India, Aug. 29 -- The 1980s had no shortage of strange ideas, but this one might take the cake. or the chicken.

Long before Kentucky Fried Chicken sent a Zinger sandwich towards the edge of space as a publicity stunt, KFC backed a much more serious space experiment involving something far less crispy: chicken eggs.

In the 1980s, a schoolboy wanted to find out what would happen to chicken embryos in microgravity. NASA eventually worked with him and the project received $50,000 in funding from KFC.

The idea came from John Vellinger, a ninth-grader from the US state of Indiana's Lafayette. He was curious about what would happen to a developing chicken embryo when gravity was largely taken out of the equation.

On Earth, a hen regularly tu...