Saturday, July 08, 2006
Tiny fruit flies have glitch a journey aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. They're part of a tested designed by the University of Central Florida and the University of California-Davis - to better know how a prolonged stay in space can affect an astronaut's immune system.
While it is known that astronauts drop bone and muscle mass in space, scant research has been done on human illness in the almost total absence of gravity. University of Central Florida investigator Laurence von Kalm of the UCF Department of Biology says the self-contained research is carrying a small amount of a fungus that is not contagious to humans. "The questions we are going to ask are the flies that traveled in space more susceptible to infection? In other words, do they die more rapidly after infection than flies that have stayed on the ground?"
He adds that fruit flies serving as manage subjects on the ground have been infected [with the fungus] as well. "The variable that we would check, and this is why the fungus traveled into space as well, is [whether] the fungus itself can become more virulent in space. We will be able to determine that from the experiments as well."
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@ 1:45 AM
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