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Here’s how the winners of NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge are making food out of thin air.

By Allison Parshall

A few weeks ago, I arrived hungry to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York City, ready for a unique culinary experience. Finalists of NASA and the Canadian Space Agency’s Deep Space Food Challenge had come from all across the planet to demonstrate how future astronauts might grow their own food. I descended upon a tiny cup of chocolate mousse topped with a raspberry.

A team of planetary scientists and oceanographers from NOAA, the Indian National Center for Ocean Information Services, and the University of Zagreb, has found an example of an exception to Ekman’s theory of wind-driven ocean currents—wind and surface flow in the Bay of Bengal.

In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group analyzed several years of data sent by a buoy in the Indian Ocean, off the eastern coast of India.

In 1905, a Swedish oceanographer named Vagn Walfrid Ekman found evidence showing that ocean currents that flow near the surface, which were known to be impacted by , were found to deflect to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere. Work since that time has backed up the theory, which has come to be known as Ekman’s theory of wind-driven ocean currents.

One class at Indiana University Indianapolis is doing its part to help out.

“What that large switch does is it just allows the child to activate it either with a whole hand or even a light touch,” Tiffany Stead, Occupational Therapist and Adjunct professor at IUI, said.

Each student rewired the traditional toy and added a larger 3D-printed button.