Cultivating the Cosmos: Decoding Crop Resilience Through Space-Grown Cotton
Plants don’t have bones or muscles or brains, but they’re always on the move. Driven by their genetics, some are hardwired to flower in…
Unlocking the Secrets of the Immune System: How Tissue Chips in Space Could Hold the Key
They say you’re only as old as you feel, but in reality, you’re only as old as your immune cells. Even though the calendar…
View From the Cupola: Susan Margulies
What can we discover about phenomena on Earth when soaring approximately 250 miles above our planet’s surface? As you will find in this issue…
A Small Drop With a Big Impact: Fundamental Science in Space to Improve Medicine on Earth
It’s 10 p.m., and researchers and students excitedly gather inside a lab at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in New York. All are focused on…
View From the Cupola: Ray Lugo
In 1994, as a much younger self, I had the opportunity to work with a team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) on the…
Stem Cells and Space: What Microgravity Can Teach Us About the Human Heart
The musical “Rent” famously calculated 525,600 minutes in a year, but how do you measure a year in heartbeats? The human heart is a…
Heating Things Up in Microgravity: Experiments in Space Answer Burning Questions About Fire Behavior
Ya-Ting Liao has always been fascinated by fire. Even as a child growing up in Taiwan, she was interested in the science that makes…
Going Cool to Go Green: Studying Cool Flames in Space to Improve Engine Efficiency
Transportation is crucial to our society, yet it is something most of us take for granted. There are more than 1.4 billion cars worldwide…
View From The Cupola: Amelia Williamson Smith
Standing outside looking upward, I gaze intently into the dark night until I finally see it. It looks like a small bright dot moving…
Mighty Mice to the Rescue: How Mice in Microgravity Help Patients With Muscle and Bone Loss on Earth
People usually think of bone and muscle as very different things. Bones support the body and give it shape, while muscles provide the strength…
Space Crystals and the Search for a Cancer Cure: Using Microgravity to Improve Protein Crystallization
To take a shot at a “holy grail” of cancer drug discovery, researchers from Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research set their sights on…
Fueling the Low Earth Orbit Economy: Orbit Fab’s Gas Stations in Space
A year before Orbit Fab completed tests on the International Space Station (ISS) for hardware designed to refuel spacecraft in orbit, Furphy—as the project…
