Anxiety and exhaustion pose a danger for astronauts, so NASA is testing a hand-held device that warns when stress or lack of sleep means they are not up to the job. The astronauts have to press a specific button as quickly as possible when a light flashes, and the device measures their reaction time and warns if they are unfit to perform critical procedures such as a spacewalk or a shuttle docking.
Genetic studies will be speeded up by a 鈥渓ab on a chip鈥� that allows live worms to be flowed through the channels etched on its surface. Created at MIT, the chip uses suction to immobilise individual 1-millimetre-long Caenorhabditis elegans worms and then images them with a microscope. The animals are sorted through a series of valves and channels and squirted into chambers containing molecules that knock out genes.
