Science sometimes turns up weird results. Clinton T. Rubin has discovered that placing mice on vibrating plates for short periods of time strengthens bones and decreases fat.

Dr. Rubin, director of the Center for Biotechnology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is reporting that in mice, a simple treatment that does not involve drugs appears to be directing cells to turn into bone instead of fat.

All he does is put mice on a platform that buzzes at such a low frequency that some people cannot even feel it. The mice stand there for 15 minutes a day, five days a week. Afterward, they have 27 percent less fat than mice that did not stand on the platform — and correspondingly more bone.

Bone marrow accumulates fat as we age. Should we sit in vibrating plates a few times a week to maintain bone health and reduce fat? This could become the next weight loss rage.

Rubin has spent years investigating why bones decay with age and found that more intense impacts don't appear to be the biggest cause of increases in bone strength. This led him in the direction of looking at low frequency vibrations.

Over the years, he and his colleagues discovered that high-magnitude signals, like the ones created by the impact as foot hits pavement, were not the predominant signals affecting bone. Instead, bone responded to signals that were high in frequency but low in magnitude, more like a buzzing than a pounding.

That makes sense, he went on, because muscles quiver when they contract, and that quivering is the predominant signal to bones. It occurs when people stand still, for example, and their muscles contract to keep them upright. As people age, they lose many of those postural muscles, making them less able to balance, more apt to fall and, perhaps, prone to loss of bone.

Rubin suspects that the vibrations send signals to stem cells to tell them to become bone cells rather than fat cells.

The US National Institutes of Health are sufficiently intrigued to fund a large study to see if this effect works on elderly people.

If this can work in humans the optimal frequency and intensity might take some work to discover. Some frequencies and intensities might even cause harm. So think twice before you start constructing your own vibrating plate for weight loss.

I'm reminded of those electric vibrator belt machines where people lean into the belt which is connected to an electric motor on a pedestal. The sellers of those machines are derided as con artists selling junk. But maybe those machines provide some real benefit?

I also wonder whether operating machinery that vibrates your body (e.g. tillers, jack hammers, saws, even some ride mowers and motorcycles) might help keep bones strong and fat off.