Category: 7. Science

Researchers in McGill’s Department of Mechanical Engineering have discovered a safe and low-cost method of engineering living materials such as tissues, organs and blood clots. By simply vibrating these materials as they form, scientists can dramatically influence how strong or, weak they become.

The findings, published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, could have a range of innovative applications, including in organ transplants, wound healing and regenerative medicine.

Good vibrations

The researchers used a speaker to apply controlled vibration, gently agitating the living materials during formation. By doing so, they found they could influence how cells organized and how strong or weak the final material became.

The technique works across a range of soft cellular materials, including blood clots made from real blood and other human tissues.

Aram Bahmani, study co-author and Yale postdoctoral fellow, conducted the research at McGill as a PhD student with Associate Professor Jianyu Li’s Biomaterials Engineering lab. Bahmani explained that strong, fast-forming blood clots are vital for use in emergencies like traumatic injuries. They’re also useful for people with clotting disorders.

“On the other hand, the same approach could help design clots that break down more easily as necessary, helping to prevent dangerous conditions like stroke or deep vein thrombosis,” he added. “Mechanical nudging allows us to make the material up to four times stronger or weaker, depending on what we need it to do.”

Why previous methods fell short

Earlier approaches to shaping living tissues relied on physical forces like magnets or ultrasound waves. While promising, these methods often fail to replicate the complexity of real tissues, which contain billions of cells and have thick, three-dimensional structures. In addition, they are often limited to specific materials, can damage healthy tissues and sometimes trigger immune responses.

The researchers’ study is the first to show that mechanical agitation, a very simple and widely accessible tool, can control the inner structure and performance of living materials in a “safe, scalable and highly tunable way.”

From the lab bench to living systems

To validate their findings, the team ran a series of tests to measure how vibration affected various cell-laden materials such as blood-based gels, plasma and seaweed-derived alginate. Using imaging and mechanical analysis, they assessed how broadly the method could be applied. Next, they tested the technique in animals.

The results showed that the technique works when applied inside the body, without harming surrounding healthy tissues.

Toward advanced medical technology

Bahmani said he believes the simple method could one day be integrated into advanced medical devices or wound-healing techniques.

“What makes this especially exciting is that our method is non-invasive, low-cost and easy to implement,” he said. “It does not rely on expensive machines or complex chemicals, meaning it could one day be built into portable medical devices, like a hand-held tool to stop bleeding, or a smart bandage that speeds up healing.” 

He noted that the method requires further testing, such as in irregular wounds or in combination with certain medications, before it can be used in real-life medical settings.

“Moving toward clinical use will require miniaturizing the devices, optimizing settings for different medical scenarios and completing regulatory testing to ensure safety and effectiveness in humans,” he said.

 

About this study

“Engineering Highly Cellularized Living Materials via Mechanical Agitation” by Aram Bahmani, Jianyu Li et al was published in Advanced Functional Materials.

The research was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the NSERC/FRQNT NOVA Program, the Fonds de Recherche du Québec–Nature et Technologies Doctoral Scholarship, the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Centre de Recherche sur les Systèmes Polymères et Composites à Haute Performance and the McGill Faculty of Engineering.

Presenting their work at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in 2018, the researchers calculated the size of this mysterious treasure trove of life for the first time – and it was a lot bigger than they expected.

They reported that approximately 70 percent of the total number of microbes on the planet live underground. In total, these microbes represent around 15 to 23 billion tonnes of carbon – hundreds of times greater than the carbon mass of all humans on the surface.

Scientists have barely scratched the surface when it comes to describing these microorganisms. However, first glances suggest that the genetic diversity of life below the surface might be comparable to, or perhaps even exceed, life above the surface. This is why nicknamed the ecosystem the “subterranean Galapagos.”

However, don’t expect any giant tortoises down there. Bacteria and their evolutionary cousins – archaea – seem to dominate beneath the surface, although the researchers also noted a fair number of eukarya down there too. For example, researchers described an unidentified nematode over 1.4 kilometers (0.8 miles) deep in a South African gold mine. 

“Ten years ago, we had sampled only a few sites – the kinds of places we’d expect to find life,” Karen Lloyd, study author and Associate Professor of microbiology at the University of Tennessee, said in a statement in 2018.

