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>> We ran ACE-M2 about four years ago.
And in between that four-year period, the samples sat
in the extremely stable environment
of the International Space Station.
These experiments are crucial
in developing the fundamental physics rules, if you will.
We want a general knowledge of what controls stability
in the long term in the absence of gravity.
Now, from an actual pragmatic level of the humans
that are going to be participating
in long-term exploration and habitation, this matters
because these colloidal particles a micron
across are almost identical in structure.
The same physics governs them as a lot of gel materials.
And, in particular, materials that will have a direct impact
on the health and quality of life of people
in exploration and habitation.
From skin creams.
Shampoos. Washing your clothes.
Eating your food.
Perhaps medicines.
Being able to say that in the long term we understand
that these materials will still be there.
Still be functioning.
Still be stable after months, years and beyond in low
and no gravity as a direct consequence of the understanding
that we're getting from our colloid work
on the Space Station.
Now, what was exciting about the BCAT-KP samples is that we able
to run those for several months.
But I took some of the same exact samples and put them
into the ACE experiment to look at on a microscopic level.
So we're combining many of these modalities
from multiple experiments to explore a wide range
of the time scales and length scales of the structure
and dynamics of these samples.
We can look at the months-long behavior
with time-lapsed photography with BCAT.
And then we can take the same sample and put it
in the microscope, which we have done with ACE.
One of the great things about being at Harvard in particular
with my advisor Professor David Weitz is, again,
creating a long-term, stable research environment
to take bigger intellectual risks.
I've been in his lab for almost 20 years,
and he's supported this work for decades.
And that's enabled a whole host of exploratory ideas
that we would not be able to do if we were under,
say more short-term thinking, short-term projects.
He's a real visionary.
One of the leading scientists in the world.
Because he's able to support and to really incubate a lot
of broad-based thinking that we've been able to put
into practice here with many different experiments
on the Space Station with NASA.
And it's been tremendously valuable to me
as a scientist personally, but more broadly to the whole field.
Because NASA has given us a stable platform, both physically
with the International Space Station
and with the funding to take new risks.
To go into areas that other people just wouldn't have the
resources to do.
We're doing these experiments on the Space Station,
and we're able to probe things like stability
over yearlong time scales.
That's just not possible for the typical short-term thinking
that a lot of other funding agencies have imposed
on their scientists.
And I think it's a great example,
not just for our subfield, but for science general.
That if you want to open up the space for people
to think broadly, to think deeper,
to think a little bit beyond what's just in front of them.
Which I think is very important.
Not just for the future of our country, but for the future
of inquiry in general as we see lots
of things happening around the world.
That NASA is almost unique in it's ability
to incubate this kind of deep scientific inquiry in a way
that very few other places are able to do.
Our data thus far has been very good.
We're able to make these full 3D maps of millimeter-size samples.
Which is something that we haven't even done on the ground
because of the stability and the reproducibility
and the engineering in this microscope.
We're very excited to be here.
The engineering has been great.
We've long anticipated these results.
And it's many years of work by a large number of people coming
to fruition in our experiment this week.
And it's really an enormous privilege to be able
to get this wonderful level of quality data.