The BBC reports (HT Betsy Devine): Smurf the hamster gets stuck to cage with magnet A hamster found itself stuck to the bars of its metal cage in Northamptonshire after chewing a magnet that had fallen off a Spiderman toy. Kate Meech, of Bugbrooke, near Northampton, returned home from a day out to find the […]
Tag: levitate
Earthquake-activated house-levitating pneumatic system
The Air Danshin Systems company of Japan says it offers pneumatic technology to protect buildings in the event of an earthquake. The shaking triggers a stream of air that levitates the house. The diagram below, from the company, shows to some extent how the system works, with blue representing the stream of air. (The Spoon & Tamago blog […]
Interview with a frog-levitating graphene tinkerer
Sean O’Neill, in New Scientist, interviews Andre Geim, who has shared (with different collaborators) both an Ig Nobel Prize in physics (for his work on teh substance graphene) and a Nobel Prize in physics. Here’s the final portion of that interview: From tinkering on the fringes to Nobel glory … You have worked in many […]
A knighthood for Geim—he of frogs, magnets & pencils
The man [pictured here] who was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for using magnets to levitate a frog (a feat he accomplished together with a man who already had a knighthood) and then ten years later was awarded a Nobel Prize for having used scotch tape to tease graphene layers from a pencil, has now been […]