“Thanks to ultra-deep sampling, we know we can find them pretty much everywhere, albeit the sampling has obviously reached only an infinitesimally tiny part of the deep biosphere,” added Professor Lloyd.

To reach the findings, the team brought together dozens of studies that looked at samples brought up from drilling between 2.5 and 5 kilometers (1.55 to 3.1 miles) into the Earth’s crust, both in the seafloor and the inland continents. Also, to their surprise, they discovered that the subsurface deep biosphere is almost twice the volume of all oceans.

Subjected to intense heat, crushing pressures, no light, and scarcely any nutrients, this is hardly where you would expect to find a diverse bank of life. Nevertheless, the researchers said that this ecosystem could answer many questions about the limits of life on Earth – and beyond.

“Our studies of deep biosphere microbes have produced much new knowledge, but also a realization and far greater appreciation of how much we have yet to learn about subsurface life,” added Rick Colwell, microbial ecologist at Oregon State University.

“For example, scientists do not yet know all the ways in which deep subsurface life affects surface life and vice versa. And, for now, we can only marvel at the nature of the metabolisms that allow life to survive under the extremely impoverished and forbidding conditions for life in deep Earth.”

An earlier version of this article was published in December 2018.

In the world of stratigraphy, or rock layers, superficial sediments are usually younger than the deeper ones they settle upon. The North Sea, however, has revealed giant mounds of sand that defy this geological principle on a scale scientists have never seen before.

Researchers from Norway and the UK have identified hundreds of sand bodies under the North Sea that seem to have sunk deeper into the ocean’s crust, swapping places with older layers, which floated to the top of the sand structures. The team claims that these aptly named “sinkites” represent the largest known stratigraphic inversion and could significantly impact carbon storage projects.

“This discovery reveals a geological process we haven’t seen before on this scale. What we’ve found are structures where dense sand has sunk into lighter sediments that floated to the top of the sand, effectively flipping the conventional layers we’d expect to see and creating huge mounds beneath the sea,” Mads Huuse, a geologist from the University of Manchester, said in a university statement.

Huge, ancient chunks of sand

With data from sources including direct rock samples and high-resolution 3D imaging techniques, Huuse and his colleagues investigated “mounds and ridges of sand embedded in fine-grained sediments, up to several hundred meters high and [tens] of [kilometers] long,” the team, led by Huuse, wrote in a study published earlier this summer in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

Researchers suggest the sinkites formed due to earthquakes or changes in underground pressure during the Late Miocene (10.4 to 5 million years ago) to Pliocene (5 to 1.6 million years ago) epochs. These events could have liquified the sand, making it sink via fractures in the seabed. This flow would have replaced the deeper ooze rafts—rigid but more porous layers of sediments with a large quantity of tiny marine fossils. These ooze rafts, or “floatites,” would have then floated to the top of the sand mounds, reversing the original order of the layers.

“This research shows how fluids and sediments can move around in the Earth’s crust in unexpected ways,” House explained in the statement. “Understanding how these sinkites formed could significantly change how we assess underground reservoirs, sealing, and fluid migration—all of which are vital for carbon capture and storage.”

Implications for climate change mitigation

In order to slow human-driven climate change, many scientists argue that, in addition to lessening our emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide (CO2), we must also find ways to capture and store them before they enter the atmosphere. One such approach could involve storing CO2 in the ocean. In fact, the world’s first commercial carbon storage project has just completed its first delivery of CO2 into the North Sea’s seabed. The researchers from the recent study argue that their discovery of sinkites carries implications for the safety of such projects, as well as predicting locations of trapped oil and gas.

“As with many scientific discoveries there are many sceptical voices, but also many who voice their support for the new model,” Huuse concluded. “Time and yet more research will tell just how widely applicable the model is.”

It was previously thought ancient organisms called nectocaridids, which bear a resemblance to squid, were a type of cephalopod – marine molluscs with tentacles and a prominent head. But scientists, co-led by the University of Bristol, have now shown these creatures are actually an early descendent of arrow worms, also known as chaetognaths.

This surprising discovery means the rather simple marine arrow worms had ancestors with much more complex anatomies and a predatory role higher up in the food chain.

The study, in partnership with paleontologists at the Korean Polar Research Institute and University of Copenhagen, is the culmination of a series of excavation expeditions to Sirius Passet in North Greenland, which began nine years ago. The locality is famous for its extreme exceptional preservation of marine organisms from the Early Cambrian around 518 million years ago.

