Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

See how astronauts make pizza in microgravity conditions

By
Add as a preferred source on Google

It’s not the 3D-printed pizza that astronauts could one day be scarfing down on lengthy missions to Mars, but it is, nevertheless, pizza in space.

This is just the kind of comfort food some astronauts hanker for during their long stints aboard the International Space Station (ISS), as evidenced by Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli when he mentioned to his boss during a recent live-stream event that he really misses the cheesy dish. A short while later, he was eating one for dinner.

Recommended Videos

The crew did, however, have to make it themselves, presumably because the Domino’s delivery guy couldn’t make the trip on his scooter.

Knowing full well that earthlings would be highly curious to see what space pizza looks like, Paolo’s fellow Expedition 53 crew member, Randy Bresnik‏, uploaded a video to YouTube over the weekend giving us the lowdown.

Truth be told, prepping pizza in space is much like prepping it at home, apart from the fact that just about everything is floating about.

Fortunately, the tomato paste that’s slathered across the base acts as a kind of adhesive to keep the topping — in the video we see plenty of pepperoni and anchovies — from floating off.

Once heated, the astronauts have some fun with their if-we’re-honest-not-particularly-tasty-looking pizza by launching them around the space station like frisbees. There’s a nice shot of the crew standing proudly with their pizza, with the astronauts and their dinner all floating together in front of the camera.

“Flying Saucers of the edible kind,” American astronaut Randy Bresnik tweeted, adding,”Pizza Pie created from scratch, the IPDS (Intergalactic Pizza Devouring Squad) says 12 thumbs up!”

Life aboard the space station

It’s not the first time the space inhabitants have shown us how they do everyday things aboard the ISS, proving that it’s never quite the same in microgravity conditions.

Former ISS astronaut Tim Peake once showed us how they make a coffee up there, and also answered the question that he said is asked the most – “How do astronauts use the bathroom?”

And we mustn’t forget astronaut Karen Nyberg’s entertaining video explaining everything you ever needed to know about washing your hair in space.

Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Topics
Rice grain-sized sensor could give robots a delicate touch and keep them from breaking stuff
Sprout Robot

Robots are incredibly precise, but being gentle is not always their strong suit. A machine that can build a car with near-perfect accuracy can still apply too much pressure when working in places where even the smallest mistake matters, like inside a human eye or during delicate surgery. That is why researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University are developing a new type of force sensor that could help robots “feel” what they are touching more accurately.

The sensor is tiny, about the size of a grain of rice at just 1.7 millimeters wide, making it small enough to fit inside advanced surgical tools. What makes it especially interesting is that it does not rely on traditional electronics. Instead, it uses light to measure force from every direction, including pressure, sliding movements, and twisting. Here is how it works. At the tip of an optical fiber sits a soft material that slightly changes shape when it comes into contact with something. That tiny deformation alters how light travels through the sensor. The altered light pattern is then sent through optical fibers to a camera, which captures it like an image. Researchers then use a machine learning model to study those light patterns and translate them into precise force readings. In simple terms, the system learns how to “read” touch through light alone, without needing a bunch of wires or multiple separate sensors packed into such a tiny space.

Read more
Meta’s own employees are having a hard time digesting AI. Who would’ve thought?
Artificial Intelligence

If you wanted a snapshot of what it looks like when a tech giant tries to force-feed its workforce an AI future, look no further than Meta right now. The company that built its empire on knowing everything about its users has turned that same appetite inward, and its employees are not happy about it. Last month, Meta quietly informed tens of thousands of its U.S. workers that their corporate laptops would begin tracking their keystrokes, mouse movements, clicks, and screen activity. The purpose was to feed that behavioral data into Meta's AI models so they could learn how people actually use computers. The reaction was immediate — within hours, internal comment threads were flooded with anger, confusion, and more than a hundred emoji reactions that left little to the imagination about how employees felt.

When an engineering manager asked how to opt out, Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, had a blunt answer: there was no opt-out, at least not on a company laptop. This is the same company that is also tying AI tool usage to performance reviews, running mandatory "AI Transformation Weeks" to retrain its workforce, and building internal dashboards that gamify how many AI tokens employees consume in a day — a metric so aggressively tracked that some workers started building AI agents to manage their other AI agents. The whole thing started to resemble a feedback loop eating itself.

Read more
Sci-fi got the gadgets right, but the vibes wrong
Sci-fi got plenty of consumer tech right, but reality keeps delivering the useful, compromised version of the dream
Officer K looking up at a neon-colored hologram in Blade Runner 2049.

I was recently waiting for an Uber when the GPS decided to lie for sport. The car was somewhere nearby, I was somewhere nearby, and somehow both of us were trapped in that modern ritual of wrong pins, slow turns, vague waving, and "I'm here" messages that help absolutely no one.

That was when I had a very reasonable thought: this is exactly where a hologram of a giant arrow pointing at me would be useful.

Read more