The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. All the magnets you have ever interacted with, such as the tchotchkes stuck to your refrigerator door, are magnetic for the same reason. But what if there were another, stranger way to make a material magnetic? In 1966, the Japanese …
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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Our planet is doomed. In a few billion years, the sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel and swell into a red giant—a star so big it will scorch, blacken and swallow up the inner planets. While red giants are bad …
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The world relies on electromagnetic waves for communications: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 5G, even radio waves. But suppose you want to prevent a device from communicating—or interfering—with the rest of the world. You can't block EM waves, but you can cancel them by surrounding the device with an electrically conducting material. We …
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