Co-lead author Dr Jakob Vinther, Associate Professor in Macroevolution at the University of Bristol, said: “Sirius Passet is a treasure trove of fossils from the Cambrian Explosion. We not only find delicate soft-bodied fossils but also their digestive systems, musculature and sometimes even their nervous system.

“Around 15 years ago a research paper, based on fossils from the famous Burgess Shale, claimed nectocaridids were cephalopods. It never really made sense to me, as the hypothesis would upend everything we otherwise know about cephalopods and their anatomy didn’t closely match cephalopods when you looked carefully.”

The research team’s excitement grew as fossils of the mysterious nectocaridids were unearthed in Sirius Passet for the first time.

By analysing 25 fossil specimens, the researchers were able to pinpoint where nectocaridids fit into the tree of life. The solution came from Sirius Passets’ unique preservation conditions resulting in their nervous systems commonly remaining intact.

“We discovered our nectocaridids preserve parts of their nervous system as paired mineralized structures, and that was a giveaway as to where these animals sit in the tree of life,” Dr Vinther explained.

Recently, the team uncovered fossils in Sirius Passet belonging to another branch of the animal tree – a small group of swimming worms called arrow worms or chaetognaths.

“These fossils all preserve a unique feature, distinct for arrow worms, called the ventral ganglion,” said co-lead author Dr Tae-Yoon Park of the Korean Polar Institute.

The ventral ganglion is a large mass of nerves situated on the belly of living arrow worms, which is unique to this type of creature. The unique anatomy of the organ combined with the special preservation conditions means it sometimes is replaced by phosphate minerals during decay.

Dr Park added: “We now had a smoking gun to resolve the nectocaridid controversy. Nectocaridids share a number of features with some of the other fossils that also belong to the arrow worm stem lineage. Many of these features are superficially squid-like and reflect simple adaptations to an active swimming mode of life in invertebrates, just like whales and ancient marine reptiles end up looking like fish when they evolve such a mode of life.”

The discovery helps reveal clues about arrow worms and their past.

“Nectocaridids have complex camera eyes just like ours. Living arrow worms can hardly form an image beyond working out roughly where the sun shines. So, the ancestors of arrow worms were really complex predators, just like the squids that only evolved about 400 million years later,” Dr Vinther added.

“We can therefore show how arrow worms used to occupy a role much higher in the food chain. Our fossils can be much bigger than a typical living arrow worm and combined with their swimming apparatus, eyes and long antennae, they must have been formidable and stealthy predators.”

As further evidence for nectocaridids being swimming carnivores, the researchers found several specimens with the carapaces of a swimming arthropod, called Isoxys, inside their digestive tract.

The fossil is named Nektognathus evasmithae. The species name honours Professor Eva Smith, the first female professor of law in Denmark and renowned human rights advocate.

Dr Vinther said: “My decision to name our fossil after Eva, is that this animal was a smart and stealthy fighter just like she is.”

Scientists have devised a new method for mapping the spottiness of distant stars by using observations from NASA missions of orbiting planets crossing their stars’ faces. The model builds on a technique researchers have used for decades to study star spots.

By improving astronomers’ understanding of spotty stars, the new model — called StarryStarryProcess — can help discover more about planetary atmospheres and potential habitability using data from telescopes like NASA’s upcoming Pandora mission.

“Many of the models researchers use to analyze data from exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system, assume that stars are uniformly bright disks,” said Sabina Sagynbayeva, a graduate student at Stony Brook University in New York. “But we know just by looking at our own Sun that stars are more complicated than that. Modeling complexity can be difficult, but our approach gives astronomers an idea of how many spots a star might have, where they are located, and how bright or dark they are.”

A paper describing StarryStarryProcess, led by Sagynbayeva, published Monday, August 25, in The Astrophysical Journal.

NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and now-retired Kepler Space Telescope were designed to identify planets using transits, dips in stellar brightness caused when a planet passes in front of its star.

These measurements reveal how the star’s light varies with time during each transit, and astronomers can arrange them in a plot astronomers call a light curve. Typically, a transit light curve traces a smooth sweep down as the planet starts passing in front of the star’s face. It reaches a minimum brightness when the world is fully in front of the star and then rises smoothly as the planet exits and the transit ends.  

