# data[].attributes.headline
3. Article - Animals use magnetic fields all the time!

# data[].attributes.subject
3. Article - Animals use magnetic fields all the time!

# data[].attributes.body
In this article it explains how animals use magnetism to migrate. It helps them know the time of year and where they are. Their bodys use it to decide when and where to migrate. When coupled with natural instinct, animals can very efficiently move around the world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Sometimes, ecology is quite visible. When an owl catches a mouse, we see that connection very clearly. When a river floods, we see how water shapes a landscape.

Ecology can also be less visible. The soil is a good example of this: There is so much life in that brown material beneath our feet, but since we live on top of it, soil life can be difficult for us to visualize.

Sometimes, ecology is invisible.

What forces guide monarch butterflies as they migrate to a place they've never seen? When animals interact with the Earth's magnetic field, these invisible influences play a big role in animals' behavior.

Many Animals Can Sense the Earth's Magnetic Field

How do you navigate through your everyday life? You likely use landmarks such as street signs or buildings. If you're not relying on a device to keep time, you could use the sun's position in the sky to tell you the time of day, and unless you live near the Arctic Circle, the presence of light or dark tells you whether it's day or night.

Humans use many environmental cues to tell them when and where to move, and for a long time, scientists thought that animals relied on similar environmental cues to find their way around.

However, in 1957, a Frankfurt scientist named Hans Fromme noticed that the robins he'd placed in a cage were getting restless. It was fall, and they kept on moving to the southwest part of the cage. Why were they doing this? Yes, the robins in Germany migrate to Spain to the winter, but their behavior puzzled him: these robins were in a closed room, without the sun or the stars to guide them.

They could not tell that it was fall, and they could not use the position of the sun and the stars to tell where Spain was. He decided that they must be using the Earth's magnetic field to guide them in their attempted migration.

How Animals Navigate

Just as we might use street signs, a GPS, and a map to navigate our way around a city, animals use multiple means of navigation. They use environmental clues such as temperature, light levels, and the availability of food sources to trigger migration. They use the sun, moon, and stars to help them make their way to breeding grounds.

Some animals use landmarks to show where they should go, while others such as salmon use the smell of a particular river to guide them home. While they usually use it together with other navigational methods, animals also use the earth's magnetic field as their compass.

How Does the Magnetic Field Influence Animal Behavior?

Since Fromme's time, many experiments on animal behavior have determined that organisms as diverse as bacteria and hamsters can detect the intensity of the Earth's magnetic field and the angle at which it intersects with the Earth.

The most visible interaction between animals and the magnetic field comes every year as animals migrate from cold to warm climates and back again. To navigation-challenged humans, animal migration can seem almost magical.

How do animals like salmon, leatherback turtles, butterflies, and hummingbirds manage to migrate thousands of miles? It turns out that it's not magic at all: it's an invisible ecological interaction.

An inner compass is very important to migrating animals, particularly on days when it's overcast and hard to navigate using the sun or the stars.

In a 2014 study of monarch butterflies, researchers from the University of Massachusetts Medical School discovered that migrating monarchs orient themselves to the south - even in the absence of cues from the sun. This means that even when it's overcast, butterflies can continue moving southward to their winter home.

An alignment with the magnetic field can also help organisms move within their immediate environment. According to Kirschvink and Diaz-Ricci's work published in the Bioeletromagnetics Supplement, magnetotactic bacteria align with the Earth's magnetic field to seek out the area between mud and water in their aquatic environments. This is the best place for the bacteria to live.

Animal Magnetoception: Where Is This Built-In Compass?

When humans use a compass, it's visible in our hands. If animals have a compass, where is it? For a long time, studies of animal behavior showed animals aligning themselves with the earth's magnetic field, but no one knew exactly how they managed to figure it out. However, research has discovered that many species contain small quantities of magnetite, the same material used in the ancient lodestones that humans used to guide their journeys.

In 2012, research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discovered that rainbow trout have a good nose for figuring out directions. In their olfactory system, the trout have some cells that contain tiny quantities of magnetite. Researchers isolated these cells by looking for cells that aligned with the magnetic field and discovered that the cells contained magnetic components.

While people have not studied the magnetoreceptor anatomy of all animals that migrate, many organisms - including humans - contain particles of magnetite within their bodies. In the case of the magnetic bacteria, the bacteria contain magnetosomes, particles of magnetite or iron sulfide tucked into their cells.

It seems that animals that use the magnetic field to navigate may come with a built-in compass, but there may be more than one type of compass. The bodies of animals such as birds and the fruit fly contain proteins called cryptochromes. When these proteins are exposed to blue light, they form molecules with electrons that spin in specific ways depending on the earth's magnetic field. Researchers think that these cryptochromes could help some animals navigate.

Human Impacts on the Earth's Magnetic Field

Humans have an impact on so many aspects of the earth's ecology. While wrangling with the magnetic field might seem like an activity that is out of our reach, human-induced electromagnetic noise could be a concern for migrating animals.

In a 2014 study published in the journal Nature, laboratory studies on robins showed birds that were exposed to background electromagnetic noise had trouble discerning which way was south.

While other studies have not seen the same impact from everyday background noise, it's prudent to be aware that human-induced electromagnetic disturbances could have an impact on some animals' highly-tuned sensory systems.

Animal Navigation: Migration and the Earth's Magnetic Field

Animal navigation has long fascinated humans. We enjoy watching the geese migrate overhead as fall approaches, but for a long time, no one knew how they managed to find their way.

While it's not completely clear how all animals navigate using the Earth's magnetic field, recent investigations of animal anatomy have drawn us closer to the answer to this perplexing question.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Animal Magnetism: Earth's Magnetic Field And Navigation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sometimes, ecology is quite visible. When an owl catches a mouse, we see that connection very clearly. When a river floods, we see how water shapes a landscape. Ecology can also be less visible.

# data[].attributes.body
This article describes the four ways that magnets are used in parts of our everyday lives and how we as a society depend on them. It also provides background on how magnets have been used for scientific advancement throughout history, primarily by the Romans and Chinese .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
*** LumineImages/iStock/GettyImages

Just like the planet Earth, magnets have a north pole and a south pole. The opposite poles attract each other, while the like poles repel each other. This creates a magnetic field that causes magnets to stick to some metals such as iron and nickel, as well as to other magnets.

The Roman Empire and ancient Greek and Chinese civilizations took advantage of magnetic energy to improve their day-to-day lives. In the 21st century, magnets continue to be versatile tools that assist people around the world in many different ways beyond serving as decorations on a refrigerator.

Speakers

*** stockmorrison/iStock/GettyImages

Whether they are in a TV, computer or headphones, speakers that project sound use magnets. Inside a speaker, there is a cone, an electromagnet in the form of a coil and a permanent magnet.

Sound is a mechanical wave. Electromagnetic coils inside speakers respond to the electric current coming in. When the coil moves with the help of the permanent magnet, it pushes and pulls on the speaker cone. These electromagnetic interactions affect the air in front of the speaker and create sound waves for us to hear.

Compass

Compasses help countless travelers find their way using a magnetic field. A compass needle aligns itself with the Earth's magnetic field, so it always points north. For hundreds of years, this gave wanderers and explorers a reliable and stable sense of direction. Compasses had an important impact on history as they enabled geographical discoveries.

MRI

*** MementoImage/iStock/GettyImages

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a medical scanning technique that uses strong magnetic fields and radio waves to produce detailed images of the body. This process occurs as a patient reclines on a table that moves into a machine with a doughnut-shaped opening for the body scan.

A magnet is the most vital part of the MRI system. It uses the body's natural magnetic properties to produce detailed images from every part of the body. Thanks to this process, MRI scans enable doctors to diagnose and treat patients accurately.

Computers

Every time you store photos, music or text documents on your computer, you use magnets.

Hard disk drives store the data thanks to the billions of magnets that cover them. Computers process data in zeros or ones, depending on whether the current is present or not. The north and south poles of these magnets on the surface of hard disk drives can represent either zeros or ones, enabling the data storage through the function of the magnets to attract and repel.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
LumineImages/iStock/GettyImages Just like the planet Earth, magnets have a north pole and a south pole. The opposite poles attract each other, while the like poles repel each other. This creates a magnetic field that causes magnets to stick to some metals such as iron and nickel, as well as to other magnets.

# data[].attributes.body
This article covers the topic of earth's magnetic field and its reversals, which have been observed to be occurring within shorter and shorter periods of time. The article also covers the effect that this may have on human technology and the damage it could cause to earth in the form of natural disasters caused by the reversals.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Solar radiation constantly bombards Earth, and Earth's magnetic field repels it. According to a new study, our planet's protective shield might weaken far more quickly and unpredictably than scientists previously thought.

Credit: NASA / Marshall Space Flight Center

Like the invisible force shield around the Death Star, Earth's magnetic field surrounds and protects our planet from the hottest, most statically charged particles the sun can throw our way. This shield - the natural product of molten iron swirling around the planet's core - has had our backs for billions of years, and prevented Earth from becoming an irradiated, electrified wasteland. Every now and then, though, that shield lets down its guard.

A few times every million years or so, Earth's magnetic field reverses polarity. Imagine a giant bar magnet inside our planet got flipped upside down; iron molecules in Earth's outer core would switch direction, the magnetic North Pole would become the magnetic South Pole, and the invisible currents of energy that make up our planet's magnetic armor would tangle and break, potentially reducing the shield's protective strength by up to 90 percent, previous studied have suggested. [ 6 Visions of Earth's Core]

Luckily, full reversals are uncommon and unfold slowly over thousands of years. (The last full reversal occurred about 780,000 years ago.) But according to a new study published Monday (Aug. 20) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, partial or temporary shifts in Earth's magnetic poles can occur much, much faster than was previously thought possible - potentially, within a single human lifetime.

In the new study, an international team of scientists analyzed 16,000 years of geomagnetic history coded into the atoms of an ancient stalagmite in China. This story written in stone told them that once, about 98,000 years ago, the planet's magnetic field suddenly flipped polarity in as little as 100 years - roughly 30 times faster than the generally expected rate, and 10 times faster than what was thought to be the fastest rate possible.

"The record provides important insights into ancient magnetic field behavior, which has turned out to vary much more rapidly than previously thought," study co-author Andrew Roberts, a professor of Earth sciences at Australian National University, said in a statement.

In their new study, Roberts and a large team of colleagues from China and Taiwan examined about 16,000 previously undocumented years of Earth's magnetic history. For their history teacher, they chose an ancient, yellow stalagmite that grew out of a cave in southwestern China between roughly 91,000 and 107,000 years ago. By dating and analyzing the iron-bearing minerals inside the stalagmite,the team was able to detect periodic variations in the direction in which Earth's magnetic field was flowing at the time those minerals formed.(Magnetic minerals orient themselves in different directions depending on where the Earth's magnetic poles are at the time.)

The team found that Earth's magnetic polarity shifted several times during that 16,000-year period, which was no surprise to them. The shock emerged about 98,000 years ago, when a huge shift in polarity occurred in a period of less than 200 years - possibly within 100 years.

"Such an extremely rapid polarity drift has not been shown before," the researchers wrote in their new study.

Knowing that our planet is capable of such spontaneous magnetic tantrums is important, mainly because our magnetic shield can diminish to about 10-percent effectiveness when it's in the middle of a reversal. Fortunately, that weakening isn't enough to threaten life on Earth; after all, Roberts pointed out, the planet's magnetic field has been reversing periodically for billions of years, and life still persists. Human technology, on the other hand, might have a rougher time coping.

Solar weather events, such as solar flares and solar wind storms, occur when blazing-hot, supercharged particles of energy blast out of the sun's surface and whiz across space on a collision course toward Earth. Even when our planet's magnetic field is at its strongest, a powerful enough solar storm can rip right past those defenses and wreak havoc on anything electrical.

That surge of charged particles can garble radio signals, fry satellite and spacecraft instruments, and overload circuit breakers to take down entire power grids. That's exactly what happened on March 13, 1989, when a massive solar storm crackled through the atmosphere and knocked the power out in Quebec, Canada, for 9 hours. An earlier, even larger solar storm in 1859, known as the Carrington event, reportedly caused telegraph wires to short-circuit all around the United States, throwing off sparks that started fires and electrocuted office workers.

Storms far less powerful than these could cause much more damage if they happened to hit while Earth's magnetic field was in the midst of a reversal, Roberts said. The result would likely be trillions of dollars in damage to our electrical infrastructure, and right now, there's no plan for dealing with an event of that magnitude.

"Hopefully, such an event is a long way in the future and we can develop future technologies to avoid huge damage," Roberts concluded. Keep your fingers (but not your magnetic-field lines) crossed.

Originally published on Live Science.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Earth's Magnetic Field Can Reverse Poles Ridiculously Quickly, Study Suggests

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Like the invisible force shield around the Death Star, Earth's magnetic field surrounds and protects our planet from the hottest, most statically charged particles the sun can throw our way. This shield - the natural product of molten iron swirling around the planet's core - has had our backs for billions of years, and prevented Earth from becoming an irradiated, electrified wasteland.

# data[].attributes.body
This comic demonstrates how a magnetic metal reacts to a magnet and how varying strengths of magnets can affect materials that are magnet-reactant. The magnet is stronger than the force of the iron In the drawing, causing the man to be lifted higher into the air and stick to it.

# data[].attributes.body
This comic shows how field lines work. If the magnets attract (Rook) then the cat-magnet goes up and attract, and they form one whole field line. If they repel (Mika) their magnetic field lines don't touch, and so the cat-magnet goes down.

# data[].attributes.body
This video shows 9 amazing magnetic gadgets, including some things that you've probably never seen before! Including magnetic putty, a solar system that can tell time, and more! (Note that #7 is just a simple electromagnet). Enjoy!

# data[].attributes.body
This article shows the study of dogs and that they line up with the magnetic field and takes the north-south stance when they do their businesses. Even though scientists found out dogs prefer certain directions when they are doing their business, they still do not know the reason why.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Downtown Los Angeles resident Garet Ammerman's dog Miya takes care... (Amina Khan / Los Angeles...)

Dogs can typically smell and hear far better than their human companions. Now it appears they can sense Earth's magnetic field too, say a team of biologists - and they show it when they poop.

These canine compasses prefer to align themselves along a north-south magnetic axis when they relieve themselves, according to a study in the journal Frontiers in Zoology. The findings may help scientists better understand how that strange sense called magnetoreception manifests in mammals.

Dogs wouldn't be the only animals thought to use magnetoreception: Birds do it, bees do it - and certain types of mammals do it, according to study coauthor Sabine Begall, a biologist at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany.

"We discovered [by measuring Google Earth aerial pictures] that cattle align with the magnetic field lines a few years ago," Begall said in an email. "Since then, we studied hunting behavior in [the] red fox and found that they have a preference for N-E during their mousing jumps, and from there it was just a small step to study dogs. First, we looked also at other behaviors but the results were less promising than the 'pooping direction.'"

The scientists studied 70 dogs of 37 different breeds as they defecated (1,893 dumps, to be precise) and urinated (a whopping 5,582 times) - data collected over two years. The researchers found that dogs prefer to point along the north-south axis when they do their business - as long as the magnetic field is stable. When the magnetic field shifts - say, because of an oncoming solar storm - it becomes more difficult to see the pattern, Begall said.

"We were quite frustrated, because we couldn't find a clear preference for a certain direction," Begall said. "Then, we sorted the data according to the prevailing [magnetic-field] conditions at the time of recording, and this analysis revealed a highly significant and predictable effect."

Both male and female dogs took this north-south stance when defecating, the study authors said. But male dogs took slightly different positions when urinating - probably a result of their leg-lifting behavior. How that leg-lifting - right or left? - affects a dog's alignment is "currently under study," the authors wrote.

The authors caution that more research is needed - in part because 'normal' magnetic conditions occurred only in 30% of the cases studied for this work.

If they do indeed sense magnetic fields, why do dogs feel the need to point north-south when they do their business? The authors don't know yet, Begall said.

"It could be that the dogs somehow calibrate their compass or read their 'mental map' during the walks," Begall said. "Imagine that you read a compass during a hike. If the compass needle is shaky, you might dismiss reading the compass at all. That could be the reason why the dogs have no preference when the [magnetic field] is unstable."
ALSO: NASA 'super ball bot' could bounce onto Saturn's icy moon, Titan Fancy footwork! These penguins do the wave to stay warm Cute yet creepy? Somersaulting MIT cube robots can self-assemble Water geysers erupt on Europa! Could Jupiter's moon host life? Is 'Huh?' a universal word?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Dogs align with magnetic fields while pooping, study says

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Downtown Los Angeles resident Garet Ammerman's dog Miya takes care... (Amina Khan / Los Angeles...) Dogs can typically smell and hear far better than their human companions. Now it appears they can sense Earth's magnetic field too, say a team of biologists - and they show it when they poop.

# data[].attributes.headline
3. Article - Using electricity to switch magnetism

# data[].attributes.subject
3. Article - Using electricity to switch magnetism

# data[].attributes.body
This article is about the connection between electricity and magnetism. Scientist discovered a way to use electric fields to control magnetic fields. It talks about how this connection between magnetism and electricity can be applied to technology like computers. The article also mentions differences between electric fields and magnetic fields

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Scientists have managed to use electrical fields to control the magnetic oscillations of certain ferrous materials. This has opened up huge potential for computer technology applications, as data is currently transferred in the form of electrical signals but stored magnetically.

It's not exactly a new revelation that electricity and magnetism are closely linked. And yet, magnetic and electrical effects have been studied separately for some time now within the field of materials science. Magnetic fields will usually be used to influence magnetic material properties, whilst electrical properties come down to electrical voltage. Then we have multiferroics -- a special group of materials that combine the two. In a new development, TU Wien has managed to use electrical fields to control the magnetic oscillations of certain ferrous materials. This has opened up huge potential for computer technology applications, as data is currently transferred in the form of electrical signals but stored magnetically.
Electrical and magnetic materials: poles apart
Within the field of solid state physics, it is often a case of working with material properties that can be influenced by either magnetic or electrical fields. As a general rule, magnetic and electrical effects can be studied separately because their causes are completely different. Magnetic effects come about because particles have an internal magnetic direction called the 'spin', whereas electrical effects result from positive and negative charges within a material that can shift position in relation to one another.

"When it comes to materials with very specific spatial symmetries, however, the two can be combined," explains Professor Andrei Pimenov from the Institute of Solid State Physics at TU Wien. He has been conducting research into this special kind of material -- 'multiferroics' -- for a number of years now. Multiferroics are currently considered to be a promising new area within solid state physics on a global scale. Interesting experiments have already been performed to research how magnetic and electrical effects can be linked and now Pimenov and his team of researchers have managed to use electrical fields to control the high-frequency magnetic oscillations of a material consisting of iron, boron and rare-earth metals for the first time.

"The material contains iron atoms which are threefold positively charged. They have a magnetic moment oscillating at a frequency of 300 GHz," says Pimenov. "There is no question that these oscillations could be controlled using a magnetic field. But what we have managed to demonstrate is that these oscillations can be altered in a targeted way using an electrical field." This means that a dynamic magnetic effect -- the iron atoms' magnetic state of oscillation -- can be activated or deactivated using a static electrical field.
Magnetic data storage, electrical writing
This development is particularly interesting for future electronics applications: "Our hard drives store data magnetically, but it is incredibly difficult to write data quickly and accurately in the same way," says Pimenov. "It is so much easier to apply an electrical field with pinpoint precision, as all you need is a simple voltage pulse. The process is very speedy and doesn't involve any significant loss of energy." But now we could potentially have the option of using materials that combine magnetic and electrical effects to bring together the advantages of magnetic storage and electrical writing.

Journal Reference:

A. M. Kuzmenko, D. Szaller, Th. Kain, V. Dziom, L. Weymann, A. Shuvaev, Anna Pimenov, A. A. Mukhin, V. Yu. Ivanov, I. A. Gudim, L. N. Bezmaternykh, A. Pimenov. Switching of Magnons by Electric and Magnetic Fields in Multiferroic Borates. Physical Review Letters, 2018; 120 (2) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.027203

Cite This Page:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
energy technology; spintronics; materials science; electricity; spintronics research; hacking; encryption; computers and internet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Using electricity to switch magnetism: A major step has been taken towards linking electrical and magnetic material properties, which is crucial for possible applications in electronics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Scientists have managed to use electrical fields to control the magnetic oscillations of certain ferrous materials. This has opened up huge potential for computer technology applications, as data is currently transferred in the form of electrical signals but stored magnetically.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a meme about magnets.

# data[].attributes.headline
2. Video-Magnetism, Magnetic Field Force, Right Hand Rule, Ampere's Law, Torque, Solenoid, Physics Problems

# data[].attributes.subject
2. Video-Magnetism, Magnetic Field Force, Right Hand Rule, Ampere's Law, Torque, Solenoid, Physics Problems

# data[].attributes.body
A educational video(with practice problems) about multiple topics related to magnets that include
1.  North & South Pole of bar magnets
2. Attracting and Repelling
3.  Magnetic Field on Straight Current-Carrying Wire
4. Right Hand Rule
5.  Magnetic Force on a Current Carrying Wire
Etc.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=magnetism

# data[].attributes.headline
3. comic strip-Science, Technology,  Engineering, and Math(STEM)

# data[].attributes.subject
3. comic strip-Science, Technology,  Engineering, and Math(STEM)

# data[].attributes.body
A short comic strip about potential magnet uses. https://www.google.com/search?q=magnetism+comic&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS813US813&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwizsaL12K_fAhWZJDQIHfkVB5IQ_AUIDigB&biw=1396&bih=690&safe=active&ssui=on#imgdii=bGstYbSepgFSlM:&imgrc=18qdHsDNF0ScXM:

# data[].attributes.body
This is an article about bacteria that orient in the Earth's magnetic fields using magnets made out of tiny iron sulfide. They were discovered in Morro Bay at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and the presence of the iron sulfide magnets also suggests that biomineralization which is the process of producing minerals of living organism happened earlier in Earth's history than what scientist previously believed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Bacteria that orient themselves in the Earth's magnetic field by using tiny iron sulfide magnets have been discovered in Morro Bay by researchers at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Many species of bacteria and animals--and perhaps even humans--are known to use embedded particles of magnetite, a form of iron oxide, for navigation. But the new bacteria, whose discovery is reported today in the British journal Nature, are the first using sulfur-based magnets.

Understanding how the newly identified bacteria produce the unusual magnets should shed new light on the mechanism of biomineralization, by which animals produce shells, teeth and bones.

Furthermore, the presence of iron sulfide magnets suggests that the process of biomineralization began much earlier in the Earth's history than had previously been believed, when hydrogen sulfide rather than oxygen was the most important component of the atmosphere.

The discovery "gives us a new line to follow back to the origin of life," said chemist R. J. P. Williams of the University of Oxford in Britain.

It also "means that biomineralization is a much more sophisticated process than we had previously thought, and possibly much older as well," said physicist Richard B. Frankel of Cal Poly, one of the report's authors.

In a separate paper, researchers from the Brazilian Center for Physics Research in Rio de Janeiro report that they have found other bacteria containing different magnetic iron sulfides.

