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Magnetotactic bacteria were first discovered back in 1975. They're microbes that orient themselves along magnetic fields, thanks to their compartments of tiny magnetic nanocrystals called magnetesomes (the orange circles in the picture above), which force the bacteria into magnetic alignment. Unlike larger animals that navigate along magnetic fields, these bacteria can't control their actions - even when they die, they remain perfectly aligned with magnetic lines. Even though we know these creatures have existed for billions of years, we've yet to truly understand how they produce those nanocrystals. More »
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Scientists at the University of Delaware added magnetic nanoparticles to soap bubbles to be able to manipulate their thickness, their color, and their motion. Take a look at the rainbow effect they created above, and check out a short black and white film of a bubble kissing a magnet while tiny liquid particles whirl inside it. More »
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If case you haven't seen it yet, here's the quantum levitation (or, more accurately, quantum locking) video that's taken the internet by storm in the last 36 hours. More »
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Over the last few decades, cloaking devices have come closer and closer to becoming reality. Scientists have masked objects from the human eye using various metamaterials. They've created sonic invisibility barriers. They've even masked heat. And now they may be able to cloak a magnetic field, too. More »
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Truth serums are something of a staple in scifi and fantasy. They even exist in real life. But now, scientists have found a new way to induce spontaneous truth telling: magnetic fields. What's more, these fields can not only increase your propensity to tell the truth — they can also turn you into a liar. More »
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Sometimes, you want to feel like a secret agent. You don't actually want to be one, since that involves danger (and probably having to run a lot and get up early in the morning), but you want to feel like one. Here's a super-sneaky way to ‘read' a credit card. More »
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One of the wonderful things about science is that it often accomplishes things that you didn't even think were possible in the service of doing things you would never think to do in the first place. A great example of this is the gyrotheodolite, an instrument that lets you navigate underground, by using the rotation of the earth to pick out direction. More »
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Joseph Shoer of Cornell University has built a levitating model spacecraft to demonstrate how a tractor beam could potentially work in real life. In the video, Shoer uses a "ludicrous" neodymium magnet to manipulate his non-ferromagnetic model which floats on air. Says Shoer of his experiment: More »
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Magnets, as most people know, are always dipoles: each magnet has both a north and a south pole. But a team of German scientists has generated a previously only theoretical magnetic feature: a magnetic monopole. More »
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The Large Hadron Collider at the CERN research facility near Geneva, Switzerland won't be going on a luau in Hawaii anytime soon, since the state is suing to stop the activation of the enormous research project. Yes, it's not just individual wackos who believe the LHC will unleash a cosmic ass-whooping on the planet. An actual state is suing the builders to keep them from activating it. They fear it'll let loose runaway miniature black holes, strangelets, or magnetic monopoles that will destroy the planet. The researchers at CERN have spent their precious time trying to assure people that won't happen, although it would be kind of cool if it did. We've got the strange and winding history of this project in today's Triviagasm. More »
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