When people think of frogs, one of the first things that hops (pun intended) into their mind is how good they are at jumping. While that is not a universal truth since there are some frogs that don’t jump well, it is generally pretty accurate.

Jumping, however, is a long way from flying, which is basically what a frog did in 1997, but it had some help.

Dr. Andre Geim and his team were experimenting with magnetism. While most experiments with magnetism use things like iron, cobalt, or other metals, they wanted to use other things, including living things.

Even things that are not commonly thought of as magnetic have weak magnetic fields. All the way down to the atomic level, everything has a magnetic field.

When you put an object into an extremely strong electromagnet, it will have some type of reaction regardless of how weak its magnetism normally is.

Well, Dr. Geim proved that was the case by placing a variety of things into the compartment surrounded by that extremely strong electromagnet, including plants, a cricket, and most famously, a frog.

As predicted, the frog levitated off the ground and was suspended in air, not unlike what would happen if it traveled to space.

You can see the experiment in the video below, including seeing the frog floating around in the little compartment. Fair warning, it looks pretty scary and mean, but rest assured, the animals in the experiment were not harmed.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this experiment and the video went somewhat viral (or whatever that was called back in the 90s). It became so famous, in fact, that the doctor and his team were awarded the Ig Nobel prize (a somewhat comical ‘opposite’ version of the Nobel Prize).

While this may seem like a silly experiment to waste time and money on, it actually has some very practical uses. For one, it allows researchers to study the effects of zero gravity on something without the expense of sending it to space.

Since the object in the chamber still has access to oxygen and other necessary things for survival, it is also safer than putting them into space.

For the moment, the compartment within an extremely strong electromagnet is still relatively small, so don’t think that you can jump in and fly around. Someday, however, scientists may be able to figure out a way to build much larger electromagnetics, which could make that possible.

Until that day comes, all we have is the funny video of this frog looking confused as it floats around.

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