The 2013 Create the Future Design Contest — sponsored by COMSOL, SAE International, and Tech Briefs Media Group (publishers of NASA Tech Briefs) — recognized innovation in product design in eight categories: Aerospace & Defense (new this year), Consumer Products, Electronics, Machinery & Equipment,...

The overall consumer experience of foods is impacted by various sensory factors including taste, texture, and smell, as well as by ingredients that occur naturally in various foods, which can directly impact one’s mood. Food additives also affect various mood neuro-actives, such as serotonin,...

A client seeks new synthetic (chemical-based) control agents for insects such as aphids and spider mites. The piercing and sucking insects damage plants by inserting their mouthpart into plant tissues and feeding on the juices. Heavily infested plants become yellow, wilted, deformed, or stunted, and may eventually...

Dr. Butler Hine is the project manager of the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft. The vehicle, successfully launched in September, will characterize the dust environment of the moon.

Nik Karpinsky quickly tapped out a few computer commands until Zeus, in all his bearded and statuesque glory, appeared in the middle of a holographic glass panel mounted to an office desk.The white statue stared back at Karpinsky. Then a hand appeared and turned the full-size head to the right and to...

It was a result so unexpected that MIT researchers initially thought it must be a mistake: Under certain conditions, putting a cracked piece of metal under tension — that is, exerting a force that would be expected to pull it apart — has the reverse effect, causing the crack to close and its...

The International Space Station (ISS) Visiting Vehicle Group needed a targeting tool for vehicles that rendezvous with the ISS. The Visiting Vehicle Ground Trajectory targeting tool provides the ability to perform both realtime and planning operations for the Visiting Vehicle Group. This tool provides a...

The Mobile Thread Task Manager (MTTM) is being applied to parallelizing existing flight software to understand the benefits and to develop new techniques and architectural concepts for adapting software to multicore architectures. It allocates and load-balances tasks for a group of threads that migrate across processors...

The Software Developer’s Assistant (SDA) helps software teams more efficiently and accurately conduct or execute software processes associated with NASA mission-critical software. SDA is a process enactment platform that guides software teams through project-specific standards, processes, and...

As remote sensing for scientific purposes has transitioned from an experimental technology to an operational one, the selection of instruments has become more coordinated, so that the scientific community can exploit complementary measurements. However, technological and scientific heterogeneity across devices...

There is a need to acquire autonomously cryogenic hydrocarbon liquid sample from remote planetary locations such as the lakes of Titan for instruments such as mass spectrometers. There are several problems that had to be solved relative to collecting the right amount of...

The conventional method for integrating a radiometer into radar hardware is to share the RF front end between the instruments, and to have separate IF receivers that take data at separate times. Alternatively, the radar and radiometer...

Using technology found in cellphones, inexpensive sensors might one day soon save lives by giving advance warning of deadly landslides in at-risk areas around the world. The wireless test sensors are installed around an active landslide zone.

Examination of the Martian atmosphere by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover confirms that some meteorites that have dropped to Earth really are from the Red Planet. A key new measurement of the inert gas argon in Mars' atmosphere by Curiosity's laboratory provides the most definitive evidence...

World View Enterprises will offer $75,000 helium balloon rides into “near space," allowing people to ride higher than 98,000 feet above Earth’s atmosphere.

A small, easy-to-use, lightweight explosive screening kit continues to move forward towards full fielding as a means to provide soldiers in the field with the capability to screen for suspected homemade explosive materials (HME). Using colorimetric chemistry, the Colorimetric Reconnaissance...

In remote regions of the world where electricity is hard to come by and scientific instruments are even scarcer, conducting medical tests at a doctor’s office or medical lab is rarely an option. Scientists are now reporting progress toward an inexpensive point-of-care, paper-based...

NASA has joined forces with the product development startup Marblar for a pilot program allowing the public to crowdsource product ideas for forty of NASA’s patents. This initiative will allow Marblar’s online community to use a portion of NASA’s diverse portfolio of patented...