If you’re a fan of the supposedly warmer, richer sound of vinyl, you owe it to yourself to outfit your sound system with gear that does your record collection justice. And as long as you’re not scratching on the side, the turntables that McIntosh has been making for decades will do your analog music proud. Particularly the company’s latest model, the MT5, that magnetically floats its glowing platter for ultra-smooth playback.
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Other than lasers and Elon Musk, magnets might be the most superhuman objects we have on this dear Earth of ours. They can make things fly, they can make things stick, they can demolish laptops, they can make you squeal and scream and feel like a kid. Another thing magnets can do? Make clothes. The two dresses above were "grown" using magnets.
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Mag-guns are pretty impractical, but they’re always fun to fire. Larsplatoon knows first-hand. A few years ago he put together a crazy single-shot coilgun that tore up household appliances one 1.25 kilojoule shot at a time
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Having to sweep up thousands of tiny metal shavings is admittedly a pretty uncommon chore. But doing it by using a super powerful neodymium magnet to just suck it all up and drop it in a box looks like such a freakin’ blast. I’d take that over washing dishes any day.
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The new skunkworks project from Swiss retailer MiCasa—MiCasa Lab—is all about giving scientists, engineers, and crazy people a safe space to work on the types of projects that might otherwise go unsupported due to a lack of "practicality" or "commercial viability" or "any reason for existence whatsoever." And thank god it does—otherwise we might never have had the wonderful, life-affirming pleasure of looking upon this tiny-hat-wearing puppy atop a magic carpet.
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Just because Cern researchers discovered the Higgs Boson particle
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Superconducting magnets are freakin’ awesome. You should know this already
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Our eyeballs are some of our more delicate organs, and the mere thought of them having to be sliced open for surgery is unsettling. So researchers at the Multi-Scale Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich have created a magnetically-guided microbot, barely larger than a few human hairs, that can be embedded in the eye and externally controlled to perform delicate surgery without any part of the patient having to be sliced open.
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Rich Lee has freed himself from the frustrations of misplacing or having to untangle his headphones ever again. How? He’s what’s known as a grinder: someone who experiments with surgical implants or body-enhancements, and he’s come up with a doozie. Implanted in his tragus—the stiff protrusion just in front of your ear canal—is a small magnet that works like an earbud built into his head.
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Magnets are pretty basic – some poles attract, some repel, and you can use them to hold stuff up on your fridge. However, what happens when magnets can be “programmed” to react in different ways? Huntsville, Ala.-based Correlated Magnetics Research has some magnets that can do some amazing – and slightly spooky – things.
These magnets can “hold together” while still not touching, release from each other with a twist, and even act as a sort of magnetic motor. In one cool demo Stephen Straus, VP of CMR, shows us magnets that repel each other from a certain distance and then, when pushed close enough, snap together. Before you run away screaming “perpetual motion machine,” understand that the laws of physics still apply.
CMR essentially programs the magnets as they’re built and the company creates magnetic solutions for companies around the world who need to control torque and movement but want to maintain an “air gap” between metals. Fortunately, they have a web store so we can try these things at home and attempt to build wild, non-intuitive magnetic interaction machines.
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