In 1992 a Russian scientist working in Finland was playing
about, as scientists do, with a three-inch superconducting
toroidal disk which he had cooled to something like 70K
(quite chilly) and was spinning it in a magnetic field.
Quite why he decided to do this is not quite clear, but he
discovered that any object of any material suspended above
the spinning disc would experience about a 0.3% drop in its
weight.

'Big deal' you might think, but it was difficult to explain
the effect given our current understanding of the way gravity
works. Things like magnetic or electric effects and updraft
from the spinning disc had all been ruled out as the cause of
the observations and so the conclusion was that the objects
were being shielded from the gravitational pull of the Earth.

Obviously 0.3% is nothing to shout about and even the latest
experiments have only reached about a 0.5% reduction but the
fact remains, we can shield objects from gravity!

'I don't believe it' you may say But NASA seem to. And in their 'Breakthrough Propulsion
Physics Program', this is one of the things they are
researching along with wormholes, the Alcubierre warp drive
and zero-point energy (also known as the 'Casimir Effect').

So what about the practical applications of this technology?
Well unfortunately it appears that you can't simply strap
a spinning disc under your spaceship and float off to the
far reaches of the universe. Apparently, the device has to be
anchored to the object providing the gravitational attraction,
i.e. the Earth, otherwise there would be a violation of the
'equivalence principle'.

This still leaves the possibility of using the technology
in some sort of elevator or even a reduced gravity launch
pad. There is even speculation that a well-known slimming
organisation is thinking of incorporating gravity shielding
technology into its own brand of bathroom scales.* Watch this
space.

Further Reading

NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project "seeks the ultimate breakthroughs in space transportation."

The Gravity Society Website contains papers on all the experiments described above together with latest information and updates.

Project Greenglow is a "speculative research programme in the realm of gravitational physics" being run by BAE SYSTEMS.