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Spinoff story
Tunable Liquid Crystals Grab Particles and Cells Using Only Light
A real-world story of NASA technology finding a life beyond the mission.
About this technology
Overview
Filtering different wavelengths of light can help reveal important information, such as clues to how well a plant is growing. Meadowlark Optics, with help from an SBIR contract from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, developed a light filter that could be tuned to different wavelengths with a flip of a switch, hoping it could be useful for NASA’s many Earth-observing missions, but the result turned out to have wide-ranging applications far beyond plant stress, from nuclear fusion to brain research.