Levitating frogs and flies might seem like something out of a Harry Potter movie, but researchers believe that they can use magnetic levitation on flies to study the long term effects of weightlessness on humans. NASA plans to put a human on Mars as the next big step in the space race. This will require astronauts to spend years in a zero gravity atmosphere. Scientists are conducting several studies on the long term effects of weightlessness. To accomplish zero gravity they can send astronauts to the International Space Station for a year or fly planes in a parabola formation. These studies, however, are either extremely expensive (the ISS costs $100 billion) or produce periods of weightlessness that are too short (parabola formations produce only 25 seconds of zero gravity) for long term studies. Superconducting magnets allow researchers to study the effects of weightlessness on organisms for long periods of time and at a reasonable price. Using magnets to levitate living organisms began in 1997 when Andre Geim and colleague Michael Berry generated a levitation force that significantly reduced the pull of gravity. In 2000, they were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for “using magnets to levitate a frog.” While the Ig Nobel Prize highlights the humorous events in scientific discovery, Geim and Berry’s work is proving more useful than expected. We don’t have a magnet powerful enough to suspend a human, but we can use smaller organisms to effectively research the effects of weightlessness on astronauts. Researchers at the University of Nottingham began conducting experiments on the effects of long term weightlessness on fruit flies using superconducting magnets in 2012. They found that the flies move more quickly when in the magnet, something that has also been observed in flies in space.

Magnetically Levitated Animals

So, in order to understand how to make organisms float, you need to understand how magnetism affects living things made of soft tissue, bone and no metal. Biological materials are affected by diamagnetism, which means they are weakly repelled from magnetic fields. Ferromagnetic materials like iron possess a strong attraction to magnetic fields.

Floating Flies

To float the flies, the researchers at Nottingham used a giant superconducting magnet to generate a magnetic field hundreds of thousands times stronger than the Earth’s. At 16 Tesla, the diamagnetic repulsion force increases significantly making the flies levitate. The diamagnetic repulsion balances the force of gravity and makes the levitation force comparable to the centrifugal force of gravity that an astronaut experiences when orbiting the Earth in the space station. You can create a similar zero gravity effect at home with only a string, some tape, a paperclip, and a small neodymium magnet. The magnetic levitation experiment might not work on flies, but it’s a great demonstration of how weightlessness can be achieved using magnets. Contact us for more information on magnets.