Varying Gyroscope Weights

(Created prior to 1993)

Question: I am not a physicist, please forgive a "left field" question.  I 
recently heard that if you took a simple child gyroscope and spun it in one 
direction that it would way different than if you spun it in the opposite 
direction.  How can this be?  Has anyone ever tried it?
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There was an article published in Physical Review Letters a few 
years back in which an extremely careful experiment was performed to determine 
whether or not the weight of a gyroscope depends on the direction of its spin.  
The result of that experiment was that the weight does depend on the spin 
direction, and immediately everybody and their grandmother tried to reproduce

mooney
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This stunning and completely unexpected result.  Nobody could reproduce it, 
and I do not think anybody believes the original experiment was correct.  The 
weight difference was extremely small, and I presume the result was came from 
systematic errors that were not adequately accounted for.
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