By measuring the time between transits, scientists can determine how far the planet lies from its star and estimate its surface temperature. The amount of missing light from the star during a transit can reveal the planet’s size, which can hint at its composition.

Every now and then, though, a planet’s light curve appears more complicated, with smaller dips and peaks added to the main arc. Scientists think these represent dark surface features akin to sunspots seen on our own Sun — star spots.

The Sun’s total number of sunspots varies as it goes through its 11-year solar cycle. Scientists use them to determine and predict the progress of that cycle as well as outbreaks of solar activity that could affect us here on Earth.

Similarly, star spots are cool, dark, temporary patches on a stellar surface whose sizes and numbers change over time. Their variability impacts what astronomers can learn about transiting planets.

Scientists have previously analyzed transit light curves from exoplanets and their host stars to look at the smaller dips and peaks. This helps determine the host star’s properties, such as its overall level of spottiness, inclination angle of the planet’s orbit, the tilt of the star’s spin compared to our line of sight, and other factors. Sagynbayeva’s model uses light curves that include not only transit information, but also the rotation of the star itself to provide even more detailed information about these stellar properties.

“Knowing more about the star in turn helps us learn even more about the planet, like a feedback loop,” said co-author Brett Morris, a senior software engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “For example, at cool enough temperatures, stars can have water vapor in their atmospheres. If we want to look for water in the atmospheres of planets around those stars — a key indicator of habitability — we better be very sure that we’re not confusing the two.”

To test their model, Sagynbayeva and her team looked at transits from a planet called TOI 3884 b, located around 141 light-years away in the northern constellation Virgo.

Discovered by TESS in 2022, astronomers think the planet is a gas giant about five times bigger than Earth and 32 times its mass.

The StarryStarryProcess analysis suggests that the planet’s cool, dim star — called TOI 3384 — has concentrations of spots at its north pole, which also tips toward Earth so that the planet passes over the pole from our perspective.

Currently, the only available data sets that can be fit by Sagynbayeva’s model are in visible light, which excludes infrared observations taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. But NASA’s upcoming Pandora mission will benefit from tools like this one. Pandora, a small satellite developed through NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers Program, will study the atmospheres of exoplanets and the activity of their host stars with long-duration multiwavelength observations. The Pandora mission’s goal is to determine how the properties of a star’s light differs when it passes through a planet’s atmosphere so scientists can better measure those atmospheres using Webb and other missions.

“The TESS satellite has discovered thousands of planets since it launched in 2018,” said Allison Youngblood, TESS project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “While Pandora will study about 20 worlds, it will advance our ability to pick out which signals come from stars and which come from planets. The more we understand the individual parts of a planetary system, the better we understand the whole — and our own.”

By Jeanette Kazmierczak
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Media Contact:
Alise Fisher
202-358-2546
alise.m.fisher@nasa.gov
NASA Headquarters, Washington

 

Using meticulous biochemistry and minimal ingredients, researchers have re-created one of the weirdest materials inside animal cells, the actomyosin cortex—a meshwork of structural and motor proteins that give the cell shape and help it move.

In this artificial cytoskeleton and their matching simulations, the researchers observed rare, explosive energy releases, which they say resemble earthquakes and point to a fine-tuned mechanism for how cells “blow up” their cytoskeleton to reshape themselves.

Occurring only in networks with a particular structure, these unusual events are characteristic of self-organized criticality, the team concludes in a new study (Nat. Phys. 2025, DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-02919-4).

 

Self-organized criticality is a once-popular idea that certain dynamic systems drive themselves toward critical events, such as sand piling up until it slides downhill or an earthquake releasing pent-up energy in Earth’s crust.

But observational and experimental evidence of self-organized criticality beyond these classic exemplars has been very difficult to come by, and many physicists now doubt its usefulness as the unifying model originally thought to explain how dynamic systems work across nature. But this study may have uncovered a microscopic example.

Inside the cellular machine

The cell’s actomyosin cortex has for decades defied biophysicists’ attempts to explain its lively behavior and surprising properties. Once thought to be a simple gel or like foam, the cortex is a very stiff yet adaptable network of flexible filaments, tiny molecular motors, and other proteins. A cell dismantles and rebuilds its cytoskeleton every 30 s, even when sitting idle, without the whole structure falling apart.

