In this week’s edition of The Prototype, we look at how portable ultrasound devices help astronauts, how a new discovery could lead to unsinkable ships, billions invested in AI “neolabs” and more. To get The Prototype in your inbox, sign up here.

Earlier this month, NASA conducted the first medical evacuation from the International Space Station, returning four crew members so one could be treated on Earth. Although the agency did not state which crewmember was affected or what the medical condition was, astronaut Mike Fincke told reporters at a public appearance that a portable ultrasound machine came in “super handy.”

NASA would not comment on the specific equipment used—and there’s more than one possibility on board. For example, a few months ago GE Healthcare’s Vivid iq, a laptop-sized ultrasound focused on heart imaging, was sent to the station. Another is the Butterfly iQ—a handheld ultrasound that’s been in orbit for nearly five years and is used to check multiple parts of the body.

In most hospitals, ultrasounds are large machines, and if you need one, you usually go to it rather than the other way around. “Portable” might come as a surprise to you. But if you’ve watched the medical drama The Pitt, you may have seen doctors using the Butterfly portable imager to treat trauma patients. The device, which first hit the market in 2018, works by replacing the large analog crystals in conventional ultrasounds with 9,000 digital sensors on a microchip that can both generate and detect ultrasound waves.

The TV show accurately represented a common use case, John Martin, Butterfly’s chief medical officer emeritus, told me this week. The company didn’t pay for product placement, so he said he was surprised to see it. “They used it very appropriately,” he added. “They were scanning the right tuning and doing the right thing.”

On the space station, Martin said, the company’s........

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