Until recently, biologists believed that biomineralization began about 600 million years ago, when the first shells appeared in fossils. Magnetite-containing bacteria have subsequently been dated back 2 billion years. The new discovery could extend the origin of biomineralization even further back into the Earth's 4.5-billion-year history.

"It's a very exciting discovery," added geobiologist Joseph Kirschvink of Caltech.

The first magnet-containing or magnetotactic bacteria were discovered in a brackish Massachusetts marsh in 1975 by Richard P. Blakemore, now at the University of New Hampshire. Placed in a magnetic field, the bacteria swam toward the north.

The bacteria live primarily in sediments on the bottom of marshes, where they feed on the rich detritus of other organisms. At the latitudes where the bacteria were discovered, the Earth's magnetic lines of force running northward dip into the Earth at a shallow angle, leading the bacteria downward toward the rich food sources on the bottom. Magnetotactic bacteria in the Southern Hemisphere swim toward the south, which again points them toward the bottom.

Researchers have subsequently discovered magnetotactic organs in the bellies of honeybees and in the brains of birds, tuna, whales and dolphins. Some evidence suggests that similar organs might even be present in humans. The magnetotactic organs, in combination with visual cues from the sun, help the animals navigate during migration.

In all previous cases, however, the magnetic organs have been based on magnetite. The new discoveries represent the first time sulfur-containing magnets have been observed. Frankel and his colleagues isolated the bacteria from environments that have high sulfide concentrations, such as the ponds, lagoons and marshes that line the Central Coast of California.

Geophysicist Darci Motta S. Esquivel and his colleagues in Brazil isolated their bacteria from similar locations in South America.

Kirschvink speculates that the iron sulfide deposits originally arose in bacteria as a method for storing iron, "which is crucial for any living organism's metabolism." Over time, the bacteria could then have evolved ways to use the material's magnetic properties as well. Eventually, the same biochemical mechanisms evolved to produce shells and, later, teeth and bones.

The sulfide materials have not yet been found in fossils, he added, because they are "notoriously unstable chemically," breaking down into simpler compounds such as iron pyrite, or fool's gold. Interestingly, both Frankel's group and the Brazilians found iron pyrite particles in the new bacteria. Their function is not yet known.

Oxford's Williams believes that the iron sulfide compounds may also have played a role in the bacteria's capture of life-giving energy from the environment, and he speculates that similar organisms may exist in the hydrogen sulfide-rich thermal vents that have been discovered on the oceans' bottoms.

Concludes Williams: "There could well be a huge variety of life in the sulfide-rich zones on Earth, perhaps holding fresh clues to help answer the question of how life began."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
SCIENCE / MEDICINE : Bacteria Produce an Unusual Magnet for Navigational Use : Origin of life: The discovery should shed new light on how animals came to produce shells, teeth and bones. And the process may be much older than previously thought.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Bacteria that orient themselves in the Earth's magnetic field by using tiny iron sulfide magnets have been discovered in Morro Bay by researchers at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Many species of bacteria and animals--and perhaps even humans--are known to use embedded particles of magnetite, a form of iron oxide, for navigation.

# data[].attributes.body
This video uses magnets attracting to produce more velocity for a magnet. It is super cool because the magnets gains speed then loses it. After the magnet gets to the end it comes back and repeats the process creating an infinite loop. Its super cool because it shows that future technology can be created to produce velocity with attracting magnets and not only repelling.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
MAGNETIC ACCELERATOR - Wakanda Technology | Magnetic Games

# data[].attributes.headline
1. Here's how you you can remember similar poles repel.

# data[].attributes.subject
1. Here's how you you can remember similar poles repel.

# data[].attributes.headline
2. Video - Razor has created the new advancement in the gaming industry.

# data[].attributes.subject
2. Video - Razor has created the new advancement in the gaming industry.

# data[].attributes.body
Project McFly, by Razer has revolutionized the gaming industry. Their new mouse completely eliminates the friction of using a normal mouse  by creating the first floating mouse that uses Earth's own magnetic field. While other designs use a special material the McFly mouse only uses Earth's magnetic field. Note: This video is old but it has been produced. If you look it up you will find more recent videos.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Hovering Mouse - Project McFly | Razer

# data[].attributes.body
This really cool video shows a lot of cool things magnets can do, It shows you that magnets are cooler than you really think
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvkEExdl-w4

# data[].attributes.body
This image below demonstrates how magnets can work in an everyday situation. As you can see here, this mailbox is magnetic, therefore it can be assumed that there are strong magnets in the box, because there is no other logical explanation for this.

# data[].attributes.headline
This really cool video shows a lot of cool things magnets can do, It shows you that magnets are cooler than you really think

# data[].attributes.subject
This really cool video shows a lot of cool things magnets can do, It shows you that magnets are cooler than you really think

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvkEExdl-w4

# data[].attributes.body
First of all, don't judge this video by its cover. This is a bunch of crazy tricks that one can do with magnets. This has nothing to do with the cover image. Similar to other videos, this has a lot to do with batteries, matches, and fruits.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Top 10 CRAZIEST Magnet Tricks You Should Try

# data[].attributes.headline
3. Engineering Video- Super Strong Magnets Explode

# data[].attributes.subject
3. Engineering Video- Super Strong Magnets Explode

# data[].attributes.body
This video shows how extremely strong two magnets collide breaking each in half and also exploding. These are the neodymium magnets causing this reaction. This also makes sparks and electricity between the two.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt8NOdINJ1s

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Super-strong neodymium magnets smashing and exploding

# data[].attributes.headline
3. Article - Saturn's Disappearing Rings

# data[].attributes.subject
3. Article - Saturn's Disappearing Rings

# data[].attributes.body
This article is about Saturn's rings and how they won't be here in around 100 million years. This may seem like a long time, but this just shows how the planets are slowly changing. The article is saying how the gravity and magnetism is pulling the rings into itself. It interesting to see how a planet is basically "consuming itself"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The rings of ice, dust, and other space debris have become a feature of the sixth planet in our solar system, but according to recent findings, they were not always around and probably won't last forever.

Saturn's iconic rings are gradually being destroyed by the planets gravity and magnetism, research led by James O'Donoghue and published in Icarus science journal says. According to it, there is a possibility that Saturn's rings are just a temporary phenomenon that didn't exist millions of years ago and will be probably gone in another 100 million years.

Using observations from W. M. Keck Observatory and shots made by Voyager and Cassini, scientists have come to the conclusion that the space debris, of which the rings consist, is slowly being dragged into the planet's atmosphere, where it evaporates without a trace.

Most of the time, this debris remain in a fragile balance between Saturn's gravity and magnetism on the one side and the centrifugal force of orbital velocity on the other, allowing it to remain in orbit in the form of the famous rings. However, according to the paper, some of this debris occasionally gets electrically charged due to the Sun's rays or other space phenomena, making it susceptible to the planet's magnetic field, which starts disrupting the forces "status quo" and drags the affected objects onto Saturn's surface.
READ MORE: NASA Develops Outer Space Submarine to Explore Saturn
The research showed that the rate, at which the rings are being consumed by this phenomenon, is following "the worst case scenario" under which the rings will cease to exist in just 100 million years, which is a minor timeframe by cosmic standards.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Scientists Say Saturn Consuming Its Own Rings and They Are Halfway Dead

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The rings of ice, dust, and other space debris have become a feature of the sixth planet in our solar system, but according to recent findings, they were not always around and probably won't last forever. Saturn's iconic rings are gradually being destroyed by the planets gravity and magnetism, research led by James O'Donoghue and published in Icarus science journal says.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a very interesting article explaining some little known facts about magnets. for example, magnets can be used for medicine and don't have to be iron. It furthers our understanding about magnets. It also has some fun facts!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Credit: Lena Lir / Shutterstock.com

The line "f-ing magnets, how do they work?" was coined in 2009 by the hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse. Magnets aren't really all that mysterious - the basics have been known for two centuries. As a basic component of disk drives, magnets are part of just about every laptop or desktop computer, and they have made their way into tape players and, of course, the things we use to hold stuff on a fridge. Before the advent of flat screens, televisions and monitors were home to some of the most powerful magnets in the average home.

Although the physics of magnets are pretty well-understood (except perhaps by some hip-hop musicians), and they've been part of our lives for centuries, they do surprise and delight. Here's a look at some fascinating facts about magnets.

1. Magnets come in four flavors: Ferromagnets - which include substances like iron and nickel - are composed of atoms with unpaired electrons whose spins are aligned. They make good permanent magnets. In another type of magnet - called ferrimagnets - only some of the electron spins are aligned.

Maglev train starts operation on June 1, 2010.

Credit: Hung Chung Chih Shutterstock.com

Most chemical elements, however, are considered paramagnetic, meaning they are magnetized only when inside another magnetic field. Paramagnets also boast unpaired electrons.

If you're looking to levitate objects, diamagnetic materials are the way to go. These materials are magnetized when in a field, but they generate fields opposite to the one in which they are located. Maglev trains work on this principle.

2. Magnetism is light: Why do magnets stick? Magnets attract each other because they exchange photons, or the particles that make up light. But unlike the photons streaming out of a desk lamp or reflecting off of everything you see around you, these photons are virtual, and your eyes (or any particle detector) can't "see" them. They can, however, exchange momentum, and this is why they stick to things or repel them. When a kid throws a dodge ball, they're exchanging momentum with the ball, and the thrower feels a slight push back. Meanwhile the target person feels the force of the ball, and (maybe) gets knocked over - they are "repelled" from the thrower. With photons, the process can also happen in reverse, as though one kid reached out and grabbed the ball while the other was still hanging on to it, which would look like an attractive force.

Photons are the force carriers not only for magnets but also for electrostatic phenomena like static electricity, and it's why electromagnetism is the term we use for effects produced by these phenomena - including light, which is an electromagnetic wave.

3. Magnetism is relativistic: That's right - whenever you turn on an electromagnet and stick it to a fridge, you are demonstrating relativity. Why? According to the theory of special relativity, the distance along the direction of motion gets shorter - that is, a fast-moving car would look squished, even though the person in the car wouldn't notice. That person would see everything around him or her as squished in the direction in which the individual was traveling.

This has consequences for charged particles in wires. Ordinarily, the negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons in a wire cancel each other out. But when current moves through a wire, the electrons are moving. From the point of view of any stationary charged particle outside the wire, the distance between electrons gets smaller. That means it looks like there are more electrons than protons in a given space - all of a sudden there's a net negative charge. Put any positively charged particle (or wire) next to the wire with current in it, and you feel a magnetic force of attraction. Put a negatively charged particle near it and it will repel - and this is why if you run the current in opposite directions through two wires, they will attract each other, and if the current is running in the same direction, they will repel.

A similar thing happens when a charged particle moves through a magnetic field, say, near a (permanent) bar magnet . The particle experiences force. But according to the theory of relativity, you can't say that the particle is moving and the magnet isn't. From the point of view of the particle, the bar magnet is moving. Maxwell's equations, which describe electromagnetic waves and forces, show that you'd see different forces, depending on which reference frame you choose. For a stationary observer it looks like a magnetic force pushing or pulling on the particle, and for a moving one it's an electrostatic force. This problem was a major piece of Einstein's development of special relativity, which accounted for the discrepancy.

4. The world's most powerful magnets: The two biggest magnets reside at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Florida State University (FSU). The two sister laboratories have magnets that can reach 100 and 45 tesla, respectively. By comparison, junkyard magnets - the ones that lift cars - are about 2 tesla.

The 45-tesla hybrid magnet, looking up toward magnet, with detail of coldwater pipes at Florida State University.

Credit: National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, FSU

The Los Alamos magnet is designed to generate fields that last only a few seconds, while the FSU magnet can maintain its fields for as long as the power is on. Each magnet is designed to perform different kinds of experiments, noted Ross McDonald, a staff scientist at Los Alamos.

An interesting effect happens with the FSU magnet when there are diamagnetic materials, such as an aluminum canister, around. The diamagnetism creates fields with an opposite orientation to the magnet, so anything made of such materials is stuck in place. "It's like trying to move it through molasses," McDonald said.

It's not safe to play with aluminum canisters near the Los Alamos magnet, for the same reason that it isn't safe to stand in the room in which the magnet is housed. "Every pulsed magnet will eventually destroy itself," McDonald said, because of the stresses of the magnetic forces on the coils. When they fail, they can fail catastrophically. "We have something like 100 sticks of dynamite's worth of energy in there and we contain 99.9 percent of it," he said. But that last percentage point is still a lot, so LANL evacuates the building when its magnet is on.

5. Magnets showed that quantum mechanics worked: The discovery of one of the fundamental quantum mechanical properties of elementary particles - spin - involved magnets. It's called the Stern-Gerlach experiment, after physicists Otto Stern and Walter Gerlach. They conducted the experiment in 1922, to test ideas about the then-new theories of quantum mechanics. They used two magnets, one on top of the other, each shaped to produce a long, asymmetrical magnetic field. They then fired uncharged particles - silver atoms - through the field at a target. The asymmetrical field will alter the silver atoms' trajectory slightly. , Since the atoms will be oriented in random directions and their angular momenta will also be random, the trajectory should be different for each silver atom, but it was not known by how much. The target should have shown a smooth distribution of hits from one end to the other.

That didn't happen. Instead, the experimenters got two clusters of hits, as though the beam had split into two directions with the particles unable to deflect to anywhere in between. Stern and Gerlach had just demonstrated that particle spins were quantized - they can be up or down, but nothing else.

6. Magnets don't have to be iron or even metal: Most of the magnets we use are made of iron (like fridge magnets). But that doesn't have to be so. Magnets can be made of any material with unpaired electrons. That includes many metals and alloys, such as neodymium, which is used in disk drives. Ferrimagnetic materials, in fact, are often not metals at all. Among them are spinels, which are used in the magnets that seal refrigerator doors.

7. Magnetic medicine: There isn't any evidence that magnets work for pain relief. The reason? Even though there is iron in your blood, it's made up of atoms that are too far apart and too diffuse for magnets to affect them. If you tested this by pricking your finger and spilling blood near a magnet, you'd find that neither your blood nor the magnet would attract one another. [ 11 Surprising Facts About the Circulatory System]

That said, magnets are used in magnetic resonance imaging machines, which use magnets stronger than the ones in junkyards that lift cars. In most cases MRI magnets are superconducting and cooled with liquid helium.

8. Long known, but not understood: The ancient Greeks and Chinese noticed something was up with certain materials, known as lodestones. Lodestones were actually magnetite, a form of iron oxide that forms when magma cools slowly. The lodestones attracted other ironlike metals, and even better, could magnetize ordinary iron. When small pieces of metal were magnetized, then hung from a string or floated in water, they aligned with the Earth's magnetic field - becoming the first magnetic compasses.

9. Animals sport magnets: Some animals and bacteria have magnetite in their bodies. A type of mollusk called a chiton even has magnetite in its "teeth," which actually cover its tongue. The magnetite is abrasive and lets the animal scrape algae, but it might also provide a homing sense, enabling chitons to find their way back to certain places where they like to mate and feed. Studies of homing pigeons seem to show that they have a magnetic sense that helps them navigate. Magnetite in the animals' beaks seems to be the key, though how big a role that magnetic sense (called magnetoception) plays is unclear.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The line "f-ing magnets, how do they work?" was coined in 2009 by the hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse. Magnets aren't really all that mysterious - the basics have been known for two centuries.

# data[].attributes.body
In this video they add super strong magnets to fidget spinners. This made some cool combination such as the fidget spinners spinning at the same time. The magnets attracting can help move the fidget spinners. Repelling can also move the fidget spinners

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fun with fidget spinners and super strong magnets!

# data[].attributes.headline
2. Article -- Magmatic Fields (Magnetic fields out of Magma) 

# data[].attributes.subject
2. Article -- Magmatic Fields (Magnetic fields out of Magma) 

# data[].attributes.body
We all know the Earth has a magnetic field (at least, I hope you know this for the benefit of your grade in science), but do other planets have one? It turns out that yes, they do -- but their magnetic field comes from a seemingly surprising place -- oceans of magma from the planet's volcanos. A study of various planets about five times the size of earth lead them to this result. Since magnetic fields are key to harboring life and protecting it from the harsh radiation of various stars, scientists are now excited about life on these planets.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
November 21, 2018 by Robert Sanders, University of California - Berkeley

An artist's concept of a super-Earth in the habitable zone of a star smaller and cooler than the sun. Such large planets could have long-lasting magma oceans that generate magnetic fields capable of protecting incipient life. The graphic was created to model Kepler-62f, one of many exoplanets discovered by NASA's now inoperable Kepler space telescope. Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/Tim Pyle

Every school kid knows that Earth has a magnetic field - it's what makes compasses align north-south and lets us navigate the oceans. It also protects the atmosphere, and thus life, from the sun's powerful wind.

But what about other Earth-like planets in the galaxy? Do they also have magnetic fields to protect emerging life?

A new analysis looks at one type of exoplanet - super-Earths up to five times the size of our own planet - and concludes that they probably do have a magnetic field, but one generated in a totally novel way: by the planets' magma oceans.

The surprising discovery that slowly churning melted rock at or under the surface can generate a strong magnetic field also suggests that in Earth's early years, when it was largely a lump of melted rock, it also had a magma-generated magnetic field. This was in addition to its present-day field, which is generated in the liquid-iron outer core.

"This is a new regime for the generation of planetary magnetic fields," said Burkhard Militzer, a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science. "Our magnetic field on Earth is generated in the liquid outer iron core. On Jupiter, it arises from the convection of liquid metallic hydrogen. On Uranus and Neptune, it is assumed to be generated in the ice layers. Now we have added molten rocks to this diverse list of field-generating materials."

The link between a planet's interior and its magnetic field also provides a way for astronomers to learn about the makeup and ages of exoplanets too far away to visit.

"This is far in the future, but if someone makes an observation of an exoplanet and they find a magnetic field, that may be an indication that there is a magma ocean, even if they cannot see this directly," Militzer said.

The conclusions also have implications for chances for life on other planets. As magma oceans cool from the top, a surface hospitable to life could appear while the melted mantle continues to churn.

"A magnetic field is helpful in protecting a planetary atmosphere from being blown away by the stellar winds," said former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow François Soubiran, now at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France. "Most of the super-Earths we are detecting now are very close to their host stars and exposed to very strong stellar winds. Thus, the possibility for a magnetic field to exist is definitely a key component in the evolution of the planet and its habitability."

Soubiran and Militzer published their findings Sept. 24 in the journal Nature Communications.
Earth's internal dynamo
The magnetic field of Earth today is generated in the molten-iron outer core, where rising and sinking masses of electrically conducting liquid iron, combined with the planet's spin, create a dynamo and a persistent magnetic field.

Layers of a possible super-Earth. The heat of formation of such a large planet could keep its magma oceans active for a billion years, generating its own magnetic field in addition to the magnetic field produced by an iron core. Credit: NASA

But the rocky Earth was molten after its initial formation 4.5 billion years ago, and some layers may have remained molten and convecting - like boiling water, only slower - for millions of years after its birth. Could the slowly convecting magma ocean have generated a magnetic field akin to the one generated in the iron core today?

The same question arose after super-Earths were discovered around other stars. Super-Earths are so massive that their interior, the mantle, should remain liquid and convecting for a few billion years after formation.

In both cases, the slowly boiling magma on a spinning planet can generate a strong magnetic field only if the liquid rock conducts electricity.

No one knew if this was true.

Experiments on silicates - a term referring to the thousands of silicon-based minerals that make up Earth's rocky interior - at the high temperatures and pressures inside a super-Earth are difficult. Even establishing whether a rock remains solid or becomes liquid is not straightforward at the conditions typical of planetary interiors: temperatures of 10,000 Celsius and pressures 10 million times that of the air around us.

"At standard temperatures and pressures, silicates are completely insulating; the electrons are either tightly bound to the nuclei or they are in molecular bonds and not able to freely move and create macroscopic electric currents," Soubiran said. "Even if the high internal pressure helps reduce the barriers for the electrons to move, it was not necessarily obvious silicates would be conducting in super-Earths."

But Soubiran and Militzer had access to atomic-scale computer models of minerals that allowed them to calculate the conductivity of, in this case, quartz (silicon dioxide), magnesia ( magnesium oxide) and a silicon-magnesium-oxide (post-perovskite), all of which are common in rocks on Earth, the moon and probably all of our solar system's planets.

After performing lengthy calculations for each of the three, they discovered that these silicates become modestly conducting when they change from solid to liquid at high temperatures and pressures. When they plugged the conductivities into models of Earth's interior, they discovered that the rocks were sufficiently conducting to sustain a dynamo and thus a magnetic field.

"Our calculations showed that the disorganized structure of the liquid helped the electrons become conducting," Soubiran said. Liquid silicates at 10,000 Celsius and 10 million atmospheres of pressure have only about one-hundredth the conductivity of liquid iron, for example.

Soubiran noted that planets rotating with a period of two days or more would generate an Earth-like magnetic field: a dipole field with a clear north and south. Slower rotation, however, could create a more disorganized field that would be harder to detect from afar.

Bruce Buffett, a UC Berkeley expert on the dynamics of Earth's interior who was not involved in the research, said that planets can generate magnetic fields only if they have the right balance of electrical conductivity and fluid velocity to create the feedback necessary to sustain a magnetic field.

"The expectation of many geophysicists was that, at least under Earth conditions, the conductivity of liquid silicates would fall more into the category of, well, if you had really, really large fluid motions to compensate for a low conductivity, you might have a magnetic field," said Buffett, a professor of earth and planetary science. "This is the first detailed calculation for higher temperature and pressure conditions, and it finds that the conductivities appear to be a little bit higher, so the fluid motions you would need to make this all work are maybe a little bit less extreme."

More information: François Soubiran et al. Electrical conductivity and magnetic dynamos in magma oceans of Super-Earths, Nature Communications (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06432-6

Provided by: University of California - Berkeley

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What magnetic fields can tell us about life on other planets

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
November 21, 2018 by Robert Sanders, University of California - Berkeley Every school kid knows that Earth has a magnetic field - it's what makes compasses align north-south and lets us navigate the oceans. It also protects the atmosphere, and thus life, from the sun's powerful wind.

# data[].attributes.body
A video explaining all the basics of magnetism in a fun and easy understand way designed specially for kids.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Magnetism | #aumsum #kids #science #education #children

# data[].attributes.body
This is a really cool video that shows these really cool trick shots you can do with magnets. This shows how strong these magnets are truly are. This also shows how fun they can be!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Amazing Magnet Trick Shots! (Magination)

# data[].attributes.body
This article shows what black holes do and they talk about there really strong magnetic fields.
https://public.nrao.edu/news/alma-magnetic-field/

# data[].attributes.headline
2. Article - Magnetism Confirmed to Control the Flow of Heat

# data[].attributes.subject
2. Article - Magnetism Confirmed to Control the Flow of Heat

# data[].attributes.body
This article is about how magnetism can control the flow of heat. It talks about how scientists conducted experiments to discover this connection between heat and magnetism.  This connection broke a law of thermodynamics. It was guessed about 50 years ago, but was only confirmed recently

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The strange world of quantum mechanics just got a little stranger with the discovery that a magnetic field can control the flow of heat from one body to another. First predicted nearly 50 years ago, the effect might some day form the basis of a new generation of electronic devices that use heat rather than charge as the information carrier.

