by pratyushkp

The real-world benefits of space travel are sometimes condensed to little more than astronaut ice cream and zero-gravity pens.But the aerospace industry has contributed thousands of practical technologies for use on Earth – and Nasa wants to tell you all about it.For the last 35 years Nasa has released an annual publication designed to showcase some of the most useful applications of space tech and how they’ve flourished in the past year, in an effort to prove that fact to the world.This year’s Spinoff Magazine lists 44 of these technologies, from LED chips initially developed to grow plants on the Space Shuttle that are now being used as a non-invasive painkiller, to a nontoxic biodegradable disinfectant first used to clean food in space and now being commercialised back home.