In the air people breathe, the water on Earth, the stars in the sky and more, atoms are the building blocks that make up the ...

Researchers have uncovered friction without contact—driven entirely by magnetic interactions. As two magnetic layers slide, their internal forces compete, causing constant rearrangements that ...

It sounds absurd, but a tiny donut-shaped magnet helped reveal that something physicists treated like a mathematical shortcut ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Amid the roilings of the Milky Way, immense pockets of gas coalesce into clouds where stars are born. In this process, there is a hidden ...

In the beginning, there was no magnetism. Immediately after the Big Bang, the universe contained an awesomely hot cloud of electrically charged protons, electrons, helium and lithium nuclei. Each ...

Scientists at ETH Zurich have discovered a new type of magnetism. Experiments show that an artificially produced material becomes magnetic through a mechanism that hasn’t been seen before. The most ...

I have a confession: I'm obsessed with magnets. We rely on magnets every day, but seldom give them a second thought. There are magnets in your credit card, your cellphone, your car, microwave oven and ...

Widespread magnetism dating from our solar system’s earliest beginnings some 4.57 billion years ago likely played a major role in creating orbital order out of chaos. But until now, magnetism’s role ...

Individual atoms with an odd number of electrons have a magnetic moment from the spin of the unpaired electron. Materials consisting of elements with an even number of electrons—such as carbon, ...