The research stems from the work of physicist Brian Josephson, who in 1962 predicted that electrons could 'tunnel' between two superconductors separated by a thin layer of insulator - a process forbidden in classical physics. The Josephson junction was subsequently built and used to make superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs), which are now sold commercially as ultra-sensitive magnetometers.

In the latest work, Francesco Giazotto and María José Martínez-Pérez at the NEST nanoscience institute in Pisa, Italy, measured the devices' thermal behavior - that is, how the electrons inside them transfer heat. The duo heated one end of a SQUID several micrometers long and monitored the temperature of an electrode connected to it. A SQUID consists of two y-shaped pieces of superconductor joined together to form a loop, but with two thin pieces of insulating material sandwiched in between (see figure); as the researchers varied the magnetic field passing through the loop, the amount of heat flowing through the device also changed. The effect was in line with a theory put forward by Kazumi Maki and Allan Griffin in 1965.

The device worked by partly reversing the heat transfer, so that some would flow from the colder body to the warmer one. "This is completely unintuitive," says Giazotto. "People are used to thinking of heat as disorder, so how can you impose quantum order on it? Amazingly, a device with Josephson junctions can do that."

Legal violation
This apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics - which states that heat will always flow from a hotter to a colder body - is, in fact, perfectly legal, says Giazotto, because only part of the total heat flow is subject to the phase variation. When you also take into account the heat transferred by single electrons, as occurs inside normal metals, the net flow is still from the hot to the cold end.

Like its electrical counterpart, this variation in the heat flow can be explained in terms of the superconductors' 'phase' - the position of the peaks and troughs of the wavefunction that describes the superconducting electron pairs in the SQUID's loop. The greatest heat flow occurs when the peaks inside one half of the loop line up with peaks in the other half, whereas the flow is at a minimum when peaks meet troughs. The magnetic field shifts those phases relative to each other, thus modifying the heat flow.

Teun Klapwijk of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands describes Giazotto and Martínez-Pérez's research as "cute" but "not very surprising". He also doubts that it will have significant practical applications. "The only possible area would be solid-state refrigeration, which would replace cryogenic liquids," he says.

But Giazotto argues that the research could help to realize tiny but highly efficient heat engines. He also hopes it might form the basis of "coherent caloritronics", in which information is carried by heat exchanges instead of electrical ones. In ordinary transistors, a voltage toggles an electric switch on and off, and the devices can be combined to form logic gates, the building blocks of computer chips; caloritronics would instead use 'thermal transistors' to switch on and off the transfer of heat. Previously, Giazotto and others have built devices that control heat exchanges using an electric rather than magnetic field.

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine . The article was first published on December 19, 2012.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Magnetism Confirmed to Control the Flow of Heat

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The strange world of quantum mechanics just got a little stranger with the discovery that a magnetic field can control the flow of heat from one body to another. First predicted nearly 50 years ago, the effect might some day form the basis of a new generation of electronic devices that use heat rather than charge as the information carrier.

# data[].attributes.headline
2. Best place to buy strong magnets online.

# data[].attributes.subject
2. Best place to buy strong magnets online.

# data[].attributes.body
This forum site tells and gives you information on where to buy the cheapest and best quality magnets.
It also gives extra information about the pros and cons of each type of magnet. An example would be:

For selection, quality, and an easy-to-parse site layout, I highly, highly recommend K&J Magnetics.

Huge variety of shapes... quality magnets (up to n52!), great data-sheets, and good service and turnaround time. Prices are on the low side of average--but quality magnets, and a good and honest description, are assured. As per your stated preference, single magnets/small numbers of magnets are available without any kind of enormous markup.

https://ask.metafilter.com/107522/Where-is-the-best-place-to-buy-strong-magnets-online

# data[].attributes.body
An article explaining the history and the present of magnets, as well as practical uses of magnets.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
All About Magnets - PowerKnowledge Physical Science

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"All About Magnets." PowerKnowledge Physical Science, The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. Accessed December 20, 2018. http://www.pkphysicalscience.com/article/499/all-about-magnets.

# data[].attributes.body
This video shows how to turn on a lightbulb using magnets and wires. This invention is helpful, since it requires less materials, saves energy, and doesn't make you pay electricity bills. Anyone could try this at home!

# data[].attributes.body
This article explains how animals use magnets. During migration, animals such as deer, salmon, and turtles use the earth's magnetic field to guide them. It can also be used for navigation during short trips or hunting. The use of magnets vary from many creatures, big and small

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The web was recently buzzing with the discovery that cattle (and other herd animals, such as red and roe deer) tend to situate themselves on a North-South axis, as if involuntarily directed by the earth's magnetic field lines to the poles. It all came about when German scientists were using Google Earth to analyze herding patterns and behavior. Thousands of years of human ignorance, gone in a single Google moment.

But it's not just cattle and deer that are affected by the earth's magnetism. Scientists have previously discovered that birds, bats, turtles and salmon (among other fish) are affected by "animal magnetism". Lobsters have been shown to exhibit magnetic sensitivity, relying upon the earth's magnetic lines to navigate.

The aforementioned bats actually have bacteria in their bodies which, through evolutionary natural selection, has been favored due to its beneficial role in magnetic sensitivity. But, being humans, scientists have also been curious to find out if homo sapiens are affected. Since testing would be near-impossible, they looked to other large mammals, such as the humble cow, to gather further evidence.

Baby sea turtles rely on the earth's magnetism to make their way to and fro in the Atlantic Ocean (that's 8,000 miles round trip). There's a major current that spans the Atlantic that scientists have learned baby turtles can actually "read". Their bodies tell them when they've strayed off course - it's just like having an internal GPS. Even more astonishing, birds can literally see the earth's magnetic field. Though it's not conclusively proven, there is compelling evidence: birds' eyes contain specialized light receptor molecules that communicate with the visual center in the brain. Just as a compass relies on a tiny magnet to "tune in" to the earth's magnet, birds' eyes may act as compasses as well. Bird brain, indeed.

But what about humans? Despite many alternative health industry claims that our cell phones, homes and highways are veritable minefields of electro-magnetic danger, the WHO (World Health Organization) and the scientific community maintain that such claims are bogus. The available scientific literature does not offer any meritable evidence that magnetism harms us; but how it affects us is still being explored. There is some interesting treatment research for electro-magnetic therapy's usefulness, particularly in helping scientists to understand how the human brain works. And if simple chemical reactions can be affected by the earth's magnetism, couldn't our bodies?

Image courtesy NASA

The earth's magnetic field itself is fascinating. Steady as you might think it is, the magnetism of the planet is remarkably capricious. Every few million years or so, it flips. It sloshes. And its power is fading. In certain parts, the magnetic fields are so weakened that the area is at risk of greater radiation. In fact, scientists believe the North and South poles could one day switch. Such fluctuations in magnetism may help to shed light on why geological phenomena like earthquakes and tsunamis are often detected by animals well in advance of people.

The evidence is interesting in that it extends from fishes and birds to mammals. With terrestrial magnetism serving to help guide animals, does this mean that earthly creatures are mere magnets upon a giant metal ball? Shelve science fiction fantasies for now. Though many animals have developed distinctive features - from heritable bacteria to special eyesight to an internal GPS - one might think of terrestrial magnetism and its impact upon animal evolution and behavior as one remarkably synergistic story.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Animal Magnetism: the Amazing and Weird Ways Animals Are Affected by the Earth's Magnetic Field - WebEcoist

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The web was recently buzzing with the discovery that cattle (and other herd animals, such as red and roe deer) tend to situate themselves on a North-South axis, as if involuntarily directed by the earth's magnetic field lines to the poles. It all came about when German scientists were using Google Earth to analyze herding patterns and behavior.

# data[].attributes.body
Magnetic fields helps us describe how magnetic forces are distributed in the space around and within a magnet. Magnets have two poles and and there can be attraction (opposite poles) or repulsion (similar poles) depending on orientation. We realize that there is a region around a magnet so we draw magnetic fields to describe this region.

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/physics/magnetic-forces-and-magnetic-fields/magnetic-field-current-carrying-wire/a/what-are-magnetic-fields

# data[].attributes.body
Behold. As many other people have done, this is a youtube compilation on different tricks that one can do with magnets. From matches to fruits. This delightful youtube compilation is very interesting in how the person can manipulate magnets to do cool things. P.S. Don't ask me on how the stuff works, I don't know and the video doesn't explain.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
TOP 10 Magnet Science Experiments & Tricks from Mr. Hacker!

# data[].attributes.body
This article is on how magnets work in a nuclear reactor. This article is about creating a nuclear reactor with a magnetic field.This is about creating better reactors so they can be more commercial and portable. It uses a spiral design to help control the plasma.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If you've heard of fusion energy, you've probably heard of tokamaks. These doughnut-shaped devices are meant to cage ionized gases called plasmas in magnetic fields while heating them to the outlandish temperatures needed for hydrogen nuclei to fuse. Tokamaks are the workhorses of fusion-solid, symmetrical, and relatively straightforward to engineer-but progress with them has been plodding.

Now, tokamaks' rebellious cousin is stepping out of the shadows. In a gleaming research lab in Germany's northeastern corner, researchers are preparing to switch on a fusion device called a stellarator, the largest ever built. The €1 billion machine, known as Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X), appears now as a 16-meter-wide ring of gleaming metal bristling with devices of all shapes and sizes, innumerable cables trailing off to unknown destinations, and technicians tinkering with it here and there. It looks a bit like Han Solo's Millennium Falcon, towed in for repairs after a run-in with the Imperial fleet. Inside are 50 6-tonne magnet coils, strangely twisted as if trampled by an angry giant.

Although stellarators are similar in principle to tokamaks, they have long been dark horses in fusion energy research because tokamaks are better at keeping gas trapped and holding on to the heat needed to keep reactions ticking along. But the Dali-esque devices have many attributes that could make them much better prospects for a commercial fusion power plant: Once started, stellarators naturally purr along in a steady state, and they don't spawn the potentially metal-bending magnetic disruptions that plague tokamaks. Unfortunately, they are devilishly hard to build, making them perhaps even more prone to cost overruns and delays than other fusion projects. "No one imagined what it means" to build one, says Thomas Klinger, leader of the German effort.

W7-X could mark a turning point. The machine, housed at a branch of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) that Klinger directs, is awaiting regulatory approval for a startup in November. It is the first large-scale example of a new breed of supercomputer-designed stellarators that have had most of their containment problems computed out. If W7-X matches or beats the performance of a similarly sized tokamak, fusion researchers may have to reassess the future course of their field. "Tokamak people are waiting to see what happens. There's an excitement around the world about W7-X," says engineer David Anderson of the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison.

Wendelstein 7-X, the first large-scale optimized stellarator, took 1.1 million working hours to assemble, using one of the most complex engineering models ever devised, and must withstand huge temperature ranges and enormous forces.

Stellarators face the same challenge as all fusion devices: They must heat and hold on to a gas at more than 100 million degrees Celsius-seven times the temperature of the sun's core. Such heat strips electrons from atoms, leaving a plasma of electrons and ions, and it makes the ions travel fast enough to overcome their mutual repulsion and fuse. But it also makes the gas impossible to contain in a normal vessel.

Instead, it is held in a magnetic cage. A current-carrying wire wound around a tube creates a straight magnetic field down the center of the tube that draws the plasma away from the walls. To keep particles from escaping at the ends, many early fusion researchers bent the tube into a doughnut-shaped ring, or torus, creating an endless track.

But the torus shape creates another problem: Because the windings of the wire are closer together inside the hole of the doughnut, the magnetic field is stronger there and weaker toward the doughnut's outer rim. The imbalance causes particles to drift off course and hit the wall. The solution is to add a twist that forces particles through regions of high and low magnetic fields, so the effects of the two cancel each other out.

Stellarators impose the twist from outside. The first stellarator, invented by astro-physicist Lyman Spitzer at Princeton University in 1951, did it by bending the tube into a figure-eight shape. But the lab he set up-the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in New Jersey-switched to a simpler method for later stellarators: winding more coils of wire around a conventional torus tube like stripes on a candy cane to create a twisting magnetic field inside.

In a tokamak, a design invented in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the twist comes from within. Tokamaks use a setup like an electrical transformer to induce the electrons and ions to flow around the tube as an electric current. This current produces a vertical looping magnetic field that, when added to the field already running the length of the tube, creates the required spiraling field lines.

Both methods work, but the tokamak is better at holding on to a plasma. In part that's because a tokamak's symmetry gives particles smoother paths to follow. In stellarators, Anderson says, "particles see lots of ripples and wiggles" that cause many of them to be lost. As a result, most fusion research since the 1970s has focused on tokamaks-culminating in the huge ITER reactor project in France, a €16 billion international effort to build a tokamak that produces more energy than it consumes, paving the way for commercial power reactors.

But tokamaks have serious drawbacks. A transformer can drive a current in the plasma only in short pulses that would not suit a commercial fusion reactor. Current in the plasma can also falter unexpectedly, resulting in "disruptions": sudden losses of plasma confinement that can unleash magnetic forces powerful enough to damage the reactor. Such problems plague even up-and-coming designs such as the spherical tokamak (Science, 22 May, p. 854).

Stellarators, however, are immune. Their fields come entirely from external coils, which don't need to be pulsed, and there is no plasma current to suffer disruptions. Those two factors have kept some teams pursuing the concept.

The largest working stellarator is the Large Helical Device (LHD) in Toki, Japan, which began operating in 1998. Lyman Spitzer would recognize the design, a variation on the classic stellarator with two helical coils to twist the plasma and other coils to add further control. The LHD holds all major records for stellarator performance, shows good steady-state operation, and is approaching the performance of a similarly sized tokamak.

Two researchers-IPP's Jürgen Nührenberg and Allen Boozer of PPPL (now at Columbia University)-calculated that they could do better with a different design that would confine plasma with a magnetic field of constant strength but changing direction. Such a "quasi-symmetric" field wouldn't be a perfect particle trap, says IPP theorist Per Helander, "but you can get arbitrarily close and get losses to a satisfactory level." In principle, it could make a stellarator perform as well as a tokamak.

The design strategy, known as optimization, involves defining the shape of magnetic field that best confines the plasma, then designing a set of magnets to produce the field. That takes considerable computing power, and supercomputers weren't up to the job until the 1980s.

The first attempt at a partially optimized stellarator, dubbed Wendelstein 7-AS, was built at the IPP branch in Garching near Munich and operated between 1988 and 2002. It broke all stellarator records for machines of its size. Researchers at UW Madison set out to build the first fully optimized device in 1993. The result, a small machine called the Helically Symmetric Experiment (HSX), began operating in 1999. "W7-AS and HSX showed the idea works," says David Gates, head of stellarator physics at PPPL.

That success gave U.S. researchers confidence to try something bigger. PPPL began building the National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX) in 2004 using an optimization strategy different from IPP's. But the difficulty of assembling the intricately shaped parts with millimeter accuracy led to cost hikes and schedule slips. In 2008, with 80% of the major components either built or purchased, the Department of Energy pulled the plug on the project (Science, 30 May 2008, p. 1142). "We flat out underestimated the cost and the schedule," says PPPL's George "Hutch" Neilson, manager of NCSX.

Wendelstein 7-X's bizarrely shaped components must be put together with millimeter precision. All welding was computer controlled and monitored with laser scanners.

BACK IN GERMANY, the project to build W7-X was well underway. The government of the recently reunified country had given the green light in 1993 and 1994 and decided to establish a new branch institute at Greifswald, in former East Germany, to build the machine. Fifty staff members from IPP moved from Garching to Greifswald, 800 kilometers away, and others made frequent trips between the sites, says Klinger, director of the Greifswald branch. New hires brought staff numbers up to today's 400. W7-X was scheduled to start up in 2006 at a cost of €550 million.

But just like the ill-fated American NCSX, W7-X soon ran into problems. The machine has 425 tonnes of superconducting magnets and support structure that must be chilled close to absolute zero. Cooling the magnets with liquid helium is "hell on Earth," Klinger says. "All cold components must work, leaks are not possible, and access is poor" because of the twisted magnets. Among the weirdly shaped magnets, engineers must squeeze more than 250 ports to supply and remove fuel, heat the plasma, and give access for diagnostic instruments. Everything needs extremely complex 3D modeling. "It can only be done on computer," Klinger says. "You can't adapt anything on site."

By 2003, W7-X was in trouble. About a third of the magnets produced by industry failed in tests and had to be sent back. The forces acting on the reactor structure turned out to be greater than the team had calculated. "It would have broken apart," Klinger says. So construction of some major components had to be halted for redesigning. One magnet supplier went bankrupt. The years 2003 to 2007 were a "crisis time," Klinger says, and the project was "close to cancellation." But civil servants in the research ministry fought hard for the project; finally, the minister allowed it to go ahead with a cost ceiling of €1.06 billion and first plasma scheduled for 2015.

After 1.1 million construction hours, the Greifswald institute finished the machine in May 2014 and spent the past year carrying out commissioning checks, which W7-X passed without a hitch. Tests with electron beams show that the magnetic field in the still-empty reactor is the right shape. "Everything looks, to an extremely high accuracy, exactly as it should," IPP's Thomas Sunn Pedersen says.

Approval to go ahead is expected from Germany's nuclear regulators by the end of this month. The real test will come once W7-X is full of plasma and researchers finally see how it holds on to heat. The key measure is energy confinement time, the rate at which the plasma loses energy to the environment. "The world's waiting to see if we get the confinement time and then hold it for a long pulse," PPPL's Gates says.

Success could mean a course change for fusion. The next step after ITER is a yet-to-be-designed prototype power plant called DEMO. Most experts have assumed it would be some sort of tokamak, but now some are starting to speculate about a stellarator. "People are already talking about it," Gates says. "It depends how good the results are. If the results are positive, there'll be a lot of excitement."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The bizarre reactor that might save nuclear fusion

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If you've heard of fusion energy, you've probably heard of tokamaks. These doughnut-shaped devices are meant to cage ionized gases called plasmas in magnetic fields while heating them to the outlandish temperatures needed for hydrogen nuclei to fuse. Tokamaks are the workhorses of fusion-solid, symmetrical, and relatively straightforward to engineer-but progress with them has been plodding.

# data[].attributes.body
This video is about how magnets can be used in everyday life. Examples of these are in NASA. They also showed how rare earth magnets and ceramic magnets interact with the other materials. Lastly, they showed how magnets are permanent and some aren't permanent.

# data[].attributes.headline
1. How and why do magnets stick together.

# data[].attributes.subject
1. How and why do magnets stick together.

# data[].attributes.body
This article article shows and explains how and why magnets stick together. Additional information about field lines themselves are included. Graphs and models of field lines and magnets are also available.
http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-and-why-do-magnets-stick-together-101899

# data[].attributes.headline
17 Kool Things to do With Magnets Article 

# data[].attributes.subject
17 Kool Things to do With Magnets Article 

# data[].attributes.body
this article shows 17 kool and fun things to do with magnets that will also further your understanding of magnetic fields and how they work, as well as providing a physical model.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Here are seventeen of our favorite magnet tricks, projects and demos.

Extract batteries from stubborn holders
We've all got things that take batteries. Some of them are well designed, and some of them are not. The worst offenders are electronic toys that take (say) half a dozen AA batteries, all of which must be inserted with the correct orientation- spring side first- and pried out, well, somehow. Rather than risk puncturing your batteries by prying them out with something pointy, just use a magnet to lift them out.

Find studs in your walls

Move a magnet over the wall until it finds a screw or nail head under the paint. You don't even need to mark the wall- you can just leave the magnet there until you've drilled your holes.
Make a homopolar motor
One of our favorite demos of all time is a homopolar motor. A magnet, a wire, a battery and a screw are all you need to make a motor spin up to 10,000 rpm.

Make LED Throwies
LED throwies are useful for many more things than graffiti. We've made variations from garden lights to origami to greeting cards, but it's not a real throwie without a magnet.

Demonstrate magnetohydrodynamic propulsion

You can make your very own caterpillar drive like the one in The Hunt for Red October with this magnetohydrodynamic demonstration.

Play with the coolest toy ever: 512 1/8″ cube magnets
Available from K&J Magnetics, this is enough magnets to really have some fun. More magnet sources are in our links section.
Make a simple compass Make almost anything (ferromagnetic) into a building set
We've previously shown how to make stupidly simple compasses that float on water or spin on a smooth surface. Here's another method: sandwich a thread between two very strong magnets and hang it down for an instant compass.

Experiment with self assembly
In a process that is a lot like assembly of biological molecules or crystal formation, randomly ordered magnets can almost automagically form themselves into neat chains. Here are some magnetic self assembly videos.

With magnets as connectors, you can build tins into anything you like. (Just be sure to get Bawls Mints, not Bawls Buzz).

Make a Curie motor
A Curie motor uses heat to demagnetize an area of a magnet, causing it to move away from the heat where the cycle starts again. On BoingBoingTV, Mark Frauenfelder shows you how to build one with a candle, a wire and a couple of magnets.

Freaking awesome chip clips
Make a fridge pen
Fold over the open top of the bag and put magnets on either side to hold it closed.

Play with eddy current damping
Drop a magnet down an aluminum or copper tube, and you'll see a hovering slow fall caused by eddy current damping. Here's a quick video.

Slip a small magnet underneath the metal clip on a pen (these uniballs are our favorite) and you can keep a pen handy on the fridge for your shopping list and phone messages.

Defeat magnetic safety interlocks
All kinds of cool industrial machines from photocopiers to deep fat fryers have magnetic safety interlocks to prevent the machine from working with the cover open. Whenever you see a magnet attached to a hinge, it's there to protect you. So if you ever want to do something ridiculously dangerous like laser engrave your fingernails, you'll need magnets to disable the magnetic interlocks.

Make anything into a fridge magnet
We like to make unusual things into fridge magnets. And this trick has occasionally fooled folks into trying to open our fridge magnets to look for candy.

Demonstrate diamagnetic levitation
By placing diamagnetic material (such as bismuth or graphite) between a large magnet and a small one, you can levitate the small one. Detailed instructions and links to kits for this are on Bill Beaty's site, amasci.com.

Wake up your laptop or put it to sleep
Many laptops have a magnetic switch that tells the computer to go to sleep when the lid closes. Older Macs could be fooled into going to sleep with their lids up by waving a magnet by the upper right hand corner of the lid. Newer Macs can be fooled by resting a magnet on the switch on the right hand side of the keyboard. Caution: don't put a magnet near your hard drive!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Here are seventeen of our favorite magnet tricks, projects and demos. Extract batteries from stubborn holders We've all got things that take batteries. Some of them are well designed, and some of them are not.

