Dear tadpolers! We're delighted to present our results: biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Tadpoles, indeed, can sense the absence of Earth's tiny magnetic field. How they do so can have major implications for health, ecology, and space travel. Follow the continuation of our work at @QuantumBioOrg!

Can we cure disease by driving cellular processes with weak magnetic fields? For decades, scientists have been finding weak magnetic fields that "do stuff" to biological systems.

Here's how #TheTadpoleExperiment started. Our lab, the @QuBiT_Lab, studies the effects of weak magnetic fields in biology. Most times, people were skeptic.

Even though this is #TheTadpoleExperiment, we will also have zebrafish inside the hypomagnetic chamber! On Monday, we did put about 480 zebrafish embryos inside the chamber, each in an individual plastic "well" (or tiny pond). Zebrafish is also a also well-studied "model organism" in biology.

This week at #TheTadpoleExperiment we will be performing the first embryo fertilizations in the lab! Our two resident frogs, Fifi and Veronika, who have been acclimatizing in our lab for a couple of weeks, are being “boosted” with hormones on Mon and Tue; Frog testes from will arrive on Tue.

Wanna see some some cool, #OpenScience? Follow #TheTadpoleExperiment! For the next 3 mo, in real time and in #OpenScience mode, we will explore the extent to which weak magnetic fields have an effect on life. What do you think we will find out? Engage with the experiment: TheTadpoleExperiment.org!

But do cells and organisms really react to weak magnetic fields, you ask? Organisms have been proposed to react to magnetic fields using different mechanisms: *chunks of magnetite; *conduction channels; *a quantum phenomenon involving electron spins: no unambiguous scientific proof for this one!

Here are some posts paying homage to our exquisite big box of metal! The hypomagnetic chamber used in #TheTadpoleExperiment was custom-made by @Mumetalshields. It has a residual magnetic field inside of 9 nT -- orders of magnitude smaller than Earth's (already tiny) 50 muT!

Let’s dive into the phases of #TheTadpoleExperiment: 🐸In Phase 1 (May), we monitor tadpole growth under a magnetic field of 9 nT (nanotesla)—the most extreme condition our chamber can handle. Why? To push the boundaries of what we know about biological responses in very weak magnetic environments.

Yay! thetadpoleexperiment.org is live, delving into the intriguing effects of magnetic fields on life. Over the next 3 mo, we will test the effects of varying magnetic fields on the biological development of tadpoles and zebrafish. #TheTadpoleExperiment #OpenScience