Mice Treated to a Strange Trip to Weightlessness

As Tonic reported just recently, mice are being successfully replaced by moths as test subjects in early stage medical testing. The mice haven't reportedly complained much about outsiders taking over their jobs, so what do they have planned for all their newly discovered free time? Well, levitation sounds like fun, thanks for asking.

As reported by LiveScience, physicists at the University of Kansas in collaboration with NASA have applied the generation of very strong magnetic fields to successfully caused a 10-gram, three-week old mouse to levitate before sending a few of its peers on the super high tech carnival ride as well.

While the mice -- quite understandably -- appeared at first a bit alarmed and agitated to find themselves suspended in a midair, frictionless environment that was designed for the testing purposes, all of the test subjects were observed to acclimate to the strange conditions, even to the point of taking food and water.

Similar magnetic field technology has been successfully applied to levitating insects and frogs, but the similarities between mice and humans is of particular interest to NASA in furthering the understanding of what weightlessness does to mammalian health and systems.

Photo courtesy of Rama, via Wikimedia Commons