Alongside 53 teams in the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project (NEBP), the Montana Space Grant Consortium (MSGC) Balloon Outreach, Research, Exploration and Landscape Imaging System (BOREALIS) Program aimed to livestream a solar eclipse to the NASA website via a high-altitude weather balloon and collect data on atmospheric phenomena. The project required a weather balloon capable of reaching neutral buoyancy for optimal data collection, connectivity and viewership. However, the cost of professionally manufactured balloons and the labor-intensive nature of manual production, coupled with weather constraints, necessitated an innovative, cost-effective solution. The goal was to design a system that organizations with varying resources and expertise could reproduce and operate.

In response to these concerns, we designed, fabricated and tested a vent attachment for latex balloons to enable controlled helium release and achieve neutral buoyancy. The predominantly 3D-printed vent reduced production costs and improved reproducibility, with the entire system manufacturable in under nine hours. Mechanically, it featured a plumbing fixture that acted as a plunger to release helium as needed. For strength, Polyethylene Terephthalate Glycol (PETG) was chosen over Polylactic Acid (PLA) filament, and a clear coat lacquer ensured airtightness.

The vent system integrates a cutdown module, custom vent board, servo motor, Hall effect sensor and battery, all housed for easy access. Additionally, a new parachute packing method based on reserve parachutes used by paragliders was developed. While minor modifications are still required, the vent has proven effective in maintaining altitude above 80,000 feet, meeting project objectives.

Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP) is a group of inherited neurodegenerative disorders caused by axonal degeneration of the cortical motor neurons. HSP affects around two out of 100,000 people worldwide. Symptoms of HSP involve spasticity, numbness and tingling sensations in the lower limb muscles. The most common recessive form of HSP, Spastic Paraplegia Type 15 (SPG15), represents 2-4% of HSP cases. SPG15 is correlated with mutations in the ZFYVE26 gene, potentially leading to lysosomal dysfunction in cortical motor neurons, resulting in mitochondrial impairment and consequent axonal degeneration. However, the challenges of acquiring patient neurons require the application of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). iPSCs provide an innovative approach to studying patient-specific mutations and disease phenotypes. This study aims to determine the pluripotency of SPG15 iPSCs derived from patient-specific fibroblasts, serving as the first crucial step in deriving stem cell models that can later be used to test for inhibitors of axonal degeneration. Following the generation of SPG15 iPSCs from patient-specific fibroblasts, we tested both samples for multiple genes and protein expressions using regular PCR, qPCR and immunostaining. The results of [which test?] indicate that the iPSC sample had elevated levels of the pluripotent genes NANOG, OCT4 and SOX2, as well as pluripotent proteins, OCT4, SSEA4, NANOG and SOX2 in comparison to the initial patient fibroblast samples. In parallel, the expression of fibroblast gene FGF5 in the iPSCs was reduced to about 0.21% of its initial expression in fibroblast cells from the Student’s t-test. The confirmation of cell pluripotency makes the SPG15 iPSCs suitable for future studies to characterize differentiated SPG15 cortical motor neurons and analyze the effects of HSP SPG15 treatments on neural cells.