhibition featuring medical technologies under development for America’s Warfighters: 18-year-old UCF student, Kavan Paul.

Health experts are urging caution as people dip into Florida waters this weekend after reports of 31 cases of humans contracting flesh-eating bacteria in coastal waters this year, according to the Florida Department of Health. Six patients died. The bacteria known as Vibrio vulnificus is endemic to Florida’s brackish waters and has lived there for many years. The bacteria can cause skin tissue to deteriorate, but infection is rare in humans. Still, experts like Salvador Almagro Moreno, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Central Florida, are concerned about more infections this year due to the bacteria's liking for warm water. This summer, Florida’s waters have been historically warm. “The waters are close to being the temperature that we use in the lab to incubate the material to make it happy. So we put out 37 degrees (Celcius) so they can grow fast and we can study it in the lab. Now we're seeing some temperatures like 32 degrees in the water," he said. “So if you give them food and water in warm temperatures they grow. That's it. It's simple, right? That's their mathematics. That's how they exist."

UCF Football made a powerful statement in its Big 12 debut. The team hammered visiting Kent State 56-6. "Playing your first game, you learn a lot about your team," Head Coach Guz Malzhan said.

Even from afar, Tropical Storm Idalia puts Brevard County's beaches and sea turtles at risk, as it rides our way right when something that happens once in a blue moon and not again this century: a blue "supermoon."Idalia will hit Florida as the moon is at its closest to Florida, making high tide higher and therefore storm surge in the storm's path that much more severe. The storm could cause chaos for hatching sea turtles, though. If the conditions are right this week, with onshore winds, then heavy surf will push hatchling sea turtles back onto the beach, risking their already endangered lives, "especially now, during the hatching season and after this kind of storm when the winds shift back onshore," Kate Mansfield, a biology professor at University of Central Florida, said via email. "It looks like the predicted winds will be onshore by weekend." Loggerhead sea turtle nesting is slowing down, Mansfield said, and should wrap up soon. Leatherback turtle nesting ended in June, she added, and green sea turtle nesting is still ongoing through September. "I think (hope) we are past the green turtle peak," she said. "It's been a doozy this year. We are breaking the green turtle nest record daily at this point (and have been for over a month)."

Today, India’s Chandrayaan-3 became the first spacecraft to successfully land near the lunar south pole, and India became the fourth country to make a soft landing anywhere on lunar soil, following the former Soviet Union, the United States, and China. The robotic vehicle touched down at 8:33 Eastern time, nearly six weeks after its launch. Getting a craft safely to the moon, and especially to the rough terrain of the south pole, poses many challenges. “You know the saying, ‘Space is hard.’ It’s because the environment we’re trying to operate in is not the environment where most of our technology has matured,” says Phil Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida who studies space economics. To name just a few of the technical factors that have to go absolutely right, the vehicle has to survive the jolt of launch, the vacuum of space, and the challenges of heat transfer and space radiation—plus communicate with Earth, despite a significant time delay. “All these things add up,” he says.

The signs of hip-hop’s influence are everywhere — from Pharrell Williams becoming Louis Vuitton’s men’s creative director to billion-dollar brands like Dr. Dre’s Beats headphones and retail mainstays like Diddy’s Sean John and Jay-Z’s Rocawear. It didn’t start out that way. The music genre germinated 50 years ago as an escape from the poverty and violence of New York City’s most distressed borough, the Bronx, where few wanted to invest in its businesses or its people. “Hip-hop goes beyond the music,” said C. Keith Harrison, a professor and founding director for the University of Central Florida’s Business of Hip-Hop Innovation & Creative Industries certificate program. “Hip-hop always knew, as Nipsey Hussle would say, how to get it out of the trunk, and so they’ve always had to have innovative business models.”

Mars, as we know it, is a frigid and lifeless world—but a new study reveals a fresh hint to a much more happening past. NASA’s Curiosity rover has found an array of medallion-sized, hexagonal mud cracks on the terrains of Mars’ Gale Crater. The distinctive shape of these patterns suggests the Red Planet was once much balmier and that it cycled through wet and dry episodes for millions of years, per the study published last week in Nature. These conditions are theorized to lead to the emergence of life. “Early Martian geology was not the result of a sudden transient warming event,” Ramses Ramirez, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida who was not involved in the study, says to Science.

The four astronauts heading to the moon have met the spacecraft that will get them there. The three NASA astronauts and one Canadian are set to launch to the moon on a flyby mission at the end of next year, part of NASA's new moon program called Artemis. From member station WMFE, Brendan Byrne reports the Artemis program represents a turning point in both where NASA is heading and how it's getting there. The lunar lander, set to fly with the Artemis III mission, will be built on a very different model. NASA won't own that lander. Instead, the agency is asking a commercial partner for a ride to the surface. It's like calling a lunar Uber instead of buying your own moon buggy. The paradigm shift started with the George W. Bush administration as it planned for the future of NASA after the retirement of the Space Shuttle program, which took astronauts to space for three decades, says University of Central Florida history professor Amy Foster.