Fruit flies going into space

The plan is to send some fruit flies into space on the next shuttle mission and to compare them to some flies at home in terms of how their immune systems respond to the trip into space.
Not sure whether this is completely novel or not, but good to see that NASA is at least trying to still support scientific research. See the press release here.

There have been some serious controversies as of late at NASA about whether it truly is suportive of scientific research or whether it (like many other agencies) is succumbing to the anti-science rhetoric and attitude of some of the higher ups in the Bush administration.

For example, see the NYTime Article from February about how the NASA admiistrator had to make an announcment calling for scientific openness in the agency.

Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis View all posts by Jonathan Eisen