Spinoff: Environmental and Agricultural Resources

Electrified Bacteria Clean Wastewater, Generate Power

NASA Technology

NASA recently sent into space organisms that might sound like they came from space to begin with—microbes that can essentially breathe electricity.

Spinoff: Public Safety

Detailed Spectrometry Makes Dangerous-Materials Testing Safer

NASA Technology

In Chris McKay’s search for signs of life on other worlds, some of the strongest clues can be found by identifying isotopes.

Spinoff: Transportation

Super-Accurate Atomic Clocks Could Aid in Navigation, Communication

NASA Technology

Do you know what time it is?

Spinoff: Transportation

Shuttle Tire Sensors Warn Drivers of Flat Tires

NASA Technology

How many people can think of a time when they got to their destination only to realize one of their car tires was dangerously low on air? Or they heard an ominous...

Spinoff: Industrial Productivity & Manufacturing Technology

Vibration Isolator Steadies Optics for Telescopes

NASA Technology

Anybody who has ever tried to hold a camera steady for a long exposure in low light knows exactly what inevitably happens: the camera shakes, and the image blurs....

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Unique Polymer Finds Widespread Use in Heart Devices

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 the...

Spinoff: Industrial Productivity & Manufacturing Technology

IonCCD Enables Fast, Reliable, Inexpensive Mass Spectrometry

NASA Technology

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has a long history of pioneering the use of the charge-coupled device, or CCD, which it used to build some of...

Spinoff: Public Safety

Methane Detector Sniffs Out Leaks

NASA Technology

Methane is everywhere on Earth, for better and for worse. Among other things, it’s the main ingredient in the natural gas that powers heating, cooking, and electricity. It’s...

Spinoff: Public Safety

Wrapped Tanks Cut Weight on Everything from Buses to Paintball Guns

NASA Technology

What do naval anti-missile guns, infant incubators, the Phoenix Mars lander, and high-end paintball guns have in common? All these...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Sterilizing Fogger Cleans Ambulances with a Breeze

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...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Biometric Sensors Optimize Workouts

NASA Technology

What if, as a pilot was pulling heavy G-forces and headed toward a blackout, a voice in his or her ear said, “Pull out of the turn”? What if ground control had a screen with...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Optimized Imager Tracks Cancer, Stem Cells in Medical Research

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...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Weightless “Weight”-Lifting Builds Muscle on Earth

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...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Virtual Therapist Offers Out-of-This-World Depression Treatment

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...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Compact Spectrometers Unveil Clues to Diagnose Cancer

NASA Technology

It may seem hard to remember now, with thousands of planets of various types and sizes discovered throughout the galaxy, but back in the 1990s, the field of...

Spinoff: Transportation

Innovative Design Propels Small Jet Faster, Farther with Less Fuel

NASA Technology

These days computers handle a lot of the work for designing an airplane, but when it comes to seeing how well the new design will really handle in...

Spinoff: Transportation

Design Software Transforms How Commercial Jetliners Are Built

NASA Technology

In the late 1990s, as computers were becoming vastly more powerful, Stuart Rogers began working on Pegasus 5—software that made use of this...

Spinoff: Transportation

Original Cryogenic Engine Still Powers Exploration, Defense, Industry

NASA Technology

At a time when cell phones and automobile features are outdated after a few short years, it may seem impossible that any technology would...

Spinoff: Transportation

Time-Triggered Ethernet Slims Down Critical Data Systems

NASA Technology

Ethernet computer networks date back to the 1970s and are now used virtually everywhere, including in space. Inexpensive, ubiquitous, and easy to use,...

Spinoff: Transportation

Simplified Aircraft Modeling Packs Weeks of Analysis into Minutes

NASA Technology

It wasn’t Walt Silva’s job to invent a technique to dramatically speed up computational modeling of aircraft. But the NASA researcher did it...

Spinoff: Public Safety

Radar Device Detects Heartbeats Trapped under Wreckage

NASA Technology

Late on a sweltering morning in July 2016, David Lewis Jr. crawls into a concrete tube in a heap of rubble amid what used to be a Northern Virginia prison...

Spinoff: Public Safety

Surveillance System Captures, Maps Lightning Strikes

NASA Technology

On July 7, 2011, as Space Shuttle Atlantis sat on the launch pad just one day before it was due to make the final voyage of NASA’s 30-year Shuttle program,...

Spinoff: Public Safety

Virtual Reality Platform Helps Pilots Land in the Sky

NASA Technology

When a plane overshoots the final approach for a landing, often the pilot’s natural—and dangerous—instinct is to pitch up the aircraft to slow down and...

Spinoff: Public Safety

Autonomous Robots Take On Dangerous Warehouse Jobs

NASA Technology

“Where does a 600-pound spider go? Anywhere she wants to.”

Spinoff: Public Safety

Drone Traffic Forecasts Show Commercial Skies of the Future

NASA Technology

It’s a safe bet that the skies of the future will be hosting a lot more drones than they do today. If you can see beyond the low-flying pizza and...

Spinoff: Public Safety

Offshore Oil Workers Learn Survival Skills in Astronaut Training Pool

NASA Technology

To simulate weightlessness while rehearsing for NASA’s 1966 Gemini 12 mission, astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Gene Cernan practiced spacewalks...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

Apollo 11 History Archive Helps Virtual Reality Program Come to Life

NASA Technology

Imagine yourself in the cramped cockpit of the Apollo spacecraft heading to the moon. Look around to see Earth out one window and stars lighting...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

Light-Induced Oxidation Cleans Air, Surfaces, Clothes

NASA Technology

In late 2015 and early 2016, while Southern California Gas workers struggled for months to stop a natural gas leak from a well at Aliso Canyon in Los Angeles,...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

Ferrofluid Technology Becomes a Magnet for Pioneering Artists

NASA Technology

In 2008, when Nikola Ilic came across an online video of moving ferrofluid sculptures by Japanese artist Sachiko Kodama, with black liquid rising into...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

The Martian Garden Recreates Red Planet’s Surface

NASA Technology

After the Phoenix lander settled into the northern polar region of Mars in 2008, its operators discovered that icy soil scraped from the planet’s surface was...