First off, we recorded on Zoom ( I KNOW it's ). Sorry about the sound quality. Trace is working on a new platform for us. But okay, magnets! You asked & we are here to demystify those wacky magnets you've got stuck all over your fridge.

Show notes:

US Energy Information Administration magnetism explanation with diagrams

Magnets and repelling sharks!

YouTube sharks vs magnets!

Jenny Lawson and her experience with transcranial magnetic stimulation

More info on the science of magnets and your brain from the Mayo Clinic

Frontiers in Zoology: Dogs and pooping on the north south axis...maybe

NASA archive on the history of magnetism

Advanced Functional Materials paper on magnets used to clean oil spills

Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) collab on Another paper on magnets and oil

Transcript

[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to Brain junk. I'm Amy Barton.

[00:00:05] Speaker B: And I'm Trace Kerr. And today is everything you never knew you wanted to know about how magnets work.

[00:00:13] Speaker A: Magnets, how they work.

[00:00:15] Speaker B: My eldest, Anson, his friend Rand, we were talking and he's like, I've listened to the podcast and I want to know, how do magnets work?

[00:00:22] Speaker A: It does the long pause here. Usually I've got banter, there's a gear grind here. I'm like, I feel like I've heard before and there's repelling and attracting, but no, I'm just going to go along for the ride with this one.

[00:00:37] Speaker B: Makes you feel any better. So I googled magnets how, and it was how do magnets get their energy? How does a magnet attract metal? And my favorite, why do magnets exist?

[00:00:52] Speaker A: Feel like they're created too, right?

[00:00:54] Speaker B: I went straight to the US Energy information Administration. Didn't know we had it, but we do same. Let's go back to like 8th and 7th grade. We're heading back to middle school for just a second. So in the middle of an atom, you've got your nucleus and electrons are spinning around it and they're going randomly. It's like a rave, there's music playing, they're going wherever they want to go. And as they spin, each of them is creating a little tiny magnetic field. But because they're all going in random directions, they kind of cancel each other out. Okay, but when you have a magnet, all the atoms have joined into molecules. The molecules make a thing and all of their electrons are spinning in the same direction. So it's like a line dance instead of a mosh pit.

[00:01:39] Speaker A: Yes.

Thank you.

[00:01:42] Speaker B: Okay, and when they're all going in the same direction, it creates a magnetic field and it flows from one end to the other. There's a lot of drawings where they'll have like a rectangle and one end has an n on it and one end has an s on it, north and south, they just kind of say that they're not necessarily...

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