# data[].attributes.headline
2. Article- Ways Magnets can change our lives in the future

# data[].attributes.subject
2. Article- Ways Magnets can change our lives in the future

# data[].attributes.body
This article explains of the futuristic ideas that will help our lives to make live easier and safer. There are magnetic trains, hover boards, cancer detecting pills, Concussion proof Football helmets, controlling sound and heat and sound, and self-driving cars. All of these will help us to make life better. Some are for medical purposes. These designs have potential to make a great and awesome future.
https://gizmodo.com/6-ways-that-magnets-are-about-to-change-our-lives-1722803538

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Magnets. You already know what they are and everything about them. Or do you? Magnets are crucial to many more emerging technologies than you might expect. The tried-and-true magnet is about to change everything-from how we drive and treat cancer to how we play sports.

1. Maglev Trains
Lightning-fast trains that hover using magnets, like this one in Japan seen in 2010, are positioned to be the next major transportation breakthrough. Credit: Getty
Earlier this year, Japan broke a world speed record for a train: 366 miles an hour. How'd they do it? Magnets, of course.

Japan used a maglev train: a special type of high-speed train that nixes wheels for magnets. How do magnets help trains go faster? It's pretty simple: Friction is totally eliminated. The trains hover above the rails, wheel-free, and are pulled along at nutso speeds using electromagnets.

Here's how Japan's Guinness-worthy using the classic principle of magnetic repulsion. The forces being repelled from one another are the train's onboard superconducting magnets and magnetic coils in the sides of the surrounding guide rails. These opposing forces with alternating north and south poles create a push-and-pull effect that propel it forward.

Also built into the guide rails are more coils that become electromagnets as those superconducting magnets aboard the train pass through. This creates a second push-and-pull force that lifts the train a few inches off the ground. (Those guide rails that cradle Japan's maglev are U-shaped to prevent derailments.)

Thanks to this simple notion in magnets and physics, maglev trains are greener, faster, quieter, and deliver smoother rides than traditional trains.

High-speed rail has existed in developed countries the world over for decades, but these blink-and-you'll-miss-'em maglev models mark the next stage of train evolution. In fact, when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the US earlier this year on a diplomatic trip, he said he wants the Japanese government to help build a maglev train linking Baltimore and Washington, DC. Since magnets mean big infrastructural projects, they mean big business, too.

Countries 'round the globe have all started pursuing this new transportation tech, as well. Shanghai's been running a maglev in China for over a decade, and Seoul's Incheon Airport will sport a smaller scale maglev train starting this summer.

2. Hoverboards
The Hendo Hoverboard by Arx Pax is shown here in 2014. It's a commercial hoverboard that uses magnets to float about an inch from terra firma. Credit: AP
As 2015 drew nearer, people started demanding a Back to the Future 2-style hoverboard-and now, companies are actually attempting to deliver. Will they bring a McFly-approved mode of futuristic transport to consumers? They've actually taken big steps toward doing so, with the help of magnets.

Earlier this month, debuted its hoverboard Slide (which tested), achieving what was thought to be unachievable: Though heavy and unwieldy, it was a ridable, skateboard-like object that actually floated an inch off the ground. Lexus the board as "assembling maglev technology onto a board." Gizmodo tested another hoverboard using similar maglev technology called .

The body of Lexus's board contains superconductors surrounded by liquid hydrogen reservoirs that plummet the superconductors to -322 degrees Fahrenheit, plus two magnets on each end of the board. The board is placed on a floor with magnets built into it, and lifts the board in a similar way to a maglev train.

Don't get us wrong; there's still plenty to be skeptical of. These boards are hard to navigate, can only hover under certain conditions, and the battery in the one we tried died lickety split. But, as is the case with those supertrains popping up across the planet, magnets mean big things for tomorrow's transportation-not to mention tomorrow's toys.

3. Cancer-detecting Pills
Pathologists, like this one examining biopsy samples, might one day be able to harness the power of magnetic fields to help fight cancer cells in humans. Credit: Shutterstock
Emerging technologies often seem like moonshots at first, and Google X's arsenal of out-there projects is no exception. One in particular uses magnets in a really cool, surprising way: Stick 'em in small to sniff out deadly diseases in the human body.

How does it work? The answer lies in magnetic nanoparticles-ridiculously small particles containing a harmless magnetic material that would attach themselves to circulating cancer cells in a patient's bloodstream. Google wants to develop a swallowable tablet filled with these nanoparticles that would, upon consumption, cruise the user's bloodstream in search for cancerous cells. Those findings would be relayed back to a wearable sensor on the wrist, where the magnetized, cancer-detecting nanoparticles would gather. This would help doctors find cancer early in patients.

Other folks have pursued magnets as cancer-busting super weapons, as well. In , South Korean researchers said they came up with a way to use a magnetic field to actually destroy cancerous cells. That's advantageous to chemo, they said, since chemotherapy can also inadvertently harm noncancerous cells in the body.

4. Concussion-proof Football Helmets
Denver Broncos strong safety David Bruton being treated for suspected concussion late last year in a match against the Oakland Raiders. Credit: Getty
Magnet technology is even sneaking its way into sports. By using magnets in protective gear in American football, the industry could better prevent concussions and other serious head injuries among its players.

Football used to be straight up deadly, as Science last November. When those soft, leather helmets of yore were swapped for polycarbonate helmet shells, the number of fatalities went way down. Still, America's most-watched sport has been under intense fire recently, and rightfully so: Last year, 123 concussions were in the NFL, most of them incurred by defensive players. Now, football helmets might be on the verge of another design revolution.

Hard helmets protect skulls, but still leave brains vulnerable to injury since they just float in cerebral spinal fluid. But Raymond Colello, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, asserts that adding lightweight magnets to the front and sides of all football helmets could act as "brakes" in head-to-head collisions, Science reports. As two players approach either mid-tackle, the magnetized helmets slightly repel each other, decreasing the g-forces that would hit each player's head in the collision.

Of course, this only safeguards against noggin-to-noggin traumas, not noggin-to-knee, say. But Colello's plan could provide technology that might significantly reduce the overall number of concussions sustained among players in an incredibly dangerous sport.

5. Controlling Heat and Sound
This year, scientists proved magnets can manipulate the amount of heat traveling through a semiconductor. Credit: The Ohio State University
It sounds like an X-Men subplot, but scientists recently showed that magnetic fields can be used manipulate heat and sound.

Researchers at the Ohio State University earlier this year that they can control heat with magnetic fields. But their discovery affects sound, too. They examined the magnetic properties of phonons, which are particles that transmit both sound and heat. Using an MRI-sized magnetic field, they controlled the behavior of phonons and lowered the amount of heat that flowed through a semiconductor by 12 percent. Their work is a big deal because it shows that magnetic fields can manipulate heat in materials that aren't traditionally magnetic, like glass, plastic, or stone. Currently, however, doing so requires a big-ass magnet.

The team also said they could direct sound waves magnetically-again, if the magnetic field was sizable enough.

Until now, phonons weren't as extensively studied as say, photons. But their heat and sound both involve atoms vibrating-expressions of the same form of quantum mechanic energy, the university says. The university admits that this discovery is still largely bound to labs. The experiment used a 7-tesla magnet, which aren't exactly growing on trees out in the real world, and also involved chilling the phonons to near absolute zero in order to slow their movement for study. (Hoverboard and maglev trains need wicked cold temperatures to activate magnets' potential, as well.)

Still, it's a big discovery that could make scientists seriously reevaluate the way they look at and study phonons. Using magnetic fields to steer heat and sound could open a lot of doors in energy production down the road.

6. Roads for Self-Driving Cars
Volvo announced last year plans to use magnets that can help align self-driving cars on the road. Credit: Volvo
Driverless vehicles are currently the hottest race among tech companies, auto companies, and startups of all stripes. And it's becoming a more crowded arena all the time. But given how accident-prone these human-free chariots might be, we need to make sure our highways are ready for their widespread arrival. Again: cue the magnets.

Volvo last year that it had completed a research project that showed the advantages of implanting magnetic sensors in streets. These could serve as "tracks" to help guide the company's self-driving cars. These magnets have an edge over other technologies, like GPS, which might fuzz out in certain conditions and can sometimes be unreliable.

Plus, we've still yet to fully understand how self-driving cars perform in adverse conditions like rain or snow. But Volvo says these magnets can help driverless cars navigate that kind of gross weather, too. While self-driving cars can function without these magnet-embedded super streets, they would provide a nice complement.

Of course, they also present a colossal infrastructural challenge: Like the Slide hoverboard, Volvo's plan involves specially designed tracks that would be ready for the vehicle ahead of time. Having to totally revamp the roads-and build some from scratch-might make the technology way more trouble than it's worth.

You can see the challenges that many of these magnet-oriented technologies face going forward: Idiosyncratic infrastructure, monstrously low temperatures, and other tricky requirements must be met in order for magnets to work this kind of magic.

But, like all emerging technologies, once these projects gradually start to leave the lab and approach commercialization, we'll see humans unlocking magnets' potential in a ton of sectors, from sports to medicine and, especially, to transportation.

The most familiar tools can sometimes yield the most astonishing results. The future has big plans for magnets, and they go way beyond your fridge door.
Image by Jim Cooke

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
6 Ways That Magnets Are About to Change Our Lives

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Magnets. You already know what they are and everything about them. Or do you? Magnets are crucial to many more emerging technologies than you might expect. The tried-and-true magnet is about to change everything-from how we drive and treat cancer to how we play sports.

# data[].attributes.headline
1. Website -Daniel Lathrop is creating Earth's magnetic Core... In a lab. 

# data[].attributes.subject
1. Website -Daniel Lathrop is creating Earth's magnetic Core... In a lab. 

# data[].attributes.body
Daniel Lathrop created a model of earth's magnetic core in his lab. His goal is to study the Earth's magnetic field and how is effected by different conditions. e studies the effects of rotation, quantum effects, and magnetic fields.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Home | Dan Lathrop's Nonlinear Dynamics Lab

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nonlinear Dynamics Lab is dedicated in studying turbulence using experiments and theory. Research includes fluid mechanics, dynamics of superfluid helium, dynamo, laboratory models of planetary cores, and chaos in nonlinear circuits.

# data[].attributes.body
This new york time article says that we can find an ocean on a different planet by the strength of their magnetic field. Measuring the strength of a magnetic field (or a moon revolving around a planet, in this case) can show that a planet has a ocean, because sometimes, the only explanation of a magnetic field is a saltwater ocean beneath the surface.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Profiles in Science

For forty years, the physicist at U.C.L.A. has been uncovering the outer solar system's secrets. Few scientists know more about the mysteries of Jupiter and its icy moons.

Image

Margaret Kivelson in her office at the University of California, Los Angeles. Credit Credit Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES - The data was like nothing Margaret Kivelson and her team of physicists ever expected.

It was December 1996, and the spacecraft Galileo had just flown by Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter. The readings beamed back to Earth suggested a magnetic field emanating from the moon. Europa should not have had a magnetic field, yet there it was - and not even pointed in the right direction.

"This is unexpected," she recalled saying as the weird data rolled in. "And that's wonderful."

It would be the most significant of a series of surprises from the Jovian moons. For Dr. Kivelson's team, the mission should not have been this exciting.

She and her colleagues had devised the magnetometer returning the anomalous data. The instrument's job was to measure Jupiter's massive magnetic field and any variations caused by its moons. Those findings were likely to interest space physicists, but few others. Dr. Kivelson's instrument was never supposed to change the course of space exploration.

And then it did. Dr. Kivelson and her team would soon prove that they had discovered the first subsurface, saltwater ocean on an alien world.

Image

Dr. Kivelson, who will turn 90 this month, is professor emerita of space physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. For forty years she has been an active part of almost every major NASA voyage beyond the asteroid belt. She has a wry sense of humor, and her modesty belies the magnitude of her scientific achievements.

Her team transformed the way magnetometers are used on space missions, making them an essential tool of discovery. Having established, essentially, the art of ocean detection, the outer solar system is now a hot zone in the search for habitability.

Most recently, Dr. Kivelson is a co-investigator working on the plasma instrument for the Europa Clipper, NASA's next great voyage to the outer solar system. Scheduled to launch as early as 2022, the spacecraft will study the habitability of Jupiter's ocean moon. Her work will help answer whether life could be there by determining the ocean's depth and salinity, and the thickness of the ice shell above it.

But the story started with Galileo's unusual encounters with Jupiter's moons. Inscrutable Europa, it turned out, had its own way of doing things.

"We came up with a lot of wrong ideas," said Dr. Kivelson. Years after the first flyby, however, they found their answer.

Dr. Kivelson was born in New York City. Her father was a physician. Her mother was a schoolteacher. Margy, as her friends call her, excelled in mathematics at an early age.

"I liked it," she said. "I thought it was one of the easier subjects, and I knew that opinion was not common."

She graduated and was accepted to Harvard, which formally excluded women, consigning them officially to Radcliffe College - a separate school without a faculty. Harvard professors would walk across the commons to repeat their lectures to women. "Women were not invited into the Harvard classrooms," she said.

It was there that she found physics, which allowed her to use math in such a way that answers had to make physical sense.
[Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar.]
"I had the good fortune of starting my studies at a time when physics was regarded as the most exciting field. This was right after World War II," she said. "Physicists had saved the world with the atom bomb and radar. And suddenly people noticed that physics was not only a wonderfully fundamental discipline, but that it was also useful."

By her sophomore year, there were no separate classes. In the wonderland of the atomic age, physics professors no longer had time to repeat their lectures. "It was ridiculous to lecture to 10 women for one hour and then to 400 men the next," she said.

Not that the situation suddenly improved for Harvard women. When she entered the physics graduate program, she was often the only woman in her classes.

In 1955, she joined the RAND Corporation, a firm founded to provide research to the Defense Department, including nuclear weapons research. She was assigned to work on an equation describing the state of hydrogen at a pressure equivalent to one million Earth atmospheres.

"There are two places where you run into that kind of pressure in hydrogen," she said. "One of them is in a hydrogen bomb, and the other is at the center of Jupiter."

Her background in theoretical physics and eventual expertise in celestial science brought her to U.C.L.A. in 1967. Her RAND research made her the local expert on Jupiter, and she soon became well known in space physics for her theoretical work on some of the most fundamental ideas in the field.

Following the Voyager spacecraft's encounter with Jupiter in 1979, scientists at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco debated how the moon Io could drive a mysterious million-amp current between itself and Jupiter.

Dr. Fran Bagenal, professor emerita of planetary science at the University of Colorado, recalled Dr. Kivelson's contributions to that debate.

"This small, diminutive woman - who was not officially on the Voyager team, but writing papers and thinking about the problem - walks into the room, walks to the podium, pulls down the microphone so she could be heard and speaks her case, and shatters everyone's ideas in the room," Dr. Bagenal said of the scene at the conference.

"She ended up being correct in the end," Dr. Bagenal added. "She was not to be argued with. She knew her stuff."

When NASA announced what would become the Galileo mission to Jupiter, Dr. Kivelson was well positioned to propose a magnetometer.

"I was very immersed in the science that was already available related to Jupiter's magnetic field and particle environment," she said.

As the proposal deadline neared, she spent weeks working each day until midnight. When her instrument was chosen, "the champagne came out," she said. "Everybody was really thrilled."

Galileo entered orbit around Jupiter in 1995. The first major discovery by Dr. Kivelson and her team was an internal magnetic field on Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon.

Dr. Carol Paty, an associate professor of earth sciences at the University of Oregon, said nobody really expected an object so small and cold to have the chemistry, thermodynamics and interior structure necessary to create its own magnetic field.

"Its discovery reshaped the scientific understanding of the inner workings of planetary bodies," she said.

Then came the series of encounters between Europa and Galileo.

Geologists had suspected that the icy moon once had a subsurface ocean, but could not say whether it still existed or had frozen solid long ago. That would still be a mystery were it not for the anomalous data received by the Galileo magnetometer.

Something strange was happening, and Dr. Kivelson and her vexed team worked out several ways of explaining it. That's when they came on the idea that Europa's magnetic field was being induced by Jupiter.

"It is the same principle governing the metal detector at an airport," said Dr. Krishan Khurana, a geophysicist at U.C.L.A. who was part of the ocean's discovery.

When you walk through the gate, a metal detector produces a high-frequency magnetic wave. If there is a key in your pocket, the wave causes a current to flow through the key, which in turn generates a little magnetic field of its own. This induced magnetic field is what triggers the metal detector.

How it might work on a Jovian scale: As Europa moves through Jupiter's magnetic field, a current courses through a subsurface conductor of some sort on the moon, creating a miniature magnetic field flipped to oppose the field of Jupiter. This, in effect, set off the Galileo metal detector.

The hypothesis was not conclusive, however. It was possible that Europa had its own odd, intrinsic magnetic field, which only happened to be oriented opposite to Jupiter's.

Because Jupiter's magnetic equator (as opposed to its geographic equator) is tilted by 10 degrees, sometimes Europa is above it, and sometimes below it. What the magnetometer team needed were measurements when Europa was on the other side of the tilt.

If the moon's magnetic field changed directions, that would mean the field was induced by Jupiter - and therefore possessed an internal conductor. The only thing that would fit the bill would be a subsurface, saltwater ocean.

Dr. Kivelson made the case to the Galileo project for a flyby of Europa at a specific orientation - no small request given a spacecraft with limited resources flying on borrowed time. She prevailed, and the flyby in January 2000 found precisely what models made by her team had predicted: definitive evidence of a global ocean.

"It's one of the most fundamental discoveries ever in planetary science," said Dr. Louise Prockter, the director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. "It spawned a revolution, really."

Dr. Robert Pappalardo, the project scientist of NASA's pending Europa Clipper mission said the discovery had ramifications not only for Europa but for the entire solar system.

"It really swung the pendulum toward the plausibility of oceans in icy worlds," he said. "We went pretty quickly from 'maybe' to 'almost certainly'to 'where else? 'That was a pretty quick transition, considering the term 'ocean world' didn't even exist back then. Now it's a class of objects, thanks to Margy's fundamental work."

Dr. Kivelson is not finished unlocking the secrets of Jupiter.

In addition to her work on the upcoming Europa Clipper, she is contributing to the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission, expected to launch in 2022. And her own research focuses on a longstanding puzzle in the gas giant's magnetosphere related to the mysterious heating of plasma as it diffuses outward from Io.

She still works in her office each day and hosts a weekly dinner and meeting on Wednesday nights at U.C.L.A. for graduate students and faculty, a tradition she started 33 years ago.

Attendees share their current research and discuss the latest advances in space physics. The reviews of one another's work can be rollicking - sharp and animated, but not heated or antagonistic. Participants spend hours critiquing equations and models projected onto a white screen. When challenged, they take to a blackboard, leaving behind a chalky mélange of exponents, cosines and the Greek alphabet.

When laptops lining the table fail them, the scientists dash to their offices to pull out fifty-year-old textbooks to win one point or another. Humor punctuates disagreements, and attendees pass chocolate around the table as they work.

At a recent session, Steve Tomlinson, a graduate student, faced constant questioning from nine physicists as he presented research on structures in the sun's coronal mass ejections.

Dr. Kivelson was in the thick of it, probing for answers and deeper reflection, her questions leading Mr. Tomlinson to better explain his work.

"It looks as if you have a very nice set of problems here," said Dr. Kivelson, content with what she had seen after an hour of inquiry and ready for the next presentation.

Credit Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Do You Find an Alien Ocean? Margaret Kivelson Figured It Out

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Profiles in Science For forty years, the physicist at U.C.L.A. has been uncovering the outer solar system's secrets. Few scientists know more about the mysteries of Jupiter and its icy moons. LOS ANGELES - The data was like nothing Margaret Kivelson and her team of physicists ever expected.

# data[].attributes.body
This article talks about how the neurons in the brain generates electrical currents. These electrical currents can produce magnetic fields. They tested this by putting gadgets to detect magnetic field in the brain or the scalp. How ever the magnetic field was so weak so they needed gadgets that could detect even the slightest fields.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
© GEORGE RETSECK

The brain is often described in terms of its wiring, connections, and circuits, and such language is not merely an analogy to a building's electrical infrastructure. Neurons control the flow of charged ions-receiving, perpetuating, and discharging currents-to perform their essential functions.

Analyzing the brain's electrical activity to gain insights into its function can be achieved with electrodes either placed upon the scalp-as in electroencephalograms (EEGs)-or inserted into the brain. But electrical currents also produce magnetic fields, and detecting these fields can offer several advantages over voltage measurements, says Myriam Pannetier-Lecoeur of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission.

For example, while electrical fields and voltage measurements are distorted by the insulating or conductive properties of surrounding tissues, magnetic fields are not. Furthermore, electrodes are unable to detect the direction of an electrical current flow, making the source of neuronal activity hard to pinpoint. Magnetic sensors, on the other hand, can determine both the intensity and direction of a magnetic field and, by inference, the underlying current flow. Lastly, for measuring voltages, a second reference electrode is required, which can complicate interpretations, whereas magnetic recordings need just one detector.

Like voltages, however, magnetic fields become weaker the farther away a detector is located, explains Pannetier-Lecoeur. So she and her colleagues have developed the first magnetic probe for insertion directly into the mammalian brain.

To create magnetic detectors small enough to insert into the brain, yet powerful enough to detect magnetic fields, the team used a new technological approach called spin electronics. This allowed them to engineer needle-shape probes just 150 µm wide-an impossibility with previous magnetic sensor technologies. Inserting these probes, called magnetrodes, into the visual cortex of anesthetized cats, the researchers could monitor the brain's magnetic activity in response to light stimulation of one eye.

Although the signal-to-noise ratio of Pannetier-Lecoeur's magnetrodes isn't yet perfect, notes Lauri Parkkonen of Aalto University in Helsinki who was not involved in the work, "spin electronics is a field that is advancing rapidly," so improvement in sensitivity "I think is likely."

Riitta Hari, also of Aalto University, adds: "This is an interesting proof-of-concept paper . . . that can open a new important research line in neurophysiology." (Neuron, 95:1283-91, 2017)

IN-BRAIN ACTIVITY DETECTOR

HOW IT WORKS

LOCALIZATION OF ACTIVITY SOURCE

IN VIVO SIGNAL DISTORTION

SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS

Electrodes

Two electrodes (one signal and one reference) are needed, at least one of them inserted into the cortex. The difference in voltage between the two is measured.

Multiple electrodes (with
their reference electrodes)
can improve mapping of
the activity source.

Yes, the properties of nearby tissues can interfere with the signal.

None

Magnetrode

One magnetrode is inserted into the cortex to measure the intesity and orientation of the magnetic field.

Multiple magnetrodes can be used to accurately pinpoint the activity source.

No, magnetic fields are not distorted by tissues.

To improve magnetrode sensitivity a magnetically shielded area would be required, which may be costly to construct.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Implanted Magnetic Probes Measure Brain Activity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
© GEORGE RETSECK The brain is often described in terms of its wiring, connections, and circuits, and such language is not merely an analogy to a building's electrical infrastructure. Neurons control the flow of charged ions-receiving, perpetuating, and discharging currents-to perform their essential functions.

# data[].attributes.body
This article shows 17 cool and fun tricks to further and extend your understanding magnets, and also provides a hands on model of magnetic functions and abilities.

# data[].attributes.body
This video shows you 9 tricks you can do on magnets. The video includes gadgets such as a slow fall ball, hover pen, etc. Usually magnets are portrayed as boring things you only use for experiments, but this video shows that magnets can actually be fun.

