NASA Levitate mice in Lab

NASA boffins have made mice weight-less using magnetic fields

Weight Loss experiments in animals has been done before with live frogs and grasshoppers, but never before with mice.

NASA started the project in their Jet Propulsion Lab as research into the long term effects of the lack of gravity on astronauts. Mice are biologically closer to humans which means NASA can study how to counteract bone loss.

Scientists working for NASA built a device with a superconducting magnet cooled to near absolute zero, and when a current is run through the solenoid it created a a magnetic field of 17 teslas. To give you some idea of  how powerful that is, its roughly ten thousand times as powerfull as a typical fridge magnet, or Ten million times that of the earth.

Yaunming Liu headed the team for the levitation device which distorts the electrons in water molecules to let the mice float for hours.

The three week old mouse weighing 10 grams floated for 4 hours and even managed to eat and drink whilst floating in the magnetic field.

From time to time the mouse kicked around trying to hold onto something, now and again it would catch the walls which would send it into a spin, the mouse appeared to be midly agitated and disorienated, although this didn't last long and the mouse adjusted.

The boffins also levitated water drops, which in a weird kind of way i would find more amazing than the mouse!

This will hopefully go a long way to helping health issue's astronauts have with bone and muscle loss, and blood flow in zero gravity.

I can see a larger device being built (if it hasn't already) to house an adult human. but supercooling a magnet that size to nearly -273C would be amazing!