Check Out This Magnet and Liquid Nitrogen Powered Hoverboard

Liquid nitrogen. Magnetic superconductor. Quantum locking. While these may seem like scary words, all together they equate to one heck of a skateboard -- or should we say hoverboard.

Watch it coast in a stream of steam:

Smart Planet reports the hovercraft, known as MagSurf, as being created by a team of researchers in Universite Paris Diderot in France. To develop the hovercraft, researchers used a technique called quantum locking. Here's essentially how it works, according to Smart Planet:

Essentially, they turned a skateboard into a one big magnetic superconductor by icing it with super-cold liquid nitrogen. What this does is it creates an electromagnetic field that’s expelled from the inside, a phenomenon known as the Meissner effect. But since the MagSurf is much larger than the ultra-thin disc used in the previous demonstration, it can’t do quantum locking. Nope. Not today. Not tomorrow. And, unfortunately, not any time soon. That’s why you see the volunteers stretching their arms to balance themselves as they glide across the magnetic track.

Care to learn more about quantum locking and levitation? Check out this video explaining the technology by Quantum Levitation, the superconductivity group at Tel Aviv University:

[H/T Popular Science]