Apparently, there is a Helium crisis and there is only a limited amount of it available! Helium is often used for cryogenics, "the study of very low temperatures (colder than any place on Earth), how to produce and exploit them, and how materials behave at those temperatures."*. Many scientists and engineers need to test their devices in cryogenics conditions. For example, for satellites or instruments, which will have to operate under those cold temperatures. To simulate those conditions, they cool down a closed system using Helium. Those experiments are time consuming and expensive. Now, this piece of information, makes it way more crucial to perform these experiments wisely and correctly; It is not just time, manpower, and good data that is lost if these engineering or scientific cryogenics experiments are not conducted correctly, but a scarce resource that cannot be obtained again.
p. s. I wish I knew this when I was performing analysis on hundreds of images obtained at cryogenics condition. I wonder how much that project contributed to this crisis!
* http://www.magnet.fsu.edu/education/tutorials/magnetacademy/cryogenics/
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