Clinton Rubin, a biomedical engineer at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has found that gently jiggling rodents prevents them from forming fat. After 15 weeks, mice that were vibrated at low magnitude for 15 minutes a day weighed 5 percent less and had 30 percent less fat than a sedentary group. Autopsies showed that the vibrations somehow caused bone-marrow stem cells, which often turn into fat as animals age, to become new bone. It's too soon to tell if the trick works for humans, Rubin says, but it could help guard against bone loss in astronauts living in microgravity.
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