China has selected nine international experiments to fly to the outpost through a collaborative project with the United Nations, developed by researchers from Japan, Russia, India and Mexico, among others.The Mengtian module is critical to restoring symmetry to the station because it is currently “flying along lop-sided, which requires a lot of energy to keep oriented,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.A new space laboratory means researchers can repeat experiments that have been conducted on the ISS to test whether the results can be reproduced, says de Souza, who hopes the findings will be made public.Experiments galoreMore than 25 research projects are already under way, including those to study the effects of microgravity on plant cells, bone and muscle, as well as on molten materials, together with protein-crystallization experiments, says Zhang Wei, a director at the Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing.Chinese state news media also reported that the crew took some 12,000 seeds, including alfalfa, oats and fungal seeds, to the space station, exposing them to cosmic radiation and microgravity for six months, before returning them in April to be planted on Earth."