NASA Spinoff

Health and Medicine

Protecting astronauts from space radiation exposure is important, so Johnson Space Center funded research into using certain segments of DNA to estimate radiation damage. After it...

Feature Image

Multi Radiance Medical Inc. of Solon, Ohio, builds light-therapy devices based in part on NASA-funded research. Though health benefits of exposure to certain wavelengths were known,...

Feature Image

NASA has long studied the effects of weightlessness on astronauts’ muscle functioning. With support from Johnson Space Center, including SBIR contracts, Delsys...

Feature Image

NASA pulls data from deep space and elsewhere using microchannel plates, devices that amplify particles or photons, making faint signals detectable. Under NASA SBIR...

Feature Image
Spinoff: Health and Medicine
Telescope Mirror Tech Improves Eye Surgery

A system for guiding LASIK eye surgery is a by-product of early research on the James Webb Space Telescope mirrors. Santa Ana, California-based Johnson & Johnson Vision’s iDesign...

Feature Image

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, as it became clear that the novel coronavirus was transmitted through the air, several companies realized their NASA-derived air-quality...

Feature Image
Spinoff: Health and Medicine
From a Lightbox to Lamps

Dale Dell’Ario had a glowing box in his living room, and he wanted to share it.

Dell’Ario had retired in 2013 from a long career in medical device manufacturing, where he’d developed lighting...

Feature Image

When chronic pain flares, the trip from your door to the doctor’s office can seem as difficult as getting from Earth to Mars. The same could be said for the...

Feature Image
Spinoff: Health and Medicine
Image-Analysis Software Sees Cancer in 3D

NASA Technology

Even NASA can be surprised.

The Space Agency works hard to search out surprising discoveries, of course, but it works equally hard to avoid unpleasant ones related...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

You might open a window after painting a room, or let a foam mattress air out before sleeping on it so the materials can off-gas and...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

Through decades of sending astronauts into space, scientists have learned much about the biological effects of weightlessness. In the absence of...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

Can you make a robot feel? That was the question posed to Johnson Space Center engineer Toby Martin.

It wasn’t a heart that NASA wanted to give...

Feature Image
Spinoff: Health and Medicine
Balance Scale Predicts, Helps Prevent Falls

NASA Technology

The inside of the International Space Station is designed to give astronauts the illusion of verticality in the weightlessness of orbit. The “floors” are relatively...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

Much of the research NASA does on the International Space Station is designed to better understand how to work and live in zero gravity to...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

Hospital rooms are full of sensors, screens, and beeps. Those sensors send signals not just to screens in that room but down the hall to the nurse’s...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

A cutting-edge technique for detecting damage to chromosomes showed enough promise for space medicine that its creators founded a company to market...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

Nobody has ever directly seen dark matter or dark energy, yet physicists and astronomers observe their effects all around us. Dark matter is thought to hold...

Feature Image
Spinoff: Health and Medicine
Material for Mars Makes Life-Saving Sutures

NASA Technology

Although NASA has sent many missions to Mars, nothing, so far, has ever come back. That’s something the Agency hopes to change—and it is working on the technology...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

NASA monitors its astronauts in orbit 24/7, aiming both to learn new information about how human bodies adapt to microgravity as well as to keep track of their...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

A material that a NASA scientist stumbled on in the early 1990s has now helped to keep hundreds of thousands of patients’ hearts beating properly all over...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

NASA’s astronauts are among the world’s most capable, resourceful, and highly trained individuals. Now technology originally created to keep them...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

What happens to bones after months in microgravity? The answers are of keen interest to researchers, who can use the information to offer new insights into...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

As NASA sets its sights on long-duration missions deeper into the solar system, including a planned mission to Mars, astronauts will need access to...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

In the 1990s, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) scientist Joy Crisp oversaw an effort to get a cutting-edge, ruggedized, lightweight spectrometer on a lander...

Feature Image
Spinoff: Health and Medicine
Pressure Garments Save New Mothers’ Lives

NASA Technology

In 1969 NASA Ames Research Center received an unusual call for help: a local woman who had given birth continued to experience abdominal bleeding weeks later despite...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

Astronauts know their bodies will be tested during time spent on the International Space Station (ISS), from the multiple sunrises and sunsets per day...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

When paramedics come racing into a home, the last thing anybody is worrying about is where the ambulance was earlier that morning. But traces of those earlier...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

After earning his doctorate, Debashish Roy set about creating a business from the biological imaging device he’d helped invent as a graduate...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

NASA astronaut Shannon Lucid spent hundreds of hours exercising during her 188-day stay on the Russian space station Mir in 1996. Although it was her least...

Feature Image

NASA Technology

Imagine being stuck in a small space with just a few coworkers for months at a time. Each person’s work is crucial to the success—even the...

Feature Image