Sex Geckos Die in Russian Space Orbit

The Russian space agency announced that all five of the geckos sent into space for the purposes of sexual experiments have died. The scientific casualties were discovered when the Foton-M4 satellite carrying the geckos returned to Earth on Monday. The geckos were part of a study to evaluate the effect of weightlessness on sex lives and development. An expert working on the mission told Interfax that the geckos appeared to have frozen to death after a heating-system malfunction. However, the Russian space agency has yet to state an official cause of death. “We can say with confidence that they died at least a week before the landing because their bodies were partly mummified,” said an official from Russia’s Institute of Medical and Biological Problems.