Biophysicists have pulled, poked, and prodded living cells to try to figure out how the cortex, which lies just beneath the cell membrane, works as a machine.

In 2016 researchers observed cells twitching and occasionally convulsing and dubbed these unexpectedly large and rare events “cytoquakes” for their statistical similarity to earthquakes. But further experiments and statistical tests by another team suggested that these cytoquakes were just chance outliers in a random process, not the hallmarks of self-organized criticality.

But these previous studies probed cells only from the outside, measuring the forces exerted by the cortex on flexible microposts. “We wanted to take a look inside the cell, so we re-created [its] intracellular machinery,” says study senior author Michael Murrell, a soft-condensed-matter physicist at Yale University.

In a chamber slide containing a glass coverslip coated with a membrane-like layer, the team mixed purified actin monomers with precise concentrations of two nucleation-promoting factors, Arp2/3 and formin, to grow networks of branched and straight F-actin filaments. Then they added fluorescent beads and myosin II dimers and imaged the lot.

The researchers measured how these artificial actomyosin networks moved using two methods: One tracked individual, fluorescently tagged subunits within the network, and the other captured displacements of the protein networks at large. Then they analyzed the behavior of their replica cortex and compared it with a simulation of polymerizing actomyosin networks.

Murrell’s team observed cytoquakes similar to those seen in living cells and that, they say, fit the statistical pattern of self-organized criticality.

Artificial networks branched by design

Moreover, the team observed these events only in networks of moderately branched, not straight or highly entangled, actin filaments. Based on their simulations, which showed the same patterns, the researchers think that this particular branched structure funnels mechanical stress into stiffer parts of the cytoskeleton, where it builds up until it is released in a sudden burst.

“There’s a very specific structure or organization in which this happens,” says Murrell. If the network is too branched and tangled, then myosin motors can’t assemble into larger complexes capable of exerting greater force on the actin filaments. But some degree of branching is required for critical collapses to occur, Murrell says.

“Say you’re clipping parts of a tree,” he says. “If you clip the ends of a branch, then tiny parts of the tree fall off. If you clip the base of the branch, the whole [limb] falls off.”

The team says this self-organized criticality allows cells to quickly dismantle and rebuild their cytoskeleton when they need to move. “It’s easier to make and destroy than to try and bend or reshape,” Murrell says.

John C. Crocker, a physicist studying soft and living matter at the University of Pennsylvania, finds the study “convincing” because of its meticulous biochemistry.

“They’ve managed to build up, piece by piece, building block by building block, this minimal recipe that actually recapitulates some of the behaviors of the cortex. And then they reproduced it in simulation as well,” he says. Their simulations also modeled the cortex on the same “meaningful” scale as their lab experiments, Crocker adds.

“That’s a real advance.”

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, physicists have made major strides in exploring its properties. Does that mean the subject is done and dusted? Far from it! In new results presented at the 2025 European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP), the ATLAS Collaboration narrowed in on two exceptionally rare Higgs-boson decays using data collected in Run 3 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). These studies offer deep insights into how closely the Higgs boson’s behaviour aligns with the Standard Model.

The first process under study was the Higgs-boson decay into a pair of muons (H→μμ). Despite its scarceness – occurring in just 1 out of every 5000 Higgs decays – this process provides the best opportunity to study the Higgs interaction with second-generation fermions and shed light on the origin of mass across different generations. The second investigated process was the Higgs-boson decay into a Z boson and a photon (H→Zγ), where the Z boson subsequently decays into electron or muon pairs. This rare decay is especially intriguing, as it proceeds via an intermediate “loop” of virtual particles. If new particles contribute to this loop, the process could offer hints of physics beyond the Standard Model.

Looking for needles in a haystack

Identifying these rare decays is quite the challenge. For H→μμ, researchers looked for a small excess of events clustering near a muon-pair mass of 125 GeV (the mass of the Higgs boson). This signal can be easily hidden behind the thousands of muon pairs produced through other processes (“background”).

The H→Zγ decay is even harder to isolate, as the chances of spotting its signal are complicated by the fact that the Z boson only decays into detectable leptons about 6% of the time. Compounding the challenge are the operation conditions of LHC Run 3, which features more overlapping collisions, making it easier for particle jets to mimic real photons.

