Superconductors, Mobius Strips, and Rare Earth Magnets...

What more could a geek want?

Magnetic Memory Breakthrough...

Those geeks of a certain age may remember magnetic bubble memories, which stored data in tiny magnetic domains stored on thin magnetic films.  