Actually this time I flew as a journalist, so I had all the fun and the researchers did their job pretty well
As for the Parabollic Flight Campaigns, it's an European Space Agency (ESA) initiative, a way to give university students from ESA member countries a chance to do research in microgravity.
The experiment I was covering as a journalist was one about capillarity phenomena in zero-g, which is pretty interesting given the necessity of hydroponic gardens in ships travelling to Mars or even greater distances.
As for the rest of the experiments, there were some very very complex ones, such as one trying to observe the reaction in nucleic acids and protein formation in microgravity, or some very... erm... "basic" experiments, such as one testing CD-burning in zero-g! (actually it's interesting because the vapor of the material burned by the laser stays at the same spot, causing single-bit errors in the CD-recording).
But I'm pretty much done with parabollic flights now. Next step, Low Earth Orbit!
Daniel
