NASA Scientists Make Mice Float Using Magnets

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Supertrek32

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Wow... This was totally NOT what I expected when I clicked on the article title. I was thinking of a computer mouse "levitated" on a magnetic mouse pad.

Funny thing is, they're both pretty useless...
 

the hedgehog

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[citation][nom]supertrek32[/nom]Wow... This was totally NOT what I expected when I clicked on the article title. I was thinking of a computer mouse "levitated" on a magnetic mouse pad.Funny thing is, they're both pretty useless...[/citation]
Lol me too.


I wonder how big the machine was that they used to levitate these mice.
 
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yes this has been done before, but frogs have much more water in their anatomy, so this is a bigger 'achievment' for nasa (give them a break, they havnt done anything worthwhile on 2 decades)
 

warezme

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Funny they make no mention of the Gigawatts of electrical energy needed to power the super magnets to levitate a 10gram mouse. Unless they figure out portable fusion, compressed singularities or dark matter, this is not good for anything but studying the effects of strong magnetic fields on complex mammalian creatures.
 

Blessedman

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This is actually pretty old news, I saw this on a Discovery channel thing about superconductivity a year or so ago. I would be more worried about the effect of that strong of a magnetic field would have on the brain.
 
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Forget about space and mice. How about a magnetic field for us earthlings so that we can fly. All the people in the world only some want to fly isn't that crazy.
 

dreamphantom_1977

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Well, they have the transportation problem beat on a small scale. Instead of maglev train, you can just levitate a mouse and shoot him down a track. That would be so cool just standing on a track, and then you float up and start moving forward at 200+ mph. Just think about it. On the other hand, if you have a skinny chick doing 200 and a fat dude only doing 150 then ur gonna have a little bit of a mess to clean up or an accidental pregnancy. On the other hand the fat guy could act as an airbag. If they make giant tubes for this then it's gonna be like the jetson's. Interesting.
 
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In the future fast food chains will have this build into the floor so you wont feel fat and eat more.
 
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The mouse was levitated by exploiting the principle of diamagnetism. In simple terms, a diamagnetic material is any substance that resists a magnetic field penetrating it. Water is such a substance. In fact, just about every substance has a degree of diamagnetism but because the effect is often thousands of times weaker than magnetism, it's usually overwhelmed. The mouse, being non-ferrous (no, iron in the blood doesn't count since it's not ferro-magnetic and so nothing significant happens to it when exposed to a strong field) and containing a large amount of water, could therefore be levitated when exposed to an incredibly strong field because there was nothing else to cancel out the effects. If you want to mess with this at home you could use a neodium magnet (they're dangerous, don't kill yourself yadda yadda) to roll a grape along a table or deflect a stream of water.

Anyway, because the principle substance in the mouse that is diamagnetic is the water, drinking water laced with ferrous metals will only make him less likely to levitate. Better choices would be gold, silver or copper. However, if you could stuff him full of pyrolytic graphite, that would work best.

I reckon this form of levitation could be dangerous on anything much larger than a mouse or frog because the creature isn't uniformly diamagnetic. It's conceivable that different lifting forces would be present in different organs, causing some of them to press against each other, potentially causing damage. Let's say your brain contains more water than your skull, and so being more apt to levitation begins pressing on it... how long before it causes injury?
 

yodoso

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So this is what they have been working on all this time. Where the "F" is their quantum physics books. Who the "F" is going to get us to another planet other than the moon at the speed of light with a minuscule amount of energy. I remember reading an article that said the current Rocket that gets us to the moon has the same cpu processing capabilities as the first Nintendo. Where are the new Ideas?
 

LLJones

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Now all they need to do is genetic experiments to increase it's intelligence and strength,and viola, Mighty Mouse is born.
 
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