PS @ Muscleguy

To use your own style, I humbly* suggest to you that you might not know what you are talking about as much as you think you do.

Let's have a beer and forget about this publicity stunt that will unfortunately spread bad science (as publicity stunts tend to do). I'm sure that the ground boffins involved in this project will have the correct controls (including same diet, same light cycles, same breeding enclosure, and /tutti quanty/). Teaching students that they can compare this to their own shelf-bred butterflies is still a shameless pseudoscience publicity stunt though. Nevermind, they probably _had_ to include this BS in the project so as to get more funding. Just another example showing that politics-driven funding of science projects is a bad idea. Also, I'm wondering how much they got from whomever owns the Gatorade trademark.

* my addition

** Just so that you know, Butterfly eggs have an oblong shape and are usually led on whatever surface is available, which means they end up in an infinite variation of angles relatively to gravity, but still the embryos always develop the same way. Development is therefore unlikely to majorly depend on gravity. As opposed to frog (for example) eggs which are spherical and for which the polarization towards the vegetative (vitellus stock) and animal (the future critter) poles is thought to be driven by gravity. Also this double asterisk bootnote doesn't have an origin in my post, you can stop searching.

@Muscleguy

"I suggest to you that you are focussing on differences in the setups that are not important to the experimental design and are not as different or as significant as you think, especially since you don't know that they space butterflies will be fed anything other than gatorade. You simply assume otherwise."

I assume that space butterfly will be fed standard lab butterfly diet, which is definitely NOT gatorade, especially for the larvae. You're thinking Imago, and that's actually the less relevant stage when studiyng development.

And the diet is actually probably one of the less important among the points I cited. The most important would probably be temperature, light cycles should prove crucial too, and I would expect humidity and air quality to play a significant role. Actually any of these points (including diet) would probably have more impact on development that the reduced gravity. I would expect gravity to have significant effects on frog developpment (the onset of embryo polarity is mostly gravity-driven in the frog if I remember correctly), but butterflies are not frogs (well, last time I checked they weren't).

In other news.....

A new multi-billion dollar experiment team will be putting "things" in microwaves to "see what happens".