Mice Levitated in Lab

reply to post by Azuredrake


LOL! I have often wondered about the physics of that. I see big Red Hawks take squirrels and rabbits all the time, and sometimes the prey looks as large as the bird!

Squirrels are pretty light, but rabbits have some mass to them, and the bird has hollow bones and feathers! I can account for the lift vs. wingspan, but what about torque, and hinge points, and leverage on their brittle bones? Birds of prey are very amazing to me! Never saw one get a coconut though.

Magnetic Levitation...

I always figured that Acoustic Levitation had far more promise for practical uses. I mean a giant supercooled magnet just to levitate a mouse?

[edit on 10-9-2009 by DaMod]

Ahh, about time they start releasing anti-grav (or rather its magnetic grav distortion)...whatever it is.

even though it will clearly be slow and segmented for public consumption verses all at once...still, a step in the right direction is better than the many decade denial of such tech in the first place.

now watch...magically they will start on the whole faster than light travel in time (introduced of course by packets of info on tortured radio waves moving faster than light...as they already had shown...)...bit by bit and in 50 years or so, the world will be very different than it is today..with space travel and all the things thought cover up today just common knowledge like a combustion engine tomorrow

but again, heres to a step in the right direction...lets hope they choose the fast progression timeline verses the drawn out 25 year plan

Originally posted by DaMod
Magnetic Levitation...

I always figured that Acoustic Levitation had far more promise for practical uses. I mean a giant supercooled magnet just to levitate a mouse?

[edit on 10-9-2009 by DaMod]

Its just how its being introduced...
like room sized computers doing simple computations a few decades back to now...its how things are established to show a very natural progression of technology. if they came out with a cell phone sized device that you attach to your car tomorrow to make it hover, you would scream conspiracy and theory...but if you watched over time this big bulky useless thing slowly trim down and become better, no flags would be raised as you watched the progress.

Phages logic is correct, the property displayed here is called Diamagnetism basically its the ability of certain objects to repel magnetic forces.

The most effective diamagnet at room temp would be bismuth (value of -16.6) a superconductor exhibits a value of -10^5 (-100000), also bear in mind that you need a very strong magnetic field to make it work.

the reason the parallel with gravity is made is due to the fact that one can mimic experimental conditions found in zero g such as this experiment
watch the video, there are others on you tube under diamagnet that will show what happens when a current is applied to the diamagnetic object.
check video here

some applications that require solvents or centrifuges can exploit this effect mineral separation

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other interesting finds recently point to the proof of monopoles in spin ice

although the effect mentioned in earlier posts with maglev trains is due to the Meisner effect (ie superconductors ability to expel magnetic flux and undergo flux pinning.

reply to post by pixanomaly


So, the Earth has a strong magnetic field. Mammals are mostly water, and electicity can polarize water making a strong magnetic field. Seems like a properly constructed generator could polarize all the water in a mammal, and align the poles to counter whatever magnetic force the Earth is producing, and create a force?

Maybe the Earth's field is not strong enough to give the repulsion needed? And maybe polarizing all the water in a living thing is a bad idea healthwise! But, IMO, the science is solid enough!

I do have a question though. In a physics experiment that I participated in, we took a silicon cube, super-cooled it with Liquid Nitrogen, and suspended it in a magnetic field. That is old science, but none of my instructors could explain why the cube "centered" itself in the magnetic field. You could spin it or tumble it in any direction, but it stayed directly above the plate. You could bump it off-center and it would oscillate, but it returned to the center rather quickly, even if it had a spin or tumble? WHY?? Spinning and tumbling and oscillating within the field would have moved the center of mass off-center, and at some point it should have shot out of the field? Or, the oscillation should have stayed the same? Why did it always find the center?

reply to post by getreadyalready


Unfortunately earths magnetic field is weak in comparison to other sources;

Interstellar space 10^-10 Tesla 10^-6 Gauss
Earth's magnetic field 0.00005 Tesla 0.5 Gauss
Small bar magnet 0.01 Tesla 100 Gauss
Within a sunspot 0.15 Tesla 1500 Gauss
Small NIB magnet 0.2 Tesla 2000 Gauss
Big electromagnet 1.5 Tesla 15,000 Gauss
Strong lab magnet 10 Tesla 100,000 Gauss
Surface of neutron star 100,000,000 Tesla 10^12 Gauss
Magstar 100,000,000,000 Tesla 10^15 Gauss

----
Are you sure it was a cube of silicon and/or liquid nitrogen was used to cool it?

reply to post by pixanomaly

Are you sure it was a cube of silicon and/or liquid nitrogen was used to cool it?

I am certain it was a cube, and certain we dipped it in liquid N2, and I am about 90% sure it was Silicon. It has been several years, but I am almost certain it was Silicon. I don't know if it was pure, but I think it was.

