Year 1997 Basically this detailed the use of magnetism to levitate frogs.<\/p>\n
When pigs fly? That could be sooner than you think. A group of researchers in the Netherlands and in England has made a frog levitate in a magnetic field. Although the feat might seem no more than a curiosity, researchers say that the floating amphibians may lead the way to a cheap alternative to space-based science experiments.<\/p>\n
Many materials are diamagnetic\u2014that is, when placed near a magnet, their atoms fight the magnetic field, and the object tries to scoot away. If such a material is placed in a strong enough magnetic field, it levitates. Superconductors, for example, are perfect diamagnets and can levitate over even weak magnets, which is why levitating trains like those in Japan can fly over the tracks. Organic material like living cells is very weakly diamagnetic, says J. C. Maan, a physicist at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. So he and colleagues employed a very strong magnet (chiefly used for crystallography experiments) to float the frog. It took 16 teslas\u2014a very powerful field indeed\u2014to lift the confused amphibian off the ground.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a little surprising how easy it is to do this,\u201d says James Brooks, a physicist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. \u201cIt\u2019s not incredibly exotic equipment. Any scientist who is awake will ask \u2018What can I do with this?\u2019\u201d Brooks notes that the magnetic fields might provide a way to study materials in milligravity\u2014without sending them into space\u2014because the levitating object is in a net zero field. Researchers could study the effects of microgravity on crystal growth and also on the growth and development of living cells, without costly space missions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Year 1997 Basically this detailed the use of magnetism to levitate frogs. When pigs fly? That could be sooner than you think. A group of researchers in the Netherlands and in England has made a frog levitate in a magnetic field. Although the feat might seem no more than a curiosity, researchers say that the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-159837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159837\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}