Saturday, October 16, 2010

Diamagnetic Levitation

An oldie, but I love it.  Apologies for short, sporadic posts in the next few weeks.  I tad bit busier than usual I'm afraid.

Diamagnetic Levitation. High Field Magnetic Laboratory. Nijmegen

Levitating Frog


Levitating Strawberry


Yeah leviating frogs and strawberries with diamagnetic levitation is fucking cool, but it actually is quite useful/important. They can test the effects of weightlessness on living things. Pure, large protein crystals grow much better in a microgravity environment so diamagnetic levitation is also useful in this regard.

New Scientist: Magnetic gravity trick grows perfect crystals [Article]

Also, I have just been informed as I am writing this that Benoit B. Mandelbrot (The father of fractal geometry) has passed away (1924-2010).  At least he lived a decent and relatively long life.

In memory of Benoit Mandelbrot here are pics of the Mandelbrot set (each image is a magnification of the image before it)















4 comments:

  1. I was just telling my girlfriend about levitating objects with two magnets the other day! I couldn't remember who had done the testing or when it was...thank you very much for posting this. It led me to all the answers I was looking for.

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  2. may benoit mandelbrot rest in successively more complex pieces.

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  3. @ Ankiseth: you are very welcome and I hope the girlfriend enjoys as well ;)

    @Shaun'dre: how profound...witty, yet probably one of the nicest things that can be said about the man in regards to his death. :)

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