Retrograde Analysis of Calcium Signaling by CaMPARI2 Shows Cytosolic Calcium in Chondrocytes Is Unaffected by Parabolic Flights

Calcium (Ca2+) elevation is an essential secondary messenger in many cellular processes, including disease progression and adaptation to external stimuli, e.g., gravitational load. Therefore, mapping and quantifying Ca2+ signaling with a high spatiotemporal resolution is a key challenge. However, particularly on microgravity platforms, experiment time is limited, allowing only a small number of replicates. Furthermore, experiment hardware is exposed to changes in gravity levels, causing experimental artifacts unless appropriately controlled. We introduce a new experimental setup based on the fluorescent Ca2+ reporter CaMPARI2, onboard LED arrays, and subsequent microscopic analysis on the ground. This setup allows for higher throughput and accuracy due to its retrograde nature. The excellent performance of CaMPARI2 was demonstrated with human chondrocytes during the 75th ESA parabolic flight campaign. CaMPARI2 revealed a strong Ca2+ response triggered by histamine but was not affected by the alternating gravitational load of a parabolic flight.

Design and Development of Antennas Design and Testing System

Based on the antenna experiment hardware, an antennas design and testing system is achieved by use of Visual Basic and Flash software development tools. The paper introduces the antenna experiment hardware and antenna pattern and input impedance measurement methods, discusses the overall structure of the system and software design. Take the helical antenna as an example demonstrates the system application in antenna simulation, design, and measurement procedure. The application shows that the self-developed system with interactive, practical and realistic which has been applied to the curricular experimental teaching and extra-curricular innovation, and achieved good results.

System Dynamics Experimentation at Home

Most Mechanical Engineering curricula include courses in system dynamics, controls, mechatronics, and vibrations. At most schools, these courses do not have a laboratory component. Even at schools that have such a component, laboratory access is often limited, and thus there is a need to increase students’ laboratory experience. This paper addresses the development and initial testing of instructional material in the form of take-home software and hardware kits that can be used to perform laboratory experiments and measurements at home to illustrate system dynamics concepts. Rather than having students perform an experiment in the university laboratory, the students are given a compact, low cost software and hardware kit with which they can perform an experiment at home using only their PC. The kits are designed so that the experiments can be conducted on a provided experimental setup such as a DC motor/tachometer system or can be used to perform dynamic measurements on engineering systems that are available at home such as motor powered devices and heating/cooling systems. The take-home kit consists of three components. The first component is a hardware interface board that is built around a PIC18F4550 microcontroller which interfaces with the student’s PC and with the experiment hardware. The second component is a Windows based user interface program that is loaded on the student’s PC and is used to run the experiment and collect data. The third component is the actual experimental setup or the sensor system to perform the measurement. Fifty five kits have been fabricated to perform five different experiments. Two of these experiments were tested in two courses in the mechanical engineering department at the University of Rhode Island. The paper discusses the design of the kit components, the details of the experiments, as well the initial experiences gained from using this new approach for laboratory experimentation.

Inertial Shear Forces and the Use of Centrifuges in Gravity Research. What is the Proper Control?

Centrifuges are used for 1×g controls in space flight microgravity experiments and in ground based research. Using centrifugation as a tool to generate an Earth like acceleration introduces unwanted inertial shear forces to the sample. Depending on the centrifuge and the geometry of the experiment hardware used these shear forces contribute significantly to the total force acting on the cells or tissues. The inertial shear force artifact should be dealt with for future experiment hardware development for Shuttle and the International Space Station (ISS) as well as for the interpretation of previous spaceflight and on-ground research data.