Edit to add: The reason given for the suspension in the field was the ability of superconductors to "resist" magnetic influence. They way it was explained, it wasn't so much of a magnetic repulsion as it was a resistance to any influence from the field. This was during an E and M class at FSU. As you probably know, a superconductor isn't "attracted" to either pole of a magnet, it resists both of them? We demonstrated that with a bar magnet and the same cube just sitting on the counter.

[edit on 10-9-2009 by getreadyalready]

Originally posted by Azuredrake

Originally posted by getreadyalready A 10lb machine to levitate a 4 oz mouse would not work.

"A 5oz bird CANNOT carry a 1lb coconut!"


...sorry, what you said just reminded me of that quote.

Originally posted by GioTheGreek
Surely if this magnetic field is messing around with the water inside of the mouses body enough to levitate it off the ground, it can't be healthy for it!

I wonder how the little rodent ended up after that experiment?

The article says the frogs were calm in the "field". I found that intresting.

Originally posted by jdub297
Have you not heard of the MagLev?

Yes, this is different , the mouse does not have a magnet straped to his body with the oposing n/s field.

Great post everyone !!

Look up Meisner effect to get a picture of the flux pinning mentioned in my post above, imagine magnetic field lines like rubber bands stretching from one pole to the other.

When you push a superconductor into the field, the field lines are expelled (do not penetrate), the force between the field and the superconductor make it appear to levitate/stay in place. Once the superconductor is pinned in the field it requires force to move it out of the field again, look up lorentz force. This could also apply to rotation of the superconductor.

Please bear in mind that the effect you observed depends on the shape of the field, I have seen superconductors run along a linear track continuing up a wall etc.

reply to post by pixanomaly


Thank you, I will look into it some more. I don't know what type of field we were using, in my mind the device reminded me of a coffee cup warmer, lol! Imagine a small hot plate with the cube suspended above it.

I suppose if I imagine it the way you describe, and the hotplate gave a starburst pattern for the field (like rays of a sunset), then if the cube was nudged it would impede on more and more of the lines and be repelled back to the center in a degrading oscillation? That makes sense, but my instructor didn't describe it very well!

reply to post by getreadyalready


Actually what they often dont realize or explain is that a more interesting aspect of superconductors is their ability to shape magnetic fields ;-)

Some people running homebrew so called overunity devices use Halbach arrays (the careful alignment of magnetic poles) to shape magnetic fields that is why I mentioned monopoles in my first response. I personally dont subscribe to overunity as I believe that energy is preserved and only because we dont understand where a specific form of energy emanates from doesnt mean that its coming from nowhere.

Salivating at the implications to computer engineering.

yummy.

reply to post by Grayelf2009


The Brain is most pleased.

Now onto world domination!

World domination!

reply to post by pixanomaly


I don't believe that overunity is "free" energy either, but I do believe we can tap into the store of energy from the universe and get the "appearance" of overunity!

Imagine expanding our "system" to include all of the Solar System, or Galaxy, or Universe! Now borrowing a little mass/energy from all that exists, and using it here on earth doesn't seem like a bad deal!

The laws of physics can be retained, but it looks like "free energy" here on Earth.

This is old news. People knew you could levitate water (and thus living things) in magnetic fields. And it wasn't ever that secret.

Originally posted by Grayelf2009


Figured it was time to post some good news.
This is really cool development. My first though was how much longer do we have to wait for the hover boards like on "Back to the Future"
All they need to do now is make a portable model . This is also gonna effect our transportation. Makes me wonder how long they have been doing this before releasing to public.

Is there any threads about that guy in Canada that levitated with radio waves and such ?

www.livescience.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Very long indeed, the phenomenon at play here is diamagnetism.

Water, (and as you know people and animals are mostly water) is diamagnetic, like many other materials.

The trick is to enclose the body in a very powerful, probably superconducting electromagnet, which, by the way, does not levitate itself.

This phenomenon has been known for many decades, it's only recently that powerful enough electromagnets have been tried on living organisms. Note that these magnets are bigger than MRI machines, and generate far more magnetism, but concentrated in a smaller volume.

I don't see any way that one could "just make this portable", especially since you would have to carry around a machine that does not levitate and must rest on the ground or wheels. (regardless how small it may be)

-rrr

It's funny how not many people speaks about the potential dangers of magnetism in our health. We have iron in our blood, among many other ionized particles. No one speaks of that when they sell you a CRT TV, a loudspeaker, or anything that generates an electromagnetic field. What happens when this magnetic fields polarize your blood and ionized particles in your body? I'm no physician but have a bit of knowledge on electronics and it really concerns me. Now they want to levitate your entire body using this stuff?

S&F

Quite an expensive way to go about Ed's low cost means of Levitation

reply to post by Phage


And if you had a portable device, turned it down to face the ground and turned it on, what would be the result? Providing it had the power to lift its own weight, of course. This is all about defeating gravity, not anti-gravity or a UFO-type null-mall effect.

One can image frogs are hardly effected because in water--which they are probably genetically acclimated to even if never having been in water--they are virtually weightless.