GBR Press: Space experiment has a sting in the tail for newts

NEW SCIENTIST (London, UK) 05 January 09 Space experiment has a sting in the tail for newts
Spending time in zero gravity could hinder human growth - if we are anything like newts, that is.
Eduardo Almeida of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and his team cut the tails off 16 newts (Pleurodeles waltl) before sending them into space. While the tails did regrow, as they do on Earth, they were less than half as long as normal.
"This is important evidence that regeneration does not occur at a normal rate in space," says Almeida, who presented the results at the American Society for Cell Biology meeting in San Francisco last month.
He believes gravity activates signals that tell cells to divide. As humans may suffer if it is absent, this needs to be resolved before considering life in space, he says.
From issue 2689 of New Scientist magazine, page 12.
http://www.newscientist.com/article...riment-has-a-sting-in-the-tail-for-newts.html

This is pretty interesting. They used ribbed newts and offspring of ribbed newts they got from me for the project. I gave them rearing advice and also recommended caudata.org as a resource. I'm glad they only chopped off the tails. I had visions of a newt in a blender.

Hi Michael,

I am so glad you wrote something here. I am always torn between believing that people conducting experiments must have an idea what they are about, and .... well... the image of my 9-year-old with a spoon, a glass, and a stick in the back yard.

One could assume that if these folks were authorized to send animals into space, they must know something about what they are doing, right? I have no information as comparison: do amputated newt tails regrow to their fullest length in all earthly environments and conditions?

What really throws me for a loop, though, is the logical jump of an association of the regeneration of newt tails with other types of cell division and then the transference to human "suffering" in space. Is the regeneration of destroyed cells the same as other cell division? I remember reading as a teen (mid 1980s) of earlier experiments where embryos were divided at a cellular level and reattached so that what would later be a spine was grafted to what would later develop into a leg, and that these experiments showed that a cell "knew" what it was supposed to be and developed accordingly. Unfortunately, I haven't learned enough about cellular function to know if Eduardo Almeida's jump in logic is a legitimate assertion.

I thought I would comment to this article and see what others have to say about it.

In any case, I would gladly sacrifice my tail it for a trip to space, as long as I could look out of the window.

-Eva

That's freaking cruel.

That's interesting, but as Eva stated I doubt they'd regenerate perfectly anyway.
I was abit confused when I first read this, I though they meant they'd sent the tails into space... and expected to have a next grow from it. Then I read it again.

Ha ha ha...

if gravity does play a role in regeneration then this will be useful but, it seems like a waste of financial resources really...