Friday, January 05, 2007

Pigs & Flies in the News

Two news items which are not earth shattering, but fun.

In time for the upcoming Year of the Pig a Chinese group has bred GFP-expressing swine. Presumably these are for some clever preclinical imaging studies, but would presumably make for some interesting dishes to eat by candlelight or during power failures. With the multitude of GFP variants around, one could have quite a lively dish!

The Scientist reports (free subscription may be required) that 30K fruit flies were released during a production of the Sarte play 'The Flies' at Brown University. I did a graduate rotation in a fly lab, and 30K flies isn't a tiny quantity (if I remember correctly, a few hundred in a bottle is about the right density, so this is a lot of bottles). I do hope the same group doesn't try to mount a production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros!

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