Let's see what VAAM can really do!

We exposed flies to cold temperatures and high concentrations of carbon dioxide gas to see exactly what superpowers VAAM gave them. We were specifically interested in seeing if it increased their metabolic rate or gave them a boost in overcoming metabolically suppressive challenges.

For the cold test, we put our super flies in a 0 degree Celsius refrigerator for 30 minutes. Once they were all unconscious, we removed them from the cold and timed how long it took them to wake up. It took super flies approximately 8.8 minutes to wake up compared to normal flies that took approximately 12 minutes to wake.

CO2 displaces oxygen and rapidly renders flies unconscious as well. To test their response to CO2 we placed super flies in our “knockout machine” (pictured below) filled with dry ice and water, and so producing large amounts of CO2. The flies were knocked out in seconds and we then removed them from the gas. The super flies woke up on average a minute earlier than normal flies.

From all of this we can conclude that VAAM not only increases super flies task endurance it also allows them to quickly recover from a variety of metabolic challenges, including cold and oxygen deprivation!