quote:
Originally posted by suicide_junkie:
as for the 'weightless environments near earth' Might you be referring to the Vomit Comet, or something more dramatic that I can't remember?
He might be referring to the demos where they used REALLY strong magnets to levitate little frogs. The upward force was due to the magnetic field causing the spins of all the froggie's atoms to line up, and they could tune it to exactly counteract the downward force from gravity. So, from the frog's point of view, it was weightless. They won't be using it to train astronauts anytime soon, though, because the region of uniform field is small compared to the size of the magnets.