The airplane ranks as one of history’s most ingenious and phenomenal inventions. It has surely been one of the most world-changing. How ideas about aerodynamics first came together and how the science and technology evolved to forge the airplane into the revolutionary machine that it became is the epic story told in this multivolume work, The Wind and Beyond: A Documentary Journey into the Hi…
The International Space Station offers a valuable platform and environment for cell biology investigations, novel discoveries and innovation in a microgravity environment. Areas of opportunity include tissue culture studies, tissue engineering research using 3-D tissue models, biopharmaceutical production, host microbe interactions, host-toxicology interactions, and host-drug sensitivity and re…
For decades, researchers have used the fruit fly Drosophila to probe the combined effects of microgravity and other conditions of spaceflight with exposure to ionizing radiation. Drosophila melanogaster provides a well-characterized model organism that is both genetically complex and relatively modest in its habitat and life support requirements. Microgravity exposure, a unique biological chall…
Dazzling photographs and images from space of our planet’s nightlights have captivated public attention for decades. In such images, patterns are immediately seen based on the presence or absence of light: a distinct coastline, bodies of water recognizable by their dark silhouettes, and the faint tendrils of roads and highways emanating from the brilliant blobs of light that are our modern, w…
NASA’s first successful mission to another planet, Mariner 2 to Venus in 1962, marked the beginning of what NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green describes in this volume as “a spectacular era” of solar system exploration. In its first 50 years of planetary exploration, NASA sent spacecraft to fly by, orbit, land on, or rove on every planet in our solar system, as well as Earth’s Moon and seve…