Natural magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic, ever-changing geometries as scientists from NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory excitedly describe their discoveries.

Animal Magnetoreception
Magnetic sensing, perhaps because it is a type of sensory perception inaccessible to humans, has long captivated the human imagination. Over the past 50 years, scientific studies have shown that a wide variety of living organisms have the ability to perceive magnetic fields and can use information from the earth’s magnetic field in orientation […]

Led by Matthew Rosen, a visiting scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian center, and Ronald Walsworth, a senior lecturer in physics at Harvard, the researchers built an MRI scanner that images how gas flows through the lungs and how much oxygen is being absorbed throughout lung tissue. They’ve used the system to study how lung function differs […]

John Kitching, physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, CO, is developing small, low-power magnetic sensors almost as sensitive as traditional large devices used to detect magnetic fields. About the size of an Advil, the sensors are called atomic magnetometers.

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The ability to control the dynamics of magnetic materials is critical to high-performance electronic devices such as magnetic field sensors and magnetic recording media. In a computer’s magnetic storage—like a hard disk—a logical bit is represented by a group of atoms whose electron “spins” all are oriented in a particular direction, creating a minute magnetic […]