# data[].attributes.body
This is an article that covers the ground-breaking news that the cosmic jets of black holes might be related to magnetic fields accelerating high-speed particles. When a magnetic field line is highly distorted and tangled with other field lines, it creates a significant electric field which accelerates the particles and creates the cosmic jets. Enjoy!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Menlo Park, Calif. - Magnetic field lines tangled like spaghetti in a bowl might be behind the most powerful particle accelerators in the universe. That's the result of a new computational study by researchers from the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which simulated particle emissions from distant active galaxies.

At the core of these active galaxies, supermassive black holes launch high-speed jets of plasma - a hot, ionized gas - that shoot millions of light years into space. This process may be the source of cosmic rays with energies tens of millions of times higher than the energy unleashed in the most powerful manmade particle accelerator.

"The mechanism that creates these extreme particle energies isn't known yet," said SLAC staff scientist Frederico Fiúza, the principal investigator of a new study published in Physical Review Letters. "But based on our simulations, we're able to propose a new mechanism that can potentially explain how these cosmic particle accelerators work."

The results could also have implications for plasma and nuclear fusion research and the development of novel high-energy particle accelerators.

Simulating cosmic jets

Researchers have long been fascinated by the violent processes that boost the energy of cosmic particles. For example, they've gathered evidence that shock waves from powerful star explosions could bring particles up to speed and send them across the universe.

Scientists have also suggested that the main driving force for cosmic plasma jets could be magnetic energy released when magnetic field lines in plasmas break and reconnect in a different way - a process known as "magnetic reconnection."

However, the new study suggests a different mechanism that's tied to the disruption of the helical magnetic field generated by the supermassive black hole spinning at the center of active galaxies.

"We knew that these fields can become unstable," said lead author Paulo Alves, a research associate working with Fiúza. "But what exactly happens when the magnetic fields become distorted, and could this process explain how particles gain tremendous energy in these jets? That's what we wanted to find out in our study."

To do so, the researchers simulated the motions of up to 550 billion particles - a miniature version of a cosmic jet - on the Mira supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory. Then, they scaled up their results to cosmic dimensions and compared them to astrophysical observations.

From tangled field lines to high-energy particles

The simulations showed that when the helical magnetic field is strongly distorted, the magnetic field lines become highly tangled and a large electric field is produced inside the jet. This arrangement of electric and magnetic fields can, indeed, efficiently accelerate electrons and protons to extreme energies. While high-energy electrons radiate their energy away in the form of X-rays and gamma rays, protons can escape the jet into space and reach the Earth's atmosphere as cosmic radiation.

"We see that a large portion of the magnetic energy released in the process goes into high-energy particles, and the acceleration mechanism can explain both the high-energy radiation coming from active galaxies and the highest cosmic-ray energies observed," Alves said.

Roger Blandford, an expert in black hole physics and former director of the SLAC/Stanford University Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), who was not involved in the study, said, "This careful analysis identifies many surprising details of what happens under conditions thought to be present in distant jets, and may help explain some remarkable astrophysical observations."

Next, the researchers want to connect their work even more firmly with actual observations, for example by studying what makes the radiation from cosmic jets vary rapidly over time. They also intend to do lab research to determine if the same mechanism proposed in this study could also cause disruptions and particle acceleration in fusion plasmas.

This work was also co-authored by Jonathan Zrake, a former Kavli Fellow at KIPAC, who is now at Columbia University. The project was supported by the DOE Office of Science through its Early Career Research Program and an ALCC award for simulations on the Mira high-performance computer. ALCF is a DOE Office of Science user facility.
-Written by Manuel Gnida
Citation: E. P. Alves, J. Zrake and Frederico Fiúza, Physical Review Letters, 14 December 2018 ( 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.245101).

Andrew Gordon, Press Office Contact: agordon@slac.stanford.edu, (650) 926-2282
SLAC is a multi-program laboratory exploring frontier questions in photon science, astrophysics, particle physics and accelerator research. Located in Menlo Park, California, SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. To learn more, please visit SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov. www.slac.stanford.edu.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
high energy density science division (heds)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
kavli institute for particle astrophysics & cosmology (kipac)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tangled magnetic fields power cosmic particle accelerators

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Menlo Park, Calif. - Magnetic field lines tangled like spaghetti in a bowl might be behind the most powerful particle accelerators in the universe. That's the result of a new computational study by researchers from the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which simulated particle emissions from distant active galaxies.

# data[].attributes.body
This is an article that describes what exactly will happen when Earth's magnetic fields finally 🤬. It explains that the 🤬 would not affect us, and we will live. It also explains what the affects will be on Earth. Make sure to check it out-it's really cool

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Many times over our planet's history, Earth's magnetic poles have reversed, meaning that sometimes a compass pointing north will be aimed at Antarctica rather than the Arctic. This might sound strange, but it's a relatively predictable quirk. Powered by the machinations of the planet's spinning iron core, this process of geomagnetic reversal has been doing its thing without much fanfare for eons.

That is, until this week, when a book excerpt describing the phenomenon appeared online. Shortly afterward, numerous websites began trumpeting the doomsday around the corner, a geomagnetic apocalypse in which tumors run rampant, satellites fall from the sky, and life on Earth will cease to exist as we know it.

True, life on Earth almost certainly will be different than it is today in multiple thousands of years. But will these polar acrobatics have much to do with that?
First thing's first: Are we all going to die?
Yes.

We are all going to die, eventually. But chances are that we will not immediately-or even proximally-perish when Earth's next geomagnetic reversal occurs.
Fine. So what is a geomagnetic reversal?
If geologic history repeats itself, Earth's magnetic poles should eventually swap places. This much is undeniable. Based on the magnetic fingerprints locked into ancient rocks, we know that over the last 20 million years, magnetic north and south have flipped roughly every 200,000 to 300,000 years (this rate has not been constant over the planet's lifetime, though). The last of these major reversals occurred about 780,000 years ago, although the Poles do wander around in between these larger flips. (What's more, climate change seems to be shifting Earth's geographic poles.)

That means we're a bit overdue for a total reversal, and some data do, in fact, suggest that a geomagnetic reversal is geologically imminent. But this does not mean a polar flip-flop is going to happen tomorrow, or even any time soon, and we'd put good money on North still being in the Arctic for a while-although neither we nor anyone else knows when the next total reversal will actually happen.
OK. But if it happens soon, won't that be bad?
Also unclear. Scientists estimate that past polar flips have been rather sluggish, with north and south migrating to opposite positions over thousands of years. This is both good and bad if you're concerned about how a geomagnetic reversal will affect life on Earth.

The sluggish polar meander is good, because it means we have time to prepare and can do our best to ameliorate any unpleasant effects before they get really unpleasant. But it's bad, because our planet's magnetic field helps shield us from damaging solar and cosmic radiation, and a protracted flip means Earth might be slightly less protected from harmful space rays for longer than we would like.

It's also not very dramatic, because it means you won't suddenly wake up and find out that your smartphone thinks Santa's workshop is in the Southern Hemisphere.
Bummer, that sounds boring. So what will we actually notice?
The only major, noticeable effect that's guaranteed to occur when the polar flop is finished is that your compass needle will tell you that North is in Antarctica and South is somewhere near Canada. This will make the names of the American continents temporarily confusing (at least, on a geologic time scale) but it'll make for a good story in classrooms.

Another interesting consequence will be that animals that use Earth's magnetic field for navigation-including birds, salmon, and sea turtles -could get lost during their routine journeys. Eventually they will sort this out, and all other things being equal, life will go on. Lots of doomsday prophets have tried to equate geomagnetic flips with mass extinctions, but the data just aren't there.
So there's nothing at all to worry about?
Not exactly. It's true that when the poles do reverse, Earth's magnetic field could get weaker-but its strength is already quite variable, so that's not necessarily unusual, and there's no indication it will vanish entirely, according to NASA. Why? Because it never has.

However, if the magnetic field gets substantially weaker and stays that way for an appreciable amount of time Earth will be less protected from the oodles of high-energy particles that are constantly flying around in space. This means that everything on the planet will be exposed to higher levels of radiation, which over time could produce an increase in diseases like cancer, as well as harm delicate spacecraft and power grids on Earth.

These are consequences we can prepare for, and as far as everything below the stratosphere goes, we'll have a nice, thick atmosphere that can also help act as a shield.

For now, we're doing a decent job of introducing carcinogenic toxins to the environment and otherwise altering the ways in which ecosystems normally function, so there are bigger things to worry about in the short term.

That being said, one total bonus of having a weaker magnetic field is that auroras will be visible from much lower latitudes, so the nighttime skies will be even more epic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
No, We're Not All Doomed by Earth's Magnetic Field Flip

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Many times over our planet's history, Earth's magnetic poles have reversed, meaning that sometimes a compass pointing north will be aimed at Antarctica rather than the Arctic. This might sound strange, but it's a relatively predictable quirk. Powered by the machinations of the planet's spinning iron core, this process of geomagnetic reversal has been doing its thing without much fanfare for eons.

# data[].attributes.body
This is an article is about how migrating Salmon uses magnetic fields as a navigation tool. The Salmon uses a magnetic mental map as a GPS. It also includes research from Oregon University whether they were born with the ability or not.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How do young, naive salmon with no migratory experience somehow voyage through vast, shifting ocean waters to wind up at specific feeding grounds that are hundreds, even thousands, of kilometers away from the rivers where they were hatched? It turns out these fish may have a magnetic 'map' in their heads that enables them to sense and navigate using the Earth's magnetic fields rather like a GPS.

The findings, published in Current Biology, "likely explain the extraordinary navigational abilities evident in many long-distance underwater migrants," the study authors wrote.

Researchers have long suspected that many animals that travel incredibly great distances to wind up at very particular spots visited by their ancestors must be able to sense magnetic fields. The ability has since been found in a variety of animals, including migratory birds and pooping dogs. Even more remarkable is that many animals seem to use it to navigate with no previous experience, like the Chinook salmon (known formally as Oncorhynchus tshawytscha).

The scientists wondered if the salmon were using Earth's magnetic field the way that sea turtles have been shown to do: like a GPS, to figure out not just which way to point, but also where exactly they are and where they need to go, like a magnetic mental map.

That ability relies on knowing two separate characteristics of the magnetic field at any given point: the inclination and the intensity. Because both of these vary depending on where you are on the globe, by combining the two you can get a pretty good sense of your position.

To figure out whether salmon are also born packing this kind of internal cartography, the research, led out of Oregon State University, tested the abilities of young Chinook salmon that were less than 1 year old and hadn't yet started their seaward journey.

They put the young fish in barrels surrounded with magnetic coils and exposed them to a simulation of the northern magnetic field, both in the strength and the inclination angle. In response, the salmon turned south-southwest. When they exposed them to a simulation of the southern magnetic field, the salmon turned north-northeast.

But how could the researchers be sure that the salmon were using both the magnetic field intensity and inclination in their mental maps? The scientists tested this by exposing them to mixed-up magnetic fields -- a northern intensity with a southern inclination, and a southern intensity with the northern inclination. Sure enough, the fish didn't point anywhere in particular, probably because these made-up "coordinates" made no sense -- they didn't fit anywhere in the salmon's mental magnetic map.

Chinook salmon have a complex life cycle: They hatch in freshwater rivers but migrate out to the ocean and spend several years foraging; their diet ranges broadly, from kelp to jellyfish. Then they buy a one-way ticket home, returning to spawn in freshwater near where they hatched, and die after the breeding season.

So having this kind of complex magnetic sense, hard-coded into the genes, may be vital for their survival, the scientists wrote -- particularly because they and other marine animals face even more challenges than terrestrial travelers. Even if winds blow birds off course, for example, they can adjust by using the ground as a reference point -- and they can land when they're tired. In the vast dark waters of the ocean crisscrossed by overwhelming currents, fish and other long-distance swimmers have no such luxuries.

That's probably why this ability has appeared in animals as different as turtles and fish, they wrote -- and it's likely to appear in other marine members of the animal kingdom as well.

"Given that these salmon make their oceanic migration only once, to locations where they have never been, and without the benefit of following experienced migrants, a navigation system based on inherited instructions is likely to be highly adaptive and possibly necessary," the authors wrote.
ALSO: Do dogs sense magnetic fields when they poop? Success! Mars rover Curiosity rides Dingo Gap down biggest sand dune yet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Genetic GPS? Migrating Chinook salmon use hardwired 'magnetic map'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How do young, naive salmon with no migratory experience somehow voyage through vast, shifting ocean waters to wind up at specific feeding grounds that are hundreds, even thousands, of kilometers away from the rivers where they were hatched?

# data[].attributes.body
This is an article about a list of materials that are attracted to magnets and their magnetic types.The list looks at ferromagnetic metals that are attracted to each other. It also discusses non-attracting metals. Fun fact: certain types of pure graphite can "float" a strong magnet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
List of Metals That Are Attracted to Magnets

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Iron, nickel and cobalt are the three main metals most strongly attracted to magnets. Other metals interact with magnetic fields, but most are too weak to detect without scientific equipment.

# data[].attributes.body
This article explains what is electromagnetism and how and why they work.  It also explains how protons are related to electrons.
https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-an-electromagnet-definition-uses-parts.html

# data[].attributes.body
Ferrofluid is a magnetic liquid that is made of finely ground magnets( about 10 nano meters). When the suspended in a liquid, the resulting magnetic suspension is called a ferrofluid.  A ferrofluid forms spikes along the magnetic field lines when the magnetic surface force exceeds the stabilizing effects of fluid weight and surface tension.

# data[].attributes.body
This article says that the magnetic field is not about to reverse. For example, it explains that the fcurrent situation of weakening is very similar to the near-magnetic reversal 40 million years ago, finding that the current situation is less strong. They also tested it on a simulation, and found out that in fact the magnetic field is not going to reverse.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Intensity at Earth's surface (left) and radial field (Br) at the CMB (right). Top: mid-point of the Laschamp excursion; bottom: mid-point of the Mono Lake excursion. Thefield is truncated at spherical harmonic degree five. Credit: University of Liverpool

A study of the most recent near-reversals of the Earth's magnetic field by an international team of researchers, including the University of Liverpool, has found it is unlikely that such an event will take place anytime soon.

There has been speculation that the Earth's geomagnetic fields may be about to reverse , with substantial implications, due to a weakening of the magnetic field over at least the last two hundred years, combined with the expansion of an identified weak area in the Earth's magnetic field called the South Atlantic Anomaly, which stretches from Chile to Zimbabwe.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of international researchers model observations of the geomagnetic field of the two most recent geomagnetic excursion events, the Laschamp, approximately 41,000 years ago, and Mono Lake, around 34,000 years ago, where the field came close to reversing but recovered its original structure.

The model reveals a field structures comparable to the current geomagnetic field at both approximately 49,000 and 46,000 years ago, with an intensity structure similar to, but much stronger than, today's South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA); their timing and severity is confirmed by records of cosmogenic nuclides. However, neither of these SAA-like fields developed into an excursion or reversal.

Richard Holme, Professor of Geomagnetism at the University of Liverpool, said: "There has been speculation that we are about to experience a magnetic polar reversal or excursion. However, by studying the two most recent excursion events, we show that neither bear resemblance to current changes in the geomagnetic field and therefore it is probably unlikely that such an event is about to happen.

"Our research suggests instead that the current weakened field will recover without such an extreme event, and therefore is unlikely to reverse."

Increased occurrence of radiation-induced technical satellite failures of the Swarm satellites (white spots) in the region of the geomagnetic South Atlantic Anomaly (blue color = reduced field intensity) between April 2014 and June 2017. Credit: I. Michaelis, GFZ

The strength and structure of the Earth's magnetic field has varied at different times throughout geological history. At certain periods, the geomagnetic field has weakened to such an extent that it was able to swap the positions of magnetic north and magnetic south, whilst geographic north and geographic south remain the same.

Called a geomagnetic reversal, the last time this happened was 780,000 years ago. However, geomagnetic excursions, where the field comes close to reversing but recovers its original structure, have occurred more recently.

The strength of the geomagnetic field at Earth's surface three times during the past: 48,500 and 47,250 thousand years ago and in 2015. The geomagnetic field of the past showed areas of weak intensity similar to today's South Atlantic Anomaly over South America and the southern Atlantic, for example 48,000 years ago. The anomaly of that time did, however, not lead to a geomagnetic field reversal, about one thousand years later the field recovered to a stable state of field strength. Credit: M. Korte/GFZ

The magnetic field shields the Earth from solar winds and harmful cosmic radiation. It also aids in human navigation, animal migrations and protects telecommunication and satellite systems. It is generated deep within the Earth in a fluid outer core of iron, nickel and other metals that creates electric currents, which in turn produce magnetic fields.

More information: Maxwell Brown el al., "Earth's magnetic field is probably not reversing," PNAS (2018). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1722110115

Provided by: University of Liverpool

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Earth's magnetic field is not about to reverse, study finds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A study of the most recent near-reversals of the Earth's magnetic field by an international team of researchers, including the University of Liverpool, has found it is unlikely that such an event will take place anytime soon.

# data[].attributes.headline
1. Article- Magnetism And Plant Growth – How Do Magnets Help Plants Grow

# data[].attributes.subject
1. Article- Magnetism And Plant Growth – How Do Magnets Help Plants Grow

# data[].attributes.body
This article explains how magnets are connected with plants and how it actually helps plants. The magnetism exposure enhance essential items. The earth’s magnetic field also has a powerful influence on all life on the planet.

Read more at Gardening Know How: Magnetism And Plant Growth – How Do Magnets Help Plants Grow https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/garden-how-to/info/magnetism-and-plant-growth.htm
https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/garden-how-to/info/magnetism-and-plant-growth.htm

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Any gardener or farmer desires consistently bigger and better plants with higher yields. The seeking of these traits has scientists testing, theorizing and hybridizing plants in an effort to achieve the optimum growth. One of these theories regards magnetism and plant growth. Magnetic fields, such as that generated by our planet, are thought to enhance plant growth. Do magnets help plants grow? There are actually several ways exposure to magnets may direct plant growth. Let's learn more.

Do Magnets Help Plants Grow?

Healthy plants are impossible without adequate intake of water and nutrients, and some studies show that magnetic exposure can enhance intake of these essential items. Why do plants react to magnets? Some of the explanation centers on a magnet's ability to change molecules. This is an important characteristic when applied to heavily saline water. The earth's magnetic field also has a powerful influence on all life on the planet - kind of like with the old-time gardening method of planting by the moon.

Grade school level experiments are common where the students study the effect of magnets on seeds or plants. The general consensus is that no discernible benefits are noticed. If this is the case, why would the experiments even exist? The magnetic pull of the earth is known to have an effect on living organisms and the biological processes.

The evidence indicates that the earth's magnetic pull influences seed germination by acting as an auxin or plant hormone. The magnetic field also assists in ripening of such plants as tomatoes. Much of plant response is due to the cryptochromes, or blue light receptors, that plants bear. Animals also have cryptochromes, which are activated by light and then are sensitive to magnetic pull.

How Magnets Affect Plant Growth

Studies in Palestine have indicated that plant growth is enhanced with magnets. This doesn't mean you directly apply a magnet to the plant, but instead, the technology involves magnetizing water.

The water in the region is heavily salted, which interrupts plant uptake. By exposing the water to magnets, the salt ions change and dissolve, creating purer water that is more easily taken up by the plant.

Studies on how magnets affect plant growth also show that magnetic treatment of seeds enhances germination by speeding up the formation of protein in the cells. Growth is more rapid and robust.

Why Do Plants React to Magnets?

The reasons behind plant response to magnets are a bit harder to understand. It seems that magnetic force pulls apart ions and changes the chemical composition of such things as salt. It also appears that magnetism and plant growth are tied together by biological impulse.

Plants have the natural response to "feel" gravity and magnetic pull just as humans and animals. The effect of magnetism actually can change the mitochondria in cells and enhance plant metabolism.

If this all sounds like mumbo jumbo, join the club. The why is not as important as the fact that magnetism does seem to drive improved plant performance. And as a gardener, this is the most important fact of all. I'll leave the scientific explanations to a professional and enjoy the benefits.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Magnetism And Plant Growth - How Do Magnets Help Plants Grow

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Any gardener or farmer desires consistently bigger and better plants with higher yields. The seeking of these traits has scientists testing, theorizing and hybridizing plants in an effort to achieve the optimum growth. One of these theories regards magnetism and plant growth. Magnetic fields, such as that generated by our planet, are thought to enhance plant growth.

# data[].attributes.body
This article explains how magnets can help fight cancer. It activates a chemical, death receptor 4, that can destroy cancer cells. It works by adding nano particles of iron to dangerous proteins, which becomes attracted to magnets that pull it out. This kills the harmful proteins of the cells.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Magnets hold things to our refrigerators, and inside compasses they help us find our way. Now researchers have found a way to use magnets like a remote control to turn on cell-killing, metal beads. The technology may point to new treatments for diseases such as cancer, which kills more than 7 million people every year.

# data[].attributes.body
This is an article about electromagnetism. This talks about how copper is actually a extremely good conductor for ELECTROmagnets. The electromagnets create an electric magnetic force which has more conductors than regular magnetic fields because it uses electricity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Try to pick up a penny with a magnet. Can't do it, can you? And yet as the person in the video moves a magnet close to a copper penny, the penny slides in the direction of the magnet's motion. What we have here is a perfect illustration of the interrelationship between electricity and magnetism.

# data[].attributes.headline
Article - How to Repel Sharks Using Magnets

# data[].attributes.subject
Article - How to Repel Sharks Using Magnets

# data[].attributes.body
This article is about how magnetic fields can be used to confuse sharks. This directs them away from traps meant for fish. It talks about the pros and cons of this method-how this protects the sharks, but how its extremely unpleasant for the shark itself. This is interesting to see how animals use their senses to live and how we interfere with their life.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Shark-repelling magnets may be the perfect antidote to unwanted shark attention while fishing.

According to new research, magnets could ward off sharks and rays, preventing them from being accidentally caught by baited fish traps.

"We were surprised at how successful this was," says Vincent Raoult, a marine ecologist at the University of Newcastle in Australia and one of the authors of a study published recently in Fisheries Research.

Sharks have sensory pores on the front of their heads that allow them to detect the electrical currents generated by the muscle contractions of their prey.

"They can basically sense where their food is, even if they can't see it or smell it," Raoult says. (Learn how sharks use their senses to navigate vast distances.)

But strong, unnatural magnetic fields can confuse these senses-Raoult describes it as the equivalent of opening a door and suddenly being hit with a strong stink. "It's just an unpleasant thing for the animal as far as we can tell."

The team tested whether magnets would deter sharks from bait traps, which are large boxes made of chicken wire that are filled with bait and used to attract fish. They put four three-inch magnetic bars made of ferrite around each funnel. While they aren't necessarily much larger than your average fridge magnet, they are thicker and much stronger.

In the Hawkesbury River estuary north of Sydney, Australia, commercial fishing vessels using bait traps are primarily fishing for Australasian snapper and yellowfin bream, but the traps also draw intruders such as blind shark, Wobbegong sharks, Port Jackson sharks, and sometimes electric rays. In this area, Raoult says about 10 percent of fishermen's entire catch by weight is made up of unwanted sharks and rays. (Check out an immersive graphic that sizes up sharks.)

