Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

(PhysOrg.com) -- Some physicists today are investigating the possibility of using molecular magnets as information storage units in future quantum computers.

By Nicola Jones of Nature magazine Two scientists from New Zealand will travel to Antarctica on December 28 in a quest to continue a 100-year-long record of Earth's magnetic field: a record begun by British explorer Robert Scott at the start of his ill-fated expedition to the geographic south pole (see "Turning the world upside down "). Record-keeping is necessary because the magnetic poles move about, thanks to the complex circulation of Earth's fluid outer core

By Nicola Jones of Nature magazine Two scientists from New Zealand will travel to Antarctica on December 28 in a quest to continue a 100-year-long record of Earth's magnetic field: a record begun by British explorer Robert Scott at the start of his ill-fated expedition to the geographic south pole (see "Turning the world upside down "). Record-keeping is necessary because the magnetic poles move about, thanks to the complex circulation of Earth's fluid outer core.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Matter in the subatomic realm is, well, a different matter. In the case of strongly correlated phases of matter, one of the most surprising findings has to do with a phenomenon known as the Hall response – an important theoretical and experimental tool for describing emergent charge carriers in strongly correlated systems, examples of which include high temperature superconductors and the quantum Hall effect.

I’ve mentioned magnetic bacteria a couple of times now, so I got quite excited when Lucas Brouwers alerted me to a recent paper in Science (ref below) that explored a whole new group of magnetic bacteria.

The mystery of why Mercury 's magnetic field is so weak may just have been solved: It is being stifled by the solar wind, researchers think. [More]

Researchers use a magnetic field to generate both side-to-side and corkscrew-like motions of tiny robots.

When a researcher asks a volunteer to slide head-first into the open eye of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, the expectation is that the device's magnetic field will penetrate the skull to produce a faithful picture of the brain without changing its behavior.

When a researcher asks a volunteer to slide head-first into the open eye of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, the expectation is that the device's magnetic field will penetrate the skull to produce a faithful picture of the brain without changing its behavior. A new study suggests, however, that MRI machines do, in fact, manipulate brain activity--and they change the brain in a way that helps treat depression. In other words, MRIs may be unintentional antidepressants

In a paper published Nov. 2 in Nature Communications, a team of researchers led by University of Maryland's Ichiro Takeuchi, in collaboration with Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource's Apurva Mehta, reported the discovery of large magnetostriction in an iron/cobalt alloy — in other words, the alloy shows a mechanical strain when a magnetic field is applied.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Every vehicle has a magnetic field, and researchers have now found that a vehicle’s magnetic field has an inverse relationship with distance at small distances. The relationship provides a way to estimate a vehicle’s position using its magnetic field when the vehicle is less than a few meters away, which could be useful for detecting imminent collisions just before they occur.

(PhysOrg.com) -- For many years, scientists have known about the magnetoelectric effect, in which an electric field can induce and control a magnetic field, and vice versa. In this effect, the electric field has always been homogeneous

A team led by Dr.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory's Pulsed Field Facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory have set a new world record for the strongest magnetic field produced by a nondestructive magnet.

At the heart of most celestial objects is a dynamo. The Earth's dynamo, spun to life in the molten metal core of our planet, generates a magnetic field that helps us find north and, perhaps more critically, shields us from solar winds that would otherwise singe our planet.