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Lettuce grown on the ISS is as nutritious as Earth harvests, scientists find
The red romaine lettuce astronauts grew on the ISS a few years ago aren't just as good as Earth-grown lettuce, they're also as nutritious. NASA's Gioia Massa, Christina Khodadad and their colleagues examined and analyzed three batches of lettuce grown on the space station between 2014 and 2016. They compared it to lettuce that they grew here at home under similar conditions -- in the same relative humidity, carbon dioxide concentration and temperature, among other things -- and determined that the level of nutrients between them is very similar.
Robots are learning to carefully peel lettuce leaves
Technology is designed to improve and streamline every facet of life, and that inevitably includes areas most people would never even think about. Such a lettuce peeling. A random issue for many, perhaps, but for the agriculture industry, a new development in this field is a big deal. Researchers from Cambridge University have developed the first robotic lettuce leaf peeling system, which not only demonstrates advances in automation, but addresses increasing food and labor demands.
NASA astronauts will eat space-grown veggies for the first time
Just because you're aboard the International Space Station doesn't mean you can avoid eating your vegetables. NASA has revealed that its ISS crew will munch on space-grown veggies (specifically, the red romaine lettuce you see above) for the first time on August 10th, rather than sending the food back to Earth as it has in the past. This isn't solely to get more fiber into the astronauts' diet, of course. It'll give NASA a sense of what it's like for spacefarers to eat fresh food that has only ever experienced microgravity and artificial lighting.
Researchers develop infrared vegetable harvesting robot, to the disgust of children everywhere
Researchers at England's National Physical Laboratory are working on a device that uses a modified microwave measurement system, terahertz and far-infrared radio frequencies, and a clever cauliflower detection algorithm to let robots "see" beneath -- and harvest -- crops that current technology cannot. So far, the imaging system has been successfully demonstrated in the lab, sparking the interest of at least one UK lettuce grower, and it looks like a product could be commercially available as early as next year. According to Dr. Richard Dudley, Project Lead at NPL, the team began by focusing on cauliflower crops because they're both "one of the hardest" to measure, and totally gross.