While the sharks usually survive the ordeal, it can cause them stress and tire them out, making them easy prey for larger sharks and fish upon their release. The sharks also affect fishing's bottom line, as they take up space meant for snapper.

After monitoring nearly 1,100 traps for eight months, the researchers found that on average, traps with magnets had 30 percent less shark bycatch than other traps. Without sharks taking up space, the traps also pulled in 30 percent more snapper.

"Coming up with a way to reduce bycatch is cool on its own," Raoult says, but it also has to make economic sense. The fact that a few magnets costing five to ten dollars per trap can reduce shark bycatch and increase snapper haul makes shark conservation financially viable, he adds.

On top of this, some fishers said that since they can catch their target load more efficiently, they could also put out fewer traps. Fewer traps means that less gear gets lost at sea, where it can cause problems for marine life that becomes stuck in it.

Raoult is optimistic about using magnets for fish traps in other parts of the world. While the sharks caught in his study aren't vulnerable species, Raoult says that magnet-armed fish traps could help protect endangered or threatened sharks in other areas.

While the magnets seem to work well in repelling sharks from fish traps, broader applications of this technology are mixed. Since the magnets used are the type known as permanent magnets, they retain their magnetic properties without needing an outside current or magnetic field.

But they emit a field for only about eight inches, Raoult says. This means that magnets may be effective at trap openings, where sharks have to stick their heads past the magnets to get the bait, but using them on hooks maybe trickier. Likewise, swimmers would be ill-advised to try to ward off sharks by carrying magnets.

One study found initial success using magnets to deter Galapagos sharks from hooks, but competition between sharks eventually pushed some individuals to get over the repellent effect and go for the bait. According to other research, the magnets even had the opposite effect on blue sharks and shortfin makos, two of the shark species most affected by longline fishing.

Magnets that can fit on dozens of longline hooks may also be too small to repel larger sharks, and would be more work to put on and maintain, says biological oceanographer Sebastian Biton Porsmoguer, a coauthor of the shortfin mako study.

But Craig O'Connell, a shark biologist with the O'Seas Conservation Foundation and National Geographic grantee, has had success keeping great whites and bull sharks away from larger areas by setting up a barrier made from magnets inside a long PVC pipe - even with bait on the other side. He hopes such a method can eventually replace the nets used to keep sharks away from beaches, which can entangle marine life. (Related: Why Great White Sharks Are Still a Mystery to Us.)

O'Connell says that finding new fishing techniques is crucial to improving the health of ocean ecosystems.

"At the end of the day, we need our fishing practices to be a bit more responsible. If we can reduce our shark bycatch, that's a step in the right direction," he says.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Shark-repelling magnets may be the perfect antidote to unwanted shark attention while fishing. According to new research, magnets could ward off sharks and rays, preventing them from being accidentally caught by baited fish traps.

# data[].attributes.body
Scientists find out how to magnetize yeast. Scientists use genetic engineering to make yeast cells magnetic This article shows how "magnetism could be genetically induced in other organisms." “It will be difficult to bring magnetism to humans or live animals, but this is a good first step,”  Xiaoping Hu, a biomedical engineer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, MASUR

Yeast cells aren't normally magnetic, but a little genetic engineering can make them thralls to a magnetic field. The research, published today (February 28) in PLoS Biology, suggests that manipulations of a few widely expressed genes could be enough to get any cell magnetized, which could be a powerful tool for both research and medicine.

"It's a very interesting study," said Xiaoping Hu, a biomedical engineer who investigates the potential for magnetizing mammalian cells as a possible marker for MRI detection at Emory University in Atlanta. Hu, who did not participate in the study, added that this work appears to be the first attempt to magnetize yeast, and may "give guidance" to others working to induce magnetism in eukaryotic cells.

Though some bacteria create magnetic nanoparticles and animals such as homing pigeons use magnetic fields to navigate, biomagnetism is a rare phenomenon. Magnetotactic bacteria create special membrane-bound organelles that concentrate magnetic iron minerals. Yeast usually shunt excess iron into vacuoles, where it's kept in a non-magnetic state, explained synthetic biologist Pamela Silver, whose postdoc Keiji Nishida performed the work.

One focus of Silver's research is the creation of new properties in cells, with the potential for "programmable behavior," she said. Magnetism is an under-exploited property, and Nishida hoped that working out the underlying pathways of cell magnetism in yeast could be a stepping stone to making any cell into a magnet.

Nishida's first step was to knockout the iron transport protein Ccclp1, yielding mutated yeast that couldn't sequester iron into vacuoles. Nishida then added a gene for human ferritin, an iron storage protein.

"Ferritin piles a lot of iron into cells, and it functions in lots of organisms," said Caroline Philpott, who studies iron transport pathways at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, and was not involved in the research.

Ablating the yeast's iron detox pathway and juicing its iron storage was enough to induce mild magnetism in yeast grown in a solution containing the iron-based compound ferric citrate: the cells started showing attraction to magnets more than 250 times the strength of an average refrigerator magnet. Electron micrographs of magnetized yeast showed dense electron deposits in mitochondria. Yeast can use mitochondria to generate energy from the citric acid cycle, which uses several iron-dependent proteins.

Nishida and Silver also hoped to understand what, if any, ordinary pathways in yeast could contribute to magnetism. After screening knockouts for changes in magnetic properties, they identified Tco89p, a non-essential component of TORC1 (target of rapamycin complex 1), which regulates cell growth in response to environmental changes like alterations in redox state, stress, and nutrients. Cells missing Tco89p showed reductions in magnetism, while transfecting yeast cells with plasmids containing multiple copies of TCO 89 were more magnetic.

Tco89 appears to be working by altering the redox state of the yeast cells, but the details of those alterations remain unclear. Working out the mechanism of the induced yeast magnetism could provide synthetic biologists with a new tool. "I'm interested in building cells that respond to certain types of input, and now we have a new kind of input," said Silver.

Magnetism also has other basic research applications, including producing bio-compatible magnetic nanoparticles, which are studied as possible drug delivery systems, Hu said. Magnetism may also serve as a new technique for separating cells of a population. Indeed, Nishida showed that the magnetic yeast can be trapped in a magnetic column.

In addition, magnetism may have therapeutic applications, as demonstrated by Hu's work. By delivering magnetism to certain cell types, like cancer cells, researchers could tracked the cells in the body using MRI, Hu explained. This technique could also theoretically be a step in an anticancer therapy: applying alternating current magnetic fields to cells containing magnetic particles transfers magnetic energy in the form of heat, selectively killing just the particle-containing cells.

"It will be difficult to bring magnetism to humans or live animals, but this is a good first step," said Hu.

K. Nishida and P.A. Silver, "Induction of Biogenic Magnetization and Redox Control by a Component of the Target of Rapamycin Complex 1 Signaling Pathway," PLoS Biology, doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001269, 2012.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, MASUR Yeast cells aren't normally magnetic, but a little genetic engineering can make them thralls to a magnetic field. The research, published today (February 28) in PLoS Biology, suggests that manipulations of a few widely expressed genes could be enough to get any cell magnetized, which could be a powerful tool for both research and medicine.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a video that shows some really sick tricks you can do with magnets. This video shows the amazing powers of magnetism and the magnetic fields. Guys, make sure to check it out, it's sick and reply back some more cool tricks you found out about!

# data[].attributes.body
This is an article about the different types of magnets. This helps explain types of magnetism even though it seems that there is only one type of magnetism. There are multiple. The most common type of magnetism is ferromagnetism.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The origin of magnetism lies in the orbital and spin motions of electrons and how the electrons interact with one another. The best way to introduce the different types of magnetism is to describe how materials respond to magnetic fields. This may be surprising to some, but all matter is magnetic.

# data[].attributes.body
This article is about how there are magnetic fields in Florida's beaches, which helps loggerhead turtles go back to their birthplace and hatch their offspring.  They did this by comparing nesting data and the positions of the isopleths near the Florida coast. Isopleths are lines on maps connecting points having equal distance of a specified location.

They found that when the distances between the magnetic signatures shrank, so did the distance between the nests.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Loggerhead sea turtles use the Earth's magnetic fields to find their way home.

# data[].attributes.headline
1. Article - What types of magnets are there?

# data[].attributes.subject
1. Article - What types of magnets are there?

# data[].attributes.body
This article describes the type of magnets there are in the world. Normally, we only think of magnets as just plain magnets, and there is no variety to them. This article goes deeper into the magnet types, how they are made, what the inside looks like, and how strong they are.

# data[].attributes.headline
1. Article - This Super-Strong Magnet Literally Blew the Doors Off a Tokyo Laboratory

# data[].attributes.subject
1. Article - This Super-Strong Magnet Literally Blew the Doors Off a Tokyo Laboratory

# data[].attributes.body
This article is about a electromagnet, which surprisingly was strong enough to blow open the doors of its lab. It also explains teslas, a unit of magnetic intensity. The article explains just how strong it is. It's quite interesting to see that magnets can be this strong.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Sparks flew when the Takeyama Lab magnet turned on in a recent experiment.

Credit: Shojiro Takeyama

There's a magnet in a secure room in central Tokyo. It's an electromagnet, the kind that generates a magnetic field when electrical current flows through it. The last time the scientists who operate it switched it on, it blew open the heavy doors designed to keep it contained. Already, it has created one of the most intense magnetic fields ever generated on Earth. And it keeps getting more powerful.

The magnetic field, which recently reached a strength of 1,200 teslas - a unit of magnetic intensity - was described in a paper published Sept. 17 in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments.

Twelve hundred teslas is an enormous measurement. The most powerful magnet most people have any chance of encountering in their lifetime is inside an MRI machine - and the most advanced, powerful, sometimes dangerous MRIs in the world clock in at just 3 teslas. In 2004, Popular Mechanics magazine described a machine billed as "the world's most powerful magnet" - meaning the most powerful magnet that doesn't tear itself to bits whenever it's turned on - and it emitted just 45 teslas. That's less than 4 percent of the power emitted by the magnet created by lead author Shojiro Takeyama and his colleagues.

And crossing the 1,000-tesla mark is a major milestone in an engineering effort that Takeyama said dated back to the 1970s, and which he has led for the last two decades.

To achieve that intensity, Takeyama and his team pump megajoules of energy into a small, precisely engineered electromagnetic coil, the inner lining of which then collapses on itself at Mach 15 - that's more than 3 miles per second (5 kilometers per second). As it collapses, the magnetic field inside gets squeezed into a tighter and tighter space, until its force peaks at a tesla reading unimaginable in conventional magnets. Fragments of a second later, the coil collapses entirely, destroying itself. [ Mad Geniuses: 10 Odd Tales About Famous Scientists]

The 1,200-tesla experiment required 3.2 megajoules of energy. But Takeyama, a physicist at the University of Tokyo, told Live Science that he believes his device can reach 1,800 teslas if he and his team apply 5 megajoules to it. (They're taking their time getting to that point, he said, partly due to safety concerns.)

"The most similar magnetic-field generation is by chemical explosives," Takeyama said, referring to experiments beginning in the 1960s and continuing until 2001, in which Russian and American researchers detonated explosives around electromagnets in order to squish them, briefly creating very powerful magnetic fields - up to 2,800 teslas.

"They cannot conduct these experiments in indoor laboratories, so they usually conduct everything in the outdoors, like Siberia in a field or somewhere in a very wide place at Los Alamos [New Mexico]," he said. "And they try to make a scientific measurement, but because of these conditions it's very hard to make precise measurements."

Other forms of superstrong magnetic fields require lasers, but Takeyama said that the laser-generated fields are tiny and supershort-lived, even by physics standards, making them similarly problematic for the sorts of experiments in which he and his laboratory colleagues at the University of Tokyo are interested.

The point of building a magnet in the 1,000-plus tesla range, Takeyama said, is to study hidden physical properties of electrons that are invisible under normal circumstances. He and his team will put different materials inside their magnet to study how their electrons behave.

Under those extreme conditions, he said, conventional models of electrons break down. Takeyama doesn't know exactly what happens to electrons in such extreme situations, but said that studying them in the moments before the coil's self-destruction should reveal properties of electrons normally invisible to science. Extremely powerful magnetic fields also have possible applications in fusion engineering, to keep the hot plasmas of a fusion reaction contained and far from their container walls.

The problem with building magnetic fields that powerful is that, as in the case of Takeyama's magnet, they almost, by definition, destroy themselves within moments of their creation. The field - and the process of creating it - inevitably exerts so much energy on the device generating it that at least some element of the device burns out or collapses on itself. Takeyama said that the advantage of his magnetic field is that it's relatively robust compared with fields generated by lasers or explosive devices. It's large enough to contain a substantial amount of material, requires no explosives and has a life span of a few dozen microseconds (millionths of a second). That's short in human terms, but it lasts several times longer than those laser-generated fields. [ Top 10 Greatest Explosions Ever]

Also, while the coil itself is destroyed, the surrounding machine survives the process largely intact.

Here's what happened when it was powered up to 3.2 megajoules for the experiment that produced the 1,200-tesla field:

The device is contained and nondestructive compared with those explosive experiments in Siberia and Los Alamos. But still, every time the magnet is used, Takeyama and his team must enter the room and begin the long, laborious process of cleanup and repairs, he said. His research team must fabricate a new magnetic coil to exquisitely precise dimensions for each use. The typical wait time between experiments, he said, is about two to five months.

Outside researchers interested in elusive fusion-power generators have expressed interest in Takeyama's research as possibly useful for their large, magnetic plasma containment systems, he said. However, he said he's not certain how useful his fields might be in that context, nor is that his primary goal.

Down the road, he said, he expects to amp up the power on his machine, eventually maxing it out at the 5-megajoule, 1,800-tesla mark. But he's in no rush to get to that point, he said. First, he and his team want to explore as much as possible what they can learn at the 3.2-megajoule, 1,200-tesla range. And there remains the problem of safety as the energies involved increase.

For now, he said, his team has added some stronger doors to his lab.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This Super-Strong Magnet Literally Blew the Doors Off a Tokyo Laboratory

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There's a magnet in a secure room in central Tokyo. It's an electromagnet, the kind that generates a magnetic field when electrical current flows through it. The last time the scientists who operate it switched it on, it blew open the heavy doors designed to keep it contained.

# data[].attributes.body
Surprisingly, Jupiter's magnetic field looks really different from Earth! It was discovered in October, and if Earth looks like a bar magnet, Jupiter looks like some strange magnetic field spliced magnet! It looks really cool!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If Earth's magnetic field resembles that of a bar magnet, Jupiter's field looks like someone took a bar magnet, bent it in half and splayed it at both ends.

The field emerges in a broad swath across Jupiter's northern hemisphere and re-enters the planet both around the south pole and in a concentrated spot just south of the equator, researchers report in the Sept. 6 Nature.

"We were baffled" at the finding, says study coauthor Kimberly Moore, a graduate student at Harvard University.

The new look at Jupiter's magnetic field comes courtesy of NASA's Juno spacecraft, which has been orbiting the planet since July 2016 ( SN: 6/25/16, p. 16). Relying on nearly 2,000 measurements of the field outside the planet, Moore and colleagues created maps detailing how the field emerges by calculating how it extends to roughly 10,000 kilometers below the cloud tops.

The results "complicate our picture of Jupiter's interior," Moore says. Planetary magnetism arises from electrically conductive fluids within a planet. Typical simulations for how these fluids generate magnetism can explain a field that resembles that of a bar magnet, such as Earth's or Saturn's, as well as those that are messy all over, like the ones at Uranus and Neptune. Jupiter's split personality is harder to explain.

One possibility is that the extreme temperature and pressure near Jupiter's core create a soup of rock and ice partly dissolved in liquid metallic hydrogen. Here, the interplay of turbulent layers might generate a convoluted magnetic field. Or perhaps squalls of helium rain closer to the clouds stir up conductive layers below, contorting the field before it emerges from the clouds.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jupiter's weird magnetic field suggests complex rumblings deep within the planet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If Earth's magnetic field resembles that of a bar magnet, Jupiter's field looks like someone took a bar magnet, bent it in half and splayed it at both ends. The field emerges in a broad swath across Jupiter's northern hemisphere and re-enters the planet both around the south pole and in a concentrated spot just south of the equator, researchers report in the Sept.

# data[].attributes.headline
3. Article - Magnetic Sense Helps Billions of Moths on an Australian Migration

# data[].attributes.subject
3. Article - Magnetic Sense Helps Billions of Moths on an Australian Migration

# data[].attributes.body
This article is about how Australian Bogo Moths use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate the way home, like pigeons. They're cycle is to migrate away from the heat in the summer, and then go dormant until fall when they go back home to mate. They have a magnetic sense to track the way back to Australia.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Researchers say this is the first reliable evidence that insects can use Earth's magnetic field for navigation.

Image

Bogong moths in a cave in the Kosciuszko National Park in New South Wales, Australia. Credit Credit Eric Warrant

Every spring in Australia, billions of bogong moths migrate from the arid plains of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria to the meadows of the Australian Alps to escape the impending heat. There, they congregate in caves like living shingles, and go dormant over the summer. Autumn arrives, and they return to their birthplaces to mate, lay eggs and die. The eggs hatch into caterpillars that develop underground through winter. The cycle continues.

How these animals complete this epic journey to a place they've never been and back, traveling hundreds of miles at night, for days to weeks each way, has long been a mystery. But scientists have now discovered that bogong moths have a magnetic sense to help them.

In a paper published Thursday in Current Biology, they tested how the moths reacted to moving visual cues and magnetic fields in an outdoor flight simulator and found that the winged insects use magnetic fields like a compass. While other animals like nocturnal songbirds and sea turtles are known to migrate by Earth's magnetic fields, the researchers say this is the first reliable evidence that insects can, too.
[Like the Science Times page on Facebook.| Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
Australia's small, brown, ordinary-looking bogong moths are the only known insect besides the monarch butterfly to manage such a long, directed and specific migration.

"They have this sort of amazing ability that belies their appearance," said Eric Warrant, a biologist at the University of Lund in Sweden and the principal investigator of the study. "It's as if the bogong moth is the dreary-colored, nocturnal cousin of the monarch butterfly."

But unlike the monarch, which flies during the day by a reliably rising and setting sun, the moth flies at night beneath dim constellations and a darting, shape-shifting moon.

Image

The bogong moth is the only known insect species besides the monarch butterfly to migrate so far and so deliberately. Credit Eric Warrant

"Originally, I thought the moth would mostly be using celestial cues," Dr. Warrant said. The dung beetle, for instance, follows polarized light, the moon or the Milky Way to roll a ball of excrement along a perfectly straight path. But it sustains this path for just a few minutes. By contrast, the moths stay directed all night.

Other studies suggested some moths used a magnetic compass.

So the researchers captured bogong moths during their migration, tethered them to a metal rod in the center of a plastic drum and recorded what direction they rotated in response to a moving felt cutout of a mountain and a synthesized magnetic field, the same strength as Earth's.

The moths flew toward the cutout, but got confused after a few minutes with the magnetic field pointing in a different direction. "They become completely disoriented, almost as if the landmark's disappeared," said Dr. Warrant.

Image

The researchers' experiment set-up, with its plastic drums containing the rods that the moths were attached to, to observe how they navigated a moving cutout landscape and a synthesized magnetic field. Credit Eric Warrant

He thinks that the bogong moth integrates visual cues and magnetic signals, checking in every now and then to make sure they align. It's similar to how a hiker uses a compass, locating and relocating reference points like trees or peaks, as they appear and disappear from view. Whether the moths use celestial, terrestrial or a combination of beacons, remains unclear.

And the big mystery remains: How do naïve moths, coming from different directions, all know to go to these caves in the first place?

The researchers are testing how the moths respond to projections of the Milky Way, how their brains' navigation center responds to magnetic fields and how genetics might allow young moths to access some kind of inherited map of their migration route.

Then they'll just need to find the animal's magnetic sensor - the holy grail of magnetoreception. "It's a bit like a needle in a haystack," Dr. Warrant said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Magnetic Sense Helps Billions of Moths on an Australian Migration

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Researchers say this is the first reliable evidence that insects can use Earth's magnetic field for navigation. Every spring in Australia, billions of bogong moths migrate from the arid plains of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria to the meadows of the Australian Alps to escape the impending heat.

# data[].attributes.body
This article includes multiple fun facts about different features of magnets. It discusses some pretty cool things, like ferromagnetic forces, and also how magnetism uses photons and is actually really similar to light. Another category is "The World's Most Powerful Magnets," and the text is fun and references other topics, like history in magnetism, and light.
*Also, despite what the intro says, this magnetic article has no bad words

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Credit: Lena Lir / Shutterstock.com

The line "f-ing magnets, how do they work?" was coined in 2009 by the hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse. Magnets aren't really all that mysterious - the basics have been known for two centuries. As a basic component of disk drives, magnets are part of just about every laptop or desktop computer, and they have made their way into tape players and, of course, the things we use to hold stuff on a fridge. Before the advent of flat screens, televisions and monitors were home to some of the most powerful magnets in the average home.

Although the physics of magnets are pretty well-understood (except perhaps by some hip-hop musicians), and they've been part of our lives for centuries, they do surprise and delight. Here's a look at some fascinating facts about magnets.

1. Magnets come in four flavors: Ferromagnets - which include substances like iron and nickel - are composed of atoms with unpaired electrons whose spins are aligned. They make good permanent magnets. In another type of magnet - called ferrimagnets - only some of the electron spins are aligned.

Maglev train starts operation on June 1, 2010.

Credit: Hung Chung Chih Shutterstock.com

Most chemical elements, however, are considered paramagnetic, meaning they are magnetized only when inside another magnetic field. Paramagnets also boast unpaired electrons.

If you're looking to levitate objects, diamagnetic materials are the way to go. These materials are magnetized when in a field, but they generate fields opposite to the one in which they are located. Maglev trains work on this principle.

2. Magnetism is light: Why do magnets stick? Magnets attract each other because they exchange photons, or the particles that make up light. But unlike the photons streaming out of a desk lamp or reflecting off of everything you see around you, these photons are virtual, and your eyes (or any particle detector) can't "see" them. They can, however, exchange momentum, and this is why they stick to things or repel them. When a kid throws a dodge ball, they're exchanging momentum with the ball, and the thrower feels a slight push back. Meanwhile the target person feels the force of the ball, and (maybe) gets knocked over - they are "repelled" from the thrower. With photons, the process can also happen in reverse, as though one kid reached out and grabbed the ball while the other was still hanging on to it, which would look like an attractive force.

Photons are the force carriers not only for magnets but also for electrostatic phenomena like static electricity, and it's why electromagnetism is the term we use for effects produced by these phenomena - including light, which is an electromagnetic wave.

3. Magnetism is relativistic: That's right - whenever you turn on an electromagnet and stick it to a fridge, you are demonstrating relativity. Why? According to the theory of special relativity, the distance along the direction of motion gets shorter - that is, a fast-moving car would look squished, even though the person in the car wouldn't notice. That person would see everything around him or her as squished in the direction in which the individual was traveling.

