NASA develops anti-grav

[General Zod]

Where's my fucking hoverboard?

NASA scientists have created an anti-gravity field that works at room temperature, which is a big Where's My Back to the Future Skateboard breakthrough. The only problem is that it only works on mice. Mice high as kites, in fact.

Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have created a superconducting magnet that generates enough energy to lift small animals off the floor. The magnet pushes the water inside the animals up, making them fly. The amazing fact is that it works at room temperature—not the ultra-cooled down environments typical of these magnets—and it's large enough to make rodents to levitate.

The mice were high in more than one way, though. According to researcher Yuanming Liu, the "first mouse actually kicked around and started to spin, and without friction, it could spin faster and faster, and we think that made it even more disoriented." So they gave a mild sedative to the next mouse, who was happy to float. [Live Science via Yahoo News]

Seriously, this is just fucking cool. I can't wait to see commercial applications.

[Starglider]

Horrendous journalism, but then you'd expect that from that source. This is of course diamagnetic levitation, which was demonstrated on small animals back in the 80s, not 'antigravity'. Doing it without using a superconducting solenoid is nice but not any sort of radical advance.

[Uraniun235]

I want one big enough to lift a man. That would be so rad.

[Zixinus]

I want one big enough to lift a man. That would be so rad.

For the first few seconds probably. Then, things are bound to spin out of control and enter a round trajectory from a bad source.

[The Romulan Republic]

Sounds cool (if uncomfortable for the poor mice), but I have two questions:

What if any are the practical applications, and

Are their any negative health effects of having the water inside you levitated?

[General Zod]

Sounds cool (if uncomfortable for the poor mice), but I have two questions:

What if any are the practical applications, and

Are their any negative health effects of having the water inside you levitated?

Per the yahoo article

Repeated levitation tests showed the mice, even when not sedated, could quickly acclimate to levitation inside the cage. After three or four hours, the mice acted normally, including eating and drinking. The strong magnetic fields did not seem to have any negative impacts on the mice in the short term, and past studies have shown that rats did not suffer from adverse effects after 10 weeks of strong, non-levitating magnetic fields.

"We're trying to see what kind of physiological impact is due to prolonged microgravity, and also what kind of countermeasures might work against it for astronauts," Liu said. "If we can contribute to the future human exploration of space, that would be very exciting." They are now applying for funding for such research with their levitator.

The researchers also levitated water drops up to 2 inches wide (5 cm). This suggests the variable gravity simulator could be used to study how liquids behave under reduced gravity, such as how heat is transferred or how bubbles behave.

[ThomasP]

Wonder if they could put those things in the ceiling to create some kind of simulated gravity effect?

[dragon]

Wonder if they could put those things in the ceiling to create some kind of simulated gravity effect?

Or simulated weightlessness and then they could replace the water tanks they uses for weightless training.

[Zac Naloen]

There is a correction on the posted article, the space the rat is in is room temperature. Not the magnet.


Not that it isn't cool though, only needs scaling up by... err.. a lot... before it could be used on humans.

[PeZook]

Water pools work just fine, and are cheaper (at least so far), though.

[Steel]

Water pools work just fine, and are cheaper (at least so far), though.

This wouldnt actually simulate zero g as well either. You're being held up by your blood, wheras the suit would still be hanging off you and have its full weight pulling down on you, varying with which way up you were unlike in actual zero g.

Then theres the added complication of using metal tools in this incredibly strong magnetic field, good luck with that! I havent run the numbers, but it could well be that in order to get a uniform B field over a region the size of a swimming pool would require such a vastly increased strength that it could crush any nearby iron objects such as girders due to tidal forces.

Also failure of the supercooled magnets leads to you plummeting to your death...

[PeZook]

Adding to that, it's not actually that important to simulate microgravity itself. The point of those immersion excercises is to build proper movement habits in the astronauts. So all you really need is an environment which punishes your usual Earthly habits, and rewards the kind of movement that you need to do in space: slow, deliberate and planned every step of the way. It's not that easy to do, as the first EVAs showed: astronauts who didn't train in this fine art became overexherted really quickly, having to fight Isaac Newton every step of the way outside their capsule.

[TheLostVikings]

Adding to that, it's not actually that important to simulate microgravity itself. The point of those immersion exercises is to build proper movement habits in the astronauts. So all you really need is an environment which punishes your usual Earthly habits, and rewards the kind of movement that you need to do in space: slow, deliberate and planned every step of the way. It's not that easy to do, as the first EVAs showed: astronauts who didn't train in this fine art became overexerted really quickly, having to fight Isaac Newton every step of the way outside their capsule.

And since you can't move without throwing something (now that's a low tech mass driver for you) an enclosure slightly larger in diameter than the height of the astronaut (+suit) would surely be enough. So, like, a sphere two and a half meters in diameter would allow you to freely rotate 360 degrees on all axes without hitting anything.

[wautd]

Sorry NASA, but Opel/Vauxhall beat you to it

(offtopic not a serious post, but I found this awesome)

[PeZook]

And since you can't move without throwing something (now that's a low tech mass driver for you) an enclosure slightly larger in diameter than the height of the astronaut (+suit) would surely be enough. So, like, a sphere two and a half meters in diameter would allow you to freely rotate 360 degrees on all axes without hitting anything.

Not really ; You can do all sorts of excercises in an immersion pool, like practicing technical work on mock-ups, working as a team, etc. - and there's the safety factor involved, too.

Some important things are often practiced on Earth hundreds of times out of necessity: you don't want an astronaut breaking your space telescope with a jerky motion, so having a pool you can put a realistic mock-up in is very useful. Setting up a faux-zerog chamber would only accomplish the barest minimum of training requirements.

[Uraniun235]

Water pools work just fine, and are cheaper (at least so far), though.

Yeah, for practical purposes. I want to be levitated by magnetism, damnit!