Physicists levitated a live frog with a magnet — and everyone is faintly magnetic

In 1997, physicist Andre Geim floated a living frog in mid-air inside a powerful electromagnet at a lab in the Netherlands. The frog was unharmed and hovered calmly. The trick relied on a property almost nobody thinks about: nearly every ordinary material — water, wood, your own body — is very weakly diamagnetic, meaning it is gently repelled by a magnetic field rather than attracted to it.

This is the opposite of how a fridge magnet grabs iron. When you put a diamagnetic object in a strong field, its electrons rearrange to create a tiny field pointing against the magnet, so the object gets pushed toward regions where the field is weaker. A frog is mostly water, and in a field of about 16 tesla (hundreds of thousands of times Earth's), that faint push is enough to cancel gravity and hold the whole animal aloft.

The effect is real but feeble, which is why you never notice it — you'd need an enormous magnet to levitate anything person-sized. Geim's stunt earned him an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000 for research that 'makes you laugh, then think.' A decade later he won a genuine Nobel Prize in Physics for co-discovering graphene, making him the only person to hold both.