This has consequences for charged particles in wires. Ordinarily, the negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons in a wire cancel each other out. But when current moves through a wire, the electrons are moving. From the point of view of any stationary charged particle outside the wire, the distance between electrons gets smaller. That means it looks like there are more electrons than protons in a given space - all of a sudden there's a net negative charge. Put any positively charged particle (or wire) next to the wire with current in it, and you feel a magnetic force of attraction. Put a negatively charged particle near it and it will repel - and this is why if you run the current in opposite directions through two wires, they will attract each other, and if the current is running in the same direction, they will repel.

A similar thing happens when a charged particle moves through a magnetic field, say, near a (permanent) bar magnet . The particle experiences force. But according to the theory of relativity, you can't say that the particle is moving and the magnet isn't. From the point of view of the particle, the bar magnet is moving. Maxwell's equations, which describe electromagnetic waves and forces, show that you'd see different forces, depending on which reference frame you choose. For a stationary observer it looks like a magnetic force pushing or pulling on the particle, and for a moving one it's an electrostatic force. This problem was a major piece of Einstein's development of special relativity, which accounted for the discrepancy.

4. The world's most powerful magnets: The two biggest magnets reside at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Florida State University (FSU). The two sister laboratories have magnets that can reach 100 and 45 tesla, respectively. By comparison, junkyard magnets - the ones that lift cars - are about 2 tesla.

The 45-tesla hybrid magnet, looking up toward magnet, with detail of coldwater pipes at Florida State University.

Credit: National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, FSU

The Los Alamos magnet is designed to generate fields that last only a few seconds, while the FSU magnet can maintain its fields for as long as the power is on. Each magnet is designed to perform different kinds of experiments, noted Ross McDonald, a staff scientist at Los Alamos.

An interesting effect happens with the FSU magnet when there are diamagnetic materials, such as an aluminum canister, around. The diamagnetism creates fields with an opposite orientation to the magnet, so anything made of such materials is stuck in place. "It's like trying to move it through molasses," McDonald said.

It's not safe to play with aluminum canisters near the Los Alamos magnet, for the same reason that it isn't safe to stand in the room in which the magnet is housed. "Every pulsed magnet will eventually destroy itself," McDonald said, because of the stresses of the magnetic forces on the coils. When they fail, they can fail catastrophically. "We have something like 100 sticks of dynamite's worth of energy in there and we contain 99.9 percent of it," he said. But that last percentage point is still a lot, so LANL evacuates the building when its magnet is on.

5. Magnets showed that quantum mechanics worked: The discovery of one of the fundamental quantum mechanical properties of elementary particles - spin - involved magnets. It's called the Stern-Gerlach experiment, after physicists Otto Stern and Walter Gerlach. They conducted the experiment in 1922, to test ideas about the then-new theories of quantum mechanics. They used two magnets, one on top of the other, each shaped to produce a long, asymmetrical magnetic field. They then fired uncharged particles - silver atoms - through the field at a target. The asymmetrical field will alter the silver atoms' trajectory slightly. , Since the atoms will be oriented in random directions and their angular momenta will also be random, the trajectory should be different for each silver atom, but it was not known by how much. The target should have shown a smooth distribution of hits from one end to the other.

That didn't happen. Instead, the experimenters got two clusters of hits, as though the beam had split into two directions with the particles unable to deflect to anywhere in between. Stern and Gerlach had just demonstrated that particle spins were quantized - they can be up or down, but nothing else.

6. Magnets don't have to be iron or even metal: Most of the magnets we use are made of iron (like fridge magnets). But that doesn't have to be so. Magnets can be made of any material with unpaired electrons. That includes many metals and alloys, such as neodymium, which is used in disk drives. Ferrimagnetic materials, in fact, are often not metals at all. Among them are spinels, which are used in the magnets that seal refrigerator doors.

7. Magnetic medicine: There isn't any evidence that magnets work for pain relief. The reason? Even though there is iron in your blood, it's made up of atoms that are too far apart and too diffuse for magnets to affect them. If you tested this by pricking your finger and spilling blood near a magnet, you'd find that neither your blood nor the magnet would attract one another. [ 11 Surprising Facts About the Circulatory System]

That said, magnets are used in magnetic resonance imaging machines, which use magnets stronger than the ones in junkyards that lift cars. In most cases MRI magnets are superconducting and cooled with liquid helium.

8. Long known, but not understood: The ancient Greeks and Chinese noticed something was up with certain materials, known as lodestones. Lodestones were actually magnetite, a form of iron oxide that forms when magma cools slowly. The lodestones attracted other ironlike metals, and even better, could magnetize ordinary iron. When small pieces of metal were magnetized, then hung from a string or floated in water, they aligned with the Earth's magnetic field - becoming the first magnetic compasses.

9. Animals sport magnets: Some animals and bacteria have magnetite in their bodies. A type of mollusk called a chiton even has magnetite in its "teeth," which actually cover its tongue. The magnetite is abrasive and lets the animal scrape algae, but it might also provide a homing sense, enabling chitons to find their way back to certain places where they like to mate and feed. Studies of homing pigeons seem to show that they have a magnetic sense that helps them navigate. Magnetite in the animals' beaks seems to be the key, though how big a role that magnetic sense (called magnetoception) plays is unclear.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The line "f-ing magnets, how do they work?" was coined in 2009 by the hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse. Magnets aren't really all that mysterious - the basics have been known for two centuries.

# data[].attributes.headline
2) Article - What are the Uses of Magnetic Fields?

# data[].attributes.subject
2) Article - What are the Uses of Magnetic Fields?

# data[].attributes.body
This article highlights multiple uses of magnetic fields, such as electromagnets, motors, magnetic levitation, and information storage. It goes in depth for each of these categories. It also discusses some cool topics within each of these, like how in electromagnets, with the 🤬 of a switch, magnets will stop sending out a magnetic field.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Motors use magnetic fields to rotate a shaft. As the electric current going to the motor varies--all generated currents do, it causes the rising and falling magnetic fields to push the core of the motor around.

# data[].attributes.body
This article shows why some magnets are stronger than others. The magnets have a magnetic field as we all know, but when we look at the materials making up the magnet and also creating the magnetic field. We can see that in weak magnets the magnetic field tends to shift more. While in Stronger magnets it is made of a rarer earth alloy which doesn't move as easily.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Dave Ansell answered this attractive question...

On a fundamental, minute scale iron, nickel and cobalt atoms have more electrons orbiting in one direction than the other. This means they produce little tiny currents like electromagnets.

With ferromagnetic things - like iron, nickel and cobalt - these tend to like lining up into areas. Normally if you just take these areas, the north poles of these little areas will attract south poles of other little areas.

They'll all wind up going into circles and ovals in magnetism. If you put them in a strong magnetic field they'll all line up.

Normally with iron, if you take the magnetic field off, most of them will realign randomly. They get all jiggled up and end up pointing in random directions again.

With very strong magnets, like rare earth magnets, the structure of the alloy tends to make it very hard to change the direction of the magnetic field. This means that more of them stay lines up, and you get a stronger magnet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why are some magnets stronger than others?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On a fundamental minute scale iron, nickel and cobalt atoms have more electrons orbiting in one direction than the other. This means they produce little, tiny currents like electromagnets. With ferromagnetic things like iron, nickel and cobalt - these tend to like lining up into areas.

# data[].attributes.body
This video shows the relationship between electricity and magnetism, and explains Oersted's law. This also explains the basics of magnetism, magnetic line drawings, and how electric currents can generate magnetic fields. It also talks a bit about Earth's magnetic field and how to calculate the magnitude of the magnetic force.

# data[].attributes.body
This talks about magnets. It talks about how magnets work. It also talks about the north and south pole of the magnets. It also talks about the Earth's magnetic field.This also talks about how some black sand that was found in mexico is also magnetic. I am not sure how this works but I will continue to do research on this!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Magnetism is the force exerted by magnets when they attract or repel each other

# data[].attributes.headline
2. Article - We finally know how birds can see Earth's magnetic fields

# data[].attributes.subject
2. Article - We finally know how birds can see Earth's magnetic fields

# data[].attributes.body
This article reveals how birds are able to navigate the globe. Cry4 protein is a special protein found in the eyes of birds and is responsible for circadian rhythms in certain species.  relies on the presence of specifically the blue wavelength of light. The complex process involves "radical" intermediate molecules which are sensitive to Earth's magnetic field.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Earth's magnetic field plays a vital role in everything from animal migration to protecting the Earth from the Sun's harsh solar wind. Now, a recent study finally sheds light on how some birds visually see Earth's magnetic field. Birds use Earth's magnetic field as sort of a heads-up display to help them navigate the globe.

The Earth's magnetic field is a result of the movement or convection of liquid iron in the outer core. As the liquid metal in the outer core moves, it generates electric currents, which lead to a magnetic field. The continual movement of liquid metal through this magnetic field creates stronger electrical currents and thus a stronger magnetic field. This positive feedback loop is called the geomagnetic dynamo.

While scientists have known for quite some time that birds can see Earth's magnetic field, it was unclear exactly how birds are able to visualize the magnetic field. Two recent studies from researchers at Lund University in Sweden and Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg in Germany discovered that the ability is a result of a special protein in bird's eyes. The two papers studied European robins and zebra finches and found evidence for an unusual eye protein called Cry4.

The Cry4 protein is part of a class of protein called a cryptochrome that is sensitive to blue light. Cryptochromes are found in both plants and animals and are responsible for circadian rhythms in various species. In the two bird species above, it appears that the presence of cryptochromes, specifically the Cry4 protein, is responsible for the ability of birds to visually detect Earth's magnetic field.

The ability to see Earth's magnetic field, known as magnetoreception, relies on the presence of specifically the blue wavelength of light. The complex process involves "radical" intermediate molecules which are sensitive to Earth's magnetic field. The Earth's magnetic field, as it relates to the direction the bird is facing, could alter the intermediate radical molecules differently, giving the bird a sense for where it is facing in relation to the Earth's magnetic field.

The research team also found that the Cry4 protein was produced in much higher amounts in European robins during migration season. Perhaps this would give the robin a more precise picture of Earth's magnetic field throughout its migration.

While the exact way birds visualize Earth's magnetic field is part of further investigation, scientists believe the Cry4 protein acts as sort of a filter over the bird's vision. This filter would allow birds to see a sort of compass of the Earth and direct their migratory flights accordingly.

Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign believe birds see Earth's magnetic field through a filter similar to the figure above. This would act to guide birds in the right direction through migration.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
We Finally Know How Birds Can See Earth's Magnetic Field

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Earth's magnetic field plays a vital role in everything from animal migration to protecting the Earth from the Sun's harsh solar wind. Now, a recent study finally sheds light on how some birds visually see Earth's magnetic field. Birds use Earth's magnetic field as sort of a heads-up display to help them navigate the globe.

# data[].attributes.body
This article tells people what magnetism is.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Magnetism is a force of nature produced by moving electric charges. Sometimes these motions are microscopic and inside of a material known as magnets. Magnets, or the magnetic fields created by moving electric charges, can attract or repel other magnets, and change the motion of other charged particles.

A magnetic field exerts a force on particles known as the Lorentz force, according to Georgia State University's HyperPhysics website. The force acting on an electrically charged particle in a magnetic field depends on the magnitude of the charge, the velocity of the particle, and the strength of the magnetic field. The Lorentz force has the peculiar property that it causes particles to move in right angles to their original motion.

Some materials, such as iron, are known as permanent magnets, which means that they can sustain a permanent magnetic field. These are the most common forms of magnets encountered in everyday life. Other materials, such as iron, cobalt and nickel, can be given a temporary magnetic field by placing them inside of a larger, powerful field, but eventually those materials will lose their magnetism.

How magnetism works

(Image credit: alxpin via Getty Images)

Magnetic fields are generated by the motion of electric charges, according to HyperPhysics. Electrons all have a fundamental quantum mechanical property of angular momentum, known as "spin." Inside atoms, most electrons tend to form pairs in which one of them is "spin up" and the other is "spin down," or in other words their angular momenta point in opposite directions. In this case, the magnetic fields created by those spins point in opposite directions, so they cancel each other. However, some atoms contain one or more unpaired electrons, and these unpaired electrons create a tiny magnetic field. The direction of their spin determines the direction of the magnetic field, according to the Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) Resource Center. When a significant majority of unpaired electrons are aligned with their spins in the same direction, they combine to produce a magnetic field that is strong enough to be observed on a macroscopic scale.

Magnetic field sources are dipolar, meaning that they have a north and south pole. Opposite poles (N and S) attract, and like poles (N and N, or S and S) repel, according to Joseph Becker of San Jose State University. This creates a toroidal, or doughnut-shaped field, as the direction of the field propagates outward from the north pole and enters through the south pole.

Earth itself is a giant magnet. The planet gets its magnetic field from circulating electric current within the molten metallic core, according to NASA. A compass points north because the small magnetic needle in it is suspended so that it can spin freely inside its casing to align itself with Earth's magnetic field. Paradoxically, what we call the Magnetic North Pole is actually a south magnetic pole because it attracts the north magnetic poles of compass needles.

History of magnetism

(Image credit: Aleksandr Pobedimskiy via Shutterstock)

If the alignment of unpaired electrons persists without the application of an external magnetic field or electric current, it produces a permanent magnet. Permanent magnets are the result of ferromagnetism. The prefix "ferro" refers to iron because permanent magnetism was first observed in a form of natural iron ore called magnetite, Fe3O4. Pieces of magnetite can be found scattered on or near the surface of the Earth, and occasionally, one will be magnetized. These naturally occurring magnets are called lodestones. While scientists don't know exactly how lodestones form, "most scientists believe that lodestone is magnetite that has been hit by lightning," according to the University of Arizona.

People soon learned that they could magnetize an iron needle by stroking it with a lodestone, causing a majority of the unpaired electrons in the needle to line up in one direction. According to NASA, around A.D. 1000, the Chinese discovered that a magnet floating in a bowl of water always lined up in the north-south direction. Thereafter, the magnetic compass became a tremendous aid to navigation, particularly during the day and on nights when the stars were hidden by clouds.

Other metals besides iron can have ferromagnetic properties. These include nickel, cobalt, and some rare earth metals such as samarium or neodymium, which are used to make super-strong permanent magnets.

Other forms of magnetism

Magnetism takes many other forms, but except for ferromagnetism, they are usually too weak to be observed except by sensitive laboratory instruments or at very low temperatures. Anton Brugnams first discovered diamagnetism in 1778 while using permanent magnets in his search for materials containing iron. According to Gerald Küstler, a widely published independent German researcher and inventor, in his paper, "Diamagnetic Levitation - Historical Milestones," published in the Romanian Journal of Technical Sciences, Brugnams observed, "Only the dark and almost violet-colored bismuth displayed a particular phenomenon in the study; for when I laid a piece of it upon a round sheet of paper floating atop water, it was repelled by both poles of the magnet."

Diamagnetism is caused by the orbital motion of electrons within atoms creating tiny current loops, which produce weak magnetic fields, according to HyperPhysics. When an external magnetic field is applied to a material, these current loops tend to align in such a way as to oppose the applied field. This causes all materials to be repelled by a permanent magnet; however, the resulting force is usually too weak to be noticeable. There are, however, some notable exceptions.

Pyrolytic carbon, a substance similar to graphite, shows even stronger diamagnetism than bismuth, albeit only along one axis, and can actually be levitated above a super-strong rare earth magnet. Certain superconducting materials show even stronger diamagnetism below their critical temperature (the temperature at which they become superconducting) and so rare-earth magnets can be levitated above them. (In theory, because of their mutual repulsion, one can be levitated above the other.)

Paramagnetism occurs when a material becomes magnetic temporarily when placed in a magnetic field and reverts to its nonmagnetic state as soon as the external field is removed. When a magnetic field is applied, some of the unpaired electron spins align themselves with the field and overwhelm the opposite force produced by diamagnetism. However, the effect is only noticeable at very low temperatures, said Daniel Marsh, a professor of physics at Missouri Southern State University.

Other, more complex, forms include antiferromagnetism, in which the magnetic fields of atoms or molecules align next to each other; and spin glass behavior, which involve both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic interactions. Additionally, ferrimagnetism can be thought of as a combination of ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism due to many similarities shared among them, but it still has its own uniqueness, according to the University of California, Davis.

Electricity and magnetism

(Image credit: fridas via Shutterstock)

When a conducting wire is moved in a magnetic field, the field induces a current in the wire. Conversely, a magnetic field is produced by an electric charge in motion, such as when a wire is carrying a current. So all the electric wires in your household produce tiny magnetic fields. This relationship between electricity and magnetism is described by Faraday's Law of Induction, which is the basis for electromagnets, electric motors and generators. A charge moving in a straight line, as through a straight wire, generates a magnetic field that spirals around the wire. When that wire is formed into a loop, the field becomes a doughnut shape, or a torus.

Direct current can also produce a constant field in one direction that can be switched on and off with the current. This field can then deflect a movable iron lever causing an audible click. This is the basis for the telegraph, invented in the 1830s by Samuel F. B. Morse, which allowed for long-distance communication over wires using a binary code based on long- and short-duration pulses, according to the Library of Congress. Skilled operators sent the pulses by quickly turning the current on and off using a spring-loaded momentary-contact switch, or key. Another operator on the receiving end would then translate the audible clicks back into letters and words.

A coil around a magnet can also be made to move in a pattern of varying frequency and amplitude to induce a current in a coil. This is the basis for a number of devices, most notably, the microphone. Sound causes a diaphragm to move in and out with the varying pressure waves. If the diaphragm is connected to a movable magnetic coil around a magnetic core, it will produce a varying current that is analogous to the incident sound waves. This electrical signal can then be amplified, recorded or transmitted as desired. Tiny super-strong rare-earth magnets are used to make miniaturized microphones for cell phones, Marsh told Live Science.

When this modulated electrical signal is applied to a coil, it produces an oscillating magnetic field, which causes the coil to move in and out over a magnetic core in that same pattern. The coil is then attached to a movable speaker cone so it can reproduce audible sound waves in the air. The first practical application for the microphone and speaker was the telephone, patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, according to the Smithsonian Institution. Although this technology has been improved and refined, it is still the basis for recording and reproducing sound.

The applications of electromagnets are nearly countless. Faraday's Law of Induction forms the basis for many aspects of our modern society including not only electric motors and generators, but electromagnets of all sizes. The same principle used by a giant crane to lift junk cars at a scrap yard is also used to align microscopic magnetic particles on a computer hard disk drive to store binary data, and new applications are being developed every day.
Staff Writer Tanya Lewis contributed to this report.
Additional resources

Bibliography

NASA, "Earth's Magnetosphere", https://www.nasa.gov/magnetosphere

"Magnetism." DISCovering Science. Gale Research, 1996. Reproduced in Discovering Collection. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group. December, 2000. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/DC/

Griffiths, David J. (1998). Introduction to Electrodynamics (3rd ed.). Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-805326-0. OCLC 40251748.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Is Magnetism? | Magnetic Fields & Magnetic Force

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Magnets, or the magnetic fields created by moving electric charges, can attract or repel other magnets, and change the motion of other charged particles.

# data[].attributes.headline
2. Article - 8 Strange Facts About Magnets

# data[].attributes.subject
2. Article - 8 Strange Facts About Magnets

# data[].attributes.body
These are some interesting facts about magnets that you probably didn't know. It tells you about the strongest magnet in the Universe.  It also talks about how magnets have helped study animals, and many more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
8 Strange Facts About Magnets and Magnetism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Magnets are interesting and strange materials. There are still some mysteries that scientists and researchers have yet to solve when it comes to magnets. However, some mysteries have been solved. In this blog, we have compiled a list of some of the strangest facts about magnets and magnetism.

# data[].attributes.headline
3. Article- New Class of Magnet Defies Established Science

# data[].attributes.subject
3. Article- New Class of Magnet Defies Established Science

# data[].attributes.body
discovery of a new class of magnets defies a long-held scientific principle that iron-based magnetic materials changed their shape, but not their volume, when placed in a magnetic field. Instead, the new magnets show a large volume change, “swelling up like puffer fish". This goes against established conclusions about the types of magnets, and scientists have coined this magnetic activity as magnorestriction.  When scientists thermally treated certain Fe-Ga, Fe-Al, and Fe-Ge alloys to approximately 760 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes, then rapidly cooled them to room temperature, the materials exhibited marked non-Joulian behavior by expanding in volume.
Note: Joulian behavior-  iron-based magnetic materials elongate and constrict anisotropically, but do not change their volume, when placed in a magnetic field.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's not every day someone makes a discovery that changes a scientific principle that has been accepted for 175 years. But that is exactly what Harsh Deep Chopra, professor and chair of mechanical engineering at Temple University, and Manfred Wuttig, professor of materials science and engineering at University of Maryland, have done.

Their discovery of a new class of magnets defies a long-held scientific principle that iron-based magnetic materials changed their shape, but not their volume, when placed in a magnetic field. Instead, the new magnets show a large volume change, "swelling up like puffer fish," says Chopra. "Our findings fundamentally change the way we think about a certain type of magnetism that has been in place since 1841."

That was when physicist James Prescott Joule discovered that iron-based magnetic materials elongate and constrict anisotropically, but do not change their volume, when placed in a magnetic field-a phenomenon called "Joule magnetostriction." Since its discovery 175 years ago, all magnets have adhered to this principle of volume conservation.

Unique Internal Structure

Chopra and Wuttig discovered that when they thermally treated certain Fe-Ga, Fe-Al, and Fe-Ge alloys to approximately 760 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes, then rapidly cooled them to room temperature, the materials exhibited marked non-Joulian behavior by expanding in volume.

"The response of these magnets differs fundamentally from what Joule likely envisioned," comments Wuttig. "He must have thought that all magnets respond in a uniform fashion."

The researchers' "non-Joulian magnets" are characterized by large volume changes in magnetic fields. They also found the thermally treated materials contained never-before-seen microscopic cellular-like structures that allow the magnets to expand. "Knowing about this unique structure will enable researchers to develop new materials with similarly attractive properties," states Wuttig.

Non-Joulian magnets also generate negligible amounts of wasteful heat during energy harvesting. This transformative breakthrough has the potential to not only displace existing technologies, but create new applications due to the unusual combination of magnetic properties.

For example, one area of application lies in the development of compact and efficient magnetic actuators with little thermal signature of waste heat. Conventional magnets can be used as an actuator to exert a force and open a valve, for example-but they only operate in one direction, since all magnets are limited by Joule magnetostriction. Actuation in two directions under the Joule paradigm requires bulky stacks of magnets, which are inefficient and preclude significant miniaturization. "However," indicates Chopra, "non-Joulian magnets can expand in all directions when an external magnetic field is applied, which should make it possible to construct energy-efficient and compact omnidirectional actuators for mechanical devices and microelectromechanical systems."

Future Applications

Because these new magnets have such energy efficient characteristics, they will likely be used to develop advanced sensors, energy harvesting devices, compact micro-actuators for aerospace, automobile, biomedical, space and robotics applications, and ultra-low thermal signature actuators for sonars and defense applications.

Another important point regarding is that these iron-based alloys do not include expensive rare-earth elements-by replacing existing rare-earth based magnetostriction alloys, the new magnets could provide more robust performance at far less cost.