To boost the sensitivity of their searches, ATLAS physicists combined the first three years of Run-3 data (165 fb^-1, collected between 2022-2024) with the full Run-2 dataset (140 fb^-1, from 2015-2018). They also developed a sophisticated method to better model background processes, categorised recorded events by the specific Higgs-production modes, and made further improvements to their event-selection techniques in order to maximize the likelihood of spotting genuine signals.

Finding evidence and enhancing sensitivity

In the previous search for H→μμ using the full Run-2 dataset, the ATLAS Collaboration saw its first hint of this process at the level of 2 standard deviations. The comparable CMS result reached an observed (expected) significance of 3 (2.5) standard deviations. Now, with the combined Run-2 and Run-3 datasets, the ATLAS Collaboration has found evidence for H→μμ with an observed (expected) significance over the background-only hypothesis of 3.4 (2.5) standard deviations. This means that the chance that the result is a statistical fluctuation is less than one in 3000!

As for the H→Zγ process, a previous ATLAS and CMS combined analysis used Run-2 data to find evidence of this decay mode. It reported an observed (expected) excess over the background-only hypothesis of 3.4 (1.6) standard deviations. The latest ATLAS result, combining Run-2 and Run-3 data, reported an observed (expected) excess over the background-only hypothesis of 2.5 (1.9) standard deviations. This outcome provides the most stringent expected sensitivity to date for measuring the decay probability (“branching fraction”) of H→Zγ.

These achievements were made possible by the large, excellent dataset provided by the LHC, the outstanding efficiency and performance of the ATLAS experiment, and the use of novel analysis techniques. With more data on the horizon, the journey of exploration continues! 

NASA is kicking off the 2026 Student Launch challenge, looking for new student teams to design, build, and launch high-powered rockets with a scientific or engineering payload next April. 

The agency is seeking proposals until Monday, Sept. 22. Details about this year’s challenge are in the 2026 handbook, which outlines the requirements for middle school, high school, and college students to participate. After a competitive proposal selection process, selected teams must meet documentation milestones and undergo detailed reviews throughout the activity year. 

“These bright students rise to a nine-month challenge for Student Launch that tests their skills in engineering, design, and teamwork,” said Kevin McGhaw, director of NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement Southeast Region. “They are part of the Golden Age of explorers – the future scientists, engineers, and innovators who will lead us into the future of space exploration.”

Student Launch will culminate with on-site events starting on April 22, 2026. Final launches are scheduled for April 25, at Bragg Farms in Toney, Alabama, near NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. 

Each year, NASA updates the university payload challenge to reflect current scientific and exploration missions. For the 2026 season, the payload challenge will take inspiration from the Artemis missions, which seek to explore the Moon for scientific discovery, technology advancement, and to learn how to live and work on another world as we prepare for human missions to Mars. This year’s payload challenge tasks college and university teams with designing, building, and flying a habitat to safely house four STEMnauts – non-living objects representing astronauts – during extended missions. The habitat must include equipment capable of both collecting and testing soil samples to support agricultural research operations.

Nearly 1,000 students participated in the 2025 Student Launch competition – making up 71 teams from across the United States. Teams launched their rockets to an altitude between 4,000 and 6,000 feet, while attempting to make a successful landing and executing the payload mission.

 Former NASA Marshall Director Art Stephenson started Student Launch in 2000 as a student rocket competition at the center. Just two university teams competed in the inaugural challenge – Alabama A&M University and the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The challenge continues to soar with thousands of students participating in the STEM competition each year, and many going on to a career with NASA.

NASA Marshall’s Office of STEM Engagement hosts Student Launch to provide students with real-world experiences that encourage them to pursue degrees and careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Student Launch is one of several NASA Artemis Student Challenges – a variety of activities that expose students to the knowledge and technology required to achieve the goals of the agency’s Artemis campaign. 

In addition to NASA Office of STEM Engagement’s Next Generation STEM project, NASA Space Operations Mission Directorate, Northrop Grumman, National Space Club Huntsville, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, National Association of Rocketry, Relativity Space and, Bastion Technologies provide funding and leadership for the Student Launch competition. 

To learn more about Student Launch, visit: 
www.nasa.gov/studentlaunch