Since reporting the non-Joulian magnetism, Chopra and Wuttig have discovered similar behavior in a large group of magnetic materials that also apparently conform to the non-Joulian concept. "We are now working to develop this new class of magnets and establish the scientific origins of this behavior so that they may be applied to develop new alloys," says Chopra. "My lab is also exploring new forms of actuators, devices, and energy harvesting systems to bring these materials to their full potential."

Since these magnets can expand in all directions, it immediately creates entirely new applications that were not previously thought possible using conventional magnetic actuators. These could range from compact, energy-efficient omnidirectional actuators and energy harvesting materials to robotic "muscles."

Chopra is still somewhat amazed at discovering a new physical principle that counters what has been accepted knowledge for 175 years.

"I learned that in order to 'see' nature, I had to shed preconceived notions of how things work," he says. "That is always the hardest part, because often one tends to fit and process new information into an existing knowledge base, even in face of those inconvenient, pesky facts that don't fit nicely into existing understanding. It is encouraging and heartening that while old principles will hold, new ones are out there to be discovered."

Mark Crawford is an independent writer.

Our findings fundamentally change the way we think about a certain type of magnetism that has been in place since 1841.
Prof. Harsh Deep Chopra, Temple University

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New Class of Magnet Defies Established Science

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's not every day someone makes a discovery that changes a scientific principle that has been accepted for 175 years. But that is exactly what Harsh Deep Chopra, professor and chair of mechanical engineering at Temple University, and Manfred Wuttig, professor of materials science and engineering at University of Maryland, have done.

# data[].attributes.body
This article is like something we learnt in class. It talks about how the earth's magnetic field f l i p could happen soon.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Earth's magnetic field, which protects the planet from huge blasts of deadly solar radiation, has been weakening over the past six months, according to data collected by a European Space Agency (ESA) satellite array called Swarm.

The biggest weak spots in the magnetic field - which extends 370,000 miles (600,000 kilometers) above the planet's surface - have sprung up over the Western Hemisphere, while the field has strengthened over areas like the southern Indian Ocean, according to the magnetometers onboard the Swarm satellites - three separate satellites floating in tandem.

The scientists who conducted the study are still unsure why the magnetic field is weakening, but one likely reason is that Earth's magnetic poles are getting ready to flip, said Rune Floberghagen, the ESA's Swarm mission manager. In fact, the data suggest magnetic north is moving toward Siberia.

"Such a flip is not instantaneous, but would take many hundred if not a few thousand years," Floberghagen told Live Science. "They have happened many times in the past."[ 50 Amazing Facts About Planet Earth]

Scientists already know that magnetic north shifts. Once every few hundred thousand years the magnetic poles flip so that a compass would point south instead of north. While changes in magnetic field strength are part of this normal flipping cycle, data from Swarm have shown the field is starting to weaken faster than in the past. Previously, researchers estimated the field was weakening about 5 percent per century, but the new data revealed the field is actually weakening at 5 percent per decade, or 10 times faster than thought. As such, rather than the full flip occurring in about 2,000 years, as was predicted, the new data suggest it could happen sooner.

Floberghagen hopes that more data from Swarm will shed light on why the field is weakening faster now.

Still, there is no evidence that a weakened magnetic field would result in a doomsday for Earth. During past polarity flips there were no mass extinctions or evidence of radiation damage. Researchers think power grids and communication systems would be most at risk.

Earth's magnetic field acts like a giant invisible bubble that shields the planet from the dangerous cosmic radiation spewing from the sun in the form of solar winds. The field exists because Earth has a giant ball of iron at its core surrounded by an outer layer of molten metal. Changes in the core's temperature and Earth's rotation boil and swirl the liquid metal around in the outer core, creating magnetic field lines.

The movement of the molten metal is why some areas of the magnetic field strengthen while others weaken, Florberghagen said. When the boiling in one area of the outer core slows down, fewer currents of charged particles are released, and the magnetic field over the surface weakens.

"The flow of the liquid outer core almost pulls the magnetic field around with it," Floberghagen said. "So, a field weakening over the American continent would mean that the flow in the outer core below America is slowing down."

The Swarm satellites not only pick up signals coming from the Earth's magnetic field, but also from its core, mantle, crust and oceans. Scientists at the ESA hope to use the data to make navigation systems that rely on the magnetic field, such as aircraft instruments, more accurate, improve earthquake predictions and pinpoint areas below the planet's surface that are rich in natural resources. Scientists think fluctuations in the magnetic field could help identify where continental plates are shifting and help predict earthquakes.

These first results from Swarm were presented at the Third Swarm Science Meeting in Denmark on June 19.

Copyright 2014 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Earth's Magnetic Field Flip Could Happen Sooner Than Expected

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Earth's magnetic field, which protects the planet from huge blasts of deadly solar radiation, has been weakening over the past six months, according to data collected by a European Space Agency (ESA) satellite array called Swarm.

# data[].attributes.headline
1. Article - Researchers find fast 🤬 in Earth’s magnetic field

# data[].attributes.subject
1. Article - Researchers find fast 🤬 in Earth’s magnetic field

# data[].attributes.body
This article talks about magnetic field flips. It talks about how scientists have discovered that magnetic field flips can take a much shorter than expected. It also mentions how the magnetic field protects us from radiation from the sun.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A research team led by scientists in Taiwan and China announced on August 21, 2018, that Earth's protective magnetic field has undergone relatively rapid shifts in the past, including one lasting just two centuries. That's fast in contrast to the thousands of years thought to be needed for a magnetic pole reversal, an event whereby magnetic south becomes magnetic north and vice versa. Such an event might leave Earth with a substantially reduced magnetic field for some unknown period of time, exposing our world to dangerous effects from the sun. If it occurred in today's world of ubiquitous electric power and global interconnected communications, a reduced magnetic field could cost us trillions of dollars. The peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published this new work on August 20.

Co-author Andrew Roberts of Australian National University (ANU) said in a statement that Earth's magnetic strength could decrease by about 90 percent during a magnetic reversal. He said:

Earth's magnetic field, which has existed for at least 3.45 billion years, provides a shield from the direct impact of solar radiation.

Even with Earth's strong magnetic field today, we're still susceptible to solar storms that can damage our electricity-based society.

Roberts contributed to the study via precise magnetic analysis and radiometric dating of a stalagmite from a cave in southwestern China. Via this study, he and his colleagues added to the known paleomagnetic record from 107,000 to 91,000 years ago. A close look at this 16,000-year-long data set revealed that, during this period, the polarity flipped within only a couple of centuries some 98,000 years ago. Roberts commented:

The record provides important insights into ancient magnetic field behavior, which has turned out to vary much more rapidly than previously thought.

As the researchers described it, the flip was nearly 30 times faster than a generally accepted time required for polarity flips and 10 times faster than the fastest known rate of change.

Magnetic pole reversals are natural events, and earthly life has evolved for billions of years with them going on in the background. What's different today is that humans have developed technologies susceptible to events on the sun. To give you an idea of how powerful the sun is, watch a bit of the video below, showing a July 19, 2012, eruption on the sun. The eruption produced a moderately powerful solar flare, exploding on the sun's lower right hand limb, sending out light and radiation. It then produced a coronal mass ejection, or CME, which shot off to the right out into space. It's the CMEs that are so dangerous to earthly technologies.

As do so many discussions of this kind, the ANU statement about the new work harked back to what's called the Carrington Event of 1859. It's named for the British astronomer Richard Carrington, who spotted the preceding solar flare. It's the largest-ever solar super-storm on record (but, remember, our human record doesn't last very long in contrast to the millions of years of human existence). According to an article in Physics World in 2014:

This massive CME released ... the equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima bombs exploding at the same time. [It] hurled around a trillion kilograms [a million tons] of charged particles towards the Earth at speeds of up to 3,000 km/s [1900 miles/sec]. Its impact on the human population, though, was relatively benign as our electronic infrastructure at the time amounted to no more than about 200,000 kilometers [120,000 miles] of telegraph lines.

The Carrington Event took place long before our vast electric power grids and satellites in orbit. A more recent event - the biggest earthly effect from a solar storm in living memory - happened on March 13, 1989. A storm on the sun that day caused auroras that could be seen as far south as Florida and Texas. It caused some satellites in orbit to lose control temporarily, and - most significantly - it sparked an electrical collapse of the Hydro-Québec power grid, causing a widespread electrical blackout for about nine hours.

And that is the issue. Events on the sun, and their accompanying CMEs, aren't harmful to earthly life. After all, life on Earth has evolved for billions of years, as occasional solar super-storms took place. But these space weather events are harmful to human technologies, such as satellites and electrical grids.

For the most part, our magnetic field protects us. With Earth's magnetic field in place, you would need an exceedingly strong solar flare to create a Carrington Event. But if Earth's magnetic field were diminished due to an ongoing magnetic field reversal, our technologies would be left vulnerable. Roberts commented:

Hopefully such an event is a long way in the future and we can develop future technologies to avoid huge damage, where possible, from such events.

I think we can and will! What do you think?

Bottom line: Researchers have learned that magnetic field reversals on Earth can happen on a relatively fast timescale. They have evidence for one that took place over only two centuries. Prior to this work, it was thought that magnetic reversals took thousands of years.
Source: Multidecadally resolved polarity oscillations during a geomagnetic excursion Via Australian National University

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
study magnetic field reversals happen faster than thought

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Researchers find fast flip in Earth's magnetic field | EarthSky.org

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A research team led by scientists in Taiwan and China announced on August 21, 2018, that Earth's protective magnetic field has undergone relatively rapid shifts in the past, including one lasting just two centuries. That's fast in contrast to the thousands of years thought to be needed for a magnetic pole reversal, an event whereby magnetic south becomes magnetic north and vice versa.

# data[].attributes.body
This article shares what black holes are and how they form, and what they take in. All about the black holes being able to consume stars. Plus amazing images of black holes consuming stars and other things.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Don't let the name fool you: a black hole is anything but empty space. Rather, it is a great amount of matter packed into a very small area - think of a star ten times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City.

# data[].attributes.body
The feel flux, though seems like a toy, is a contraption that seems to slow down time. When a ball is placed in the opening of the tube, the ball falls through but at a slowed pace. If you look at the process the ball takes as it passes through the tube, you can also see that the ball never touches the sides. This is because of Lenz's Law. By using an extremely strong magnet, the ball generates an electric current which causes the ball to slow due to the magnetic fields it creates.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Feel Flux - A Magical Experience Powered by Science

# data[].attributes.headline
2. Article- MIT researchers discover a new kind of magnetismExperiments demonstrate ‘quantum spin liquid,’ which could have applications in new computer memory storage.

# data[].attributes.subject
2. Article- MIT researchers discover a new kind of magnetismExperiments demonstrate ‘quantum spin liquid,’ which could have applications in new computer memory storage.

# data[].attributes.body
This article is about a super cool new type of magnetism other than Ferromagnetism and Antiferromagnetism- QSL. This is a solid crystal, but its magnetic state is described as liquid- the magnetic orientations of the charged particles fluctuate constantly, like a liquid. Unlike anything scientists have seen before, this new type of magnetism has a strong interaction between the charged ions, but their orientation constantly fluctuates.  While most matter has discrete quantum states whose changes are expressed as whole numbers, this QSL material exhibits fractional quantum states.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Following up on earlier theoretical predictions, MIT researchers have now demonstrated experimentally the existence of a fundamentally new kind of magnetic behavior, adding to the two previously known states of magnetism.

Ferromagnetism - the simple magnetism of a bar magnet or compass needle - has been known for centuries. In a second type of magnetism, antiferromagnetism, the magnetic fields of the ions within a metal or alloy cancel each other out. In both cases, the materials become magnetic only when cooled below a certain critical temperature. The prediction and discovery of antiferromagnetism - the basis for the read heads in today's computer hard disks - won Nobel Prizes in physics for Louis Neel in 1970 and for MIT professor emeritus Clifford Shull in 1994.

"We're showing that there is a third fundamental state for magnetism," says MIT professor of physics Young Lee. The experimental work showing the existence of this new state, called a quantum spin liquid (QSL), is reported this week in the journal Nature, with Lee as the senior author and Tianheng Han, who earned his PhD in physics at MIT earlier this year, as lead author.

The QSL is a solid crystal, but its magnetic state is described as liquid: Unlike the other two kinds of magnetism, the magnetic orientations of the individual particles within it fluctuate constantly, resembling the constant motion of molecules within a true liquid.
Finding the evidence
There is no static order to the magnetic orientations, known as magnetic moments, within the material, Lee explains. "But there is a strong interaction between them, and due to quantum effects, they don't lock in place," he says.

Although it is extremely difficult to measure, or prove the existence, of this exotic state, Lee says, "this is one of the strongest experimental data sets out there that [does] this. What used to just be in theorists' models is a real physical system."

Philip Anderson, a leading theorist, first proposed the concept in 1987, saying that this state could be relevant to high-temperature superconductors, Lee says. "Ever since then, physicists have wanted to make such a state," he adds. "It's only in the past few years that we've made progress."

The material itself is a crystal of a mineral called herbertsmithite. Lee and his colleagues first succeeded in making a large, pure crystal of this material last year - a process that took 10 months - and have since been studying its properties in detail.

"This was a multidisciplinary collaboration, with physicists and chemists," Lee explains. "You need both ... to synthesize the material and study it with advanced physics techniques. Theorists were also crucial to this."

Through its experiments, the team made a significant discovery, Lee says: They found a state with fractionalized excitations, which had been predicted by some theorists but was a highly controversial idea. While most matter has discrete quantum states whose changes are expressed as whole numbers, this QSL material exhibits fractional quantum states. In fact, the researchers found that these excited states, called spinons, form a continuum. This observation, they say in their Nature paper, is "a remarkable first."
Scattering neutrons
To measure this state, the team used a technique called neutron scattering, which is Lee's specialty. To actually carry out the measurements, they used a neutron spectrometer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md.

The results, Lee says, are "really strong evidence of this fractionalization" of the spin states. "That's a fundamental theoretical prediction for spin liquids that we are seeing in a clear and detailed way for the first time."

It may take a long time to translate this "very fundamental research" into practical applications, Lee says. The work could possibly lead to advances in data storage or communications, he says - perhaps using an exotic quantum phenomenon called long-range entanglement, in which two widely separated particles can instantaneously influence each other's states. The findings could also bear on research into high-temperature superconductors, and could ultimately lead to new developments in that field, he says.

"We have to get a more comprehensive understanding of the big picture," Lee says. "There is no theory that describes everything that we're seeing."

Subir Sachdev, a professor of physics at Harvard University who was not connected with this work, says that these findings, which have been anticipated for decades, "are very significant and open a new chapter in the study of quantum entanglement in many-body systems." The detection of such states, he says, was an "exceptionally difficult task. Young Lee and his group brilliantly overcame these challenges in their beautiful experiment."

In addition to Lee and Han, the work was carried out by J.S. Helton of NIST, research scientist Shaoyan Chu of MIT's Center for Materials Science and Engineering, MIT chemistry professor Daniel Nocera, Jose Rodriguez-Rivera of NIST and the University of Maryland, and Colin Broholm of Johns Hopkins University. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
MIT researchers discover a new kind of magnetism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Following up on earlier theoretical predictions, MIT researchers have now demonstrated experimentally the existence of a fundamentally new kind of magnetic behavior, adding to the two previously known states of magnetism. Ferromagnetism - the simple magnetism of a bar magnet or compass needle - has been known for centuries.

# data[].attributes.headline
1. Article- High-tech Magnet Smashes World Record and Opens New Frontiers in Tech

# data[].attributes.subject
1. Article- High-tech Magnet Smashes World Record and Opens New Frontiers in Tech

# data[].attributes.body
This is an article about how the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) made the most powerful superconducting magnet in the world. It is 33% more powerful  than the last magnet to hold the world record. It's 1000 times stronger than the average refrigerator magnet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In brief: The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory has created the world's most powerful superconducting magnet. Named 32 T, it's 33 percent more powerful than the previous record-holding magnet, and thousands of times stronger than refrigerator magnets.
BACK ON TOP

The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (National MagLab) is no stranger to breaking records. In August, the team took back the title of "world's strongest resistive magnet" - after losing it in 2014 - with their Project 11 magnet that reached 41.4 teslas, a unit of magnetic field strength. On December 8, they came back once again to set a new record: this time, for the world's most powerful superconducting magnet.

Their new superconducting magnet, created in the MagLab Tallahassee facility, created a magnetic field of 32 teslas, making it nearly 33 percent stronger than the magnet that held the previous record (and giving it the nickname of "32T"). For reference, that's 3000 times stronger than the magnets we put on our refrigerators. According to MagLab, the world record set last week represents one of the biggest improvements made in the last 40 years.

"This is a transformational step in magnet technology, a true revolution in the making," said Greg Boebinger, MagLab Director, in a press release. "Not only will this state-of-the-art magnet design allow us to offer new experimental techniques here at the lab, but it will boost the power of other scientific tools such as X-rays and neutron scattering around the world."

ADVANCED PHYSICS

Superconductors are already vital to the operation of a range of different devices, from MRI machines to high-speed transportation systems, and nuclear fusion reactors to enormous particle colliders. This superconducting magnet is therefore expected to help advance research in several areas, including physics, chemistry, biology, and quantum matter. To help facilitate its use, MagLab is allowing scientists from around the world to apply for the opportunity to use it.

The team doesn't intend to stop at 32 teslas, however. One day, the superconducting magnet may be as powerful as the lab's record-breaking resistive magnet, though MagLab engineer Huub Weijers - who oversaw the magnet's construction - foresees magnets going even further beyond that.

"We've opened up an enormous new realm," said Weijers in the press release. "I don't know what that limit is, but it's beyond 100 teslas. The required materials exist. It's just technology and dollars that are between us and 100 teslas."
"New Superconducting Magnet Smashes World Record" was originally published by Futurism, LLC on Dec. 19, 2017 by Kyree Leary. Copyright 2017. Futurism, LLC. All rights reserved.
FOLLOW NBC NEWS MACH ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, AND INSTAGRAM.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
High-tech magnet smashes world record and opens new frontiers in tech

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In brief: The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory has created the world's most powerful superconducting magnet. Named 32 T, it's 33 percent more powerful than the previous record-holding magnet, and thousands of times stronger than refrigerator magnets. The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (National MagLab) is no stranger to breaking records.

# data[].attributes.body
- 3 posts
- 4 comments
- You can answer question
- Do this after launcher

# data[].attributes.headline
1. Article- Rare glimpse of a black hole’s magnetic field could help us to understand how it feeds 

# data[].attributes.subject
1. Article- Rare glimpse of a black hole’s magnetic field could help us to understand how it feeds 

# data[].attributes.body
This is a super interesting article about how scientists tracked the magnetic waves next to a black hole  (one that is close to the Milky Way Galaxy) and discovered a quite weak magnetic force- only 10 times stronger than a regular kitchen magnet. There is a hot halo of charged particles held in place by a magnetic field around the black hole. This is surprising because discoveries of strong gamma rays had suggested a super strong, large-scale magnetic field

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Encountering a black hole would be a frightening prospect for our planet. We know that these cosmic monsters ferociously devour any object that strays too close to their "event horizon" - the last chance of escape. But even though black holes drive some of the most energetic phenomena in the universe, the physics of their behaviour, including how they feed, remains hotly debated.

In particular, the conditions close to the black hole and the role of its magnetic fields are thought to be key, but are notoriously difficult to probe in distant cosmic systems. Now an international team of astronomers have for the first time measured the precise magnetic field properties close to a black hole in our own Milky Way galaxy.

The results of study, published in Science, could help us better understand the mysterious process by which black holes swallow matter and grow.

Predicted mathematically from Einstein's theory of general relativity, we now think that black holes come in a range of sizes. Supermassive black holes - with a million to a billion times the mass of our sun and about the size of our solar system in extent - are thought to lie at the heart of all massive galaxies and are likely to play a decisive role in the formation and evolution of galaxies.

ESO/M. Kornmesser, CC BY-SA

At the other extreme, there are black holes just a little more massive than our sun but contained in a region only a few kilometres across. They form in the cataclysmic death throes of massive stars or the merger of dense stellar remnants such as neutron stars or a neutron star colliding with another stellar black hole. When they merge, they produce gravitational waves.

Studies of gamma ray bursts (bursts of light with very high energy) have previously suggested that large-scale magnetic fields could form close to black holes and cause jets of charged gas to escape from them. A similar mechanism is expected for supermassive black hole systems, which launch jets that spread over distances of millions of light years and are visible to networks of radio telescopes such as the Very Large Array. However, even the nearest supermassive black hole is nearly 30,000 light years away from us, so it is technically challenging to probe their magnetic fields.

Cosmic burp

Till Credner/wikimedia

The new study looks at a black hole that lies only 8,000 light years from Earth, part of a "binary system", dubbed V404 Cygni. This consists of a black hole with the mass of ten suns and a star similar to our own sun (but slightly cooler), which orbit each other every 6.5 days. In such systems, material from the star can fall towards the companion black hole to be gradually swallowed by it.

On its journey, the matter heats up, shines brightly and - in the presence of magnetic fields - some of it may be ejected back into space in the form of a focused beam of charged gas (plasma) or jets at bulk speeds close to that of light. Exactly how the magnetic fields cause this effect is still unknown. Luckily, the flares tend to be long-lived and their brightness can be monitored from Earth.

On June 15, 2015, V404 Cygni produced such an outburst - analogous to flares seen from the sun - that lasted for two weeks. The team, which immediately pointed a number of different telescopes at it, then noticed that the brightness of the system decreased suddenly and unexpectedly around June 25 across light frequencies ranging from X-rays to infrared.

They realised that this precipitous drop in brightness signalled that the system was cooling. By comparing this drop in brightness with models that predict how electrons produce light and lose energy - cool - when they spiral around magnetic field lines, the team were able to make a very precise estimate of the strength of the magnetic field. At 461 Gauss (a measurement of magnetism), this is much weaker than expected - only ten times stronger than a typical fridge magnet.

By studying how the properties of the light depended on frequency and time, they showed that the region from which the light was emitted was not expanding, as would be expected if the matter in this region formed part of a jet outflow. Instead, the research shows that there is a hot halo of charged particles held in place by a magnetic field around the black hole. The long-term fate of this halo gas is unknown, but it could be considered one of the last staging posts for fuel to reach the black hole and, if cooled further, may ultimately feed the black hole itself.

This work is important as it lays the foundations for future studies of this intriguing system to discover how black holes feed and how, if overfed, they may "burp" by launching focused beams or jets. Fortunately, V404 Cygni is sufficiently close to be an ideal laboratory for future studies of black hole feeding and cosmic indigestion, but far enough from Earth not to be a threat to us.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rare glimpse of a black hole's magnetic field could help us to understand how it feeds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Encountering a black hole would be a frightening prospect for our planet. We know that these cosmic monsters ferociously devour any object that strays too close to their "event horizon" - the last chance of escape. But even though black holes drive some of the most energetic phenomena in the universe, the physics of their behaviour, including how they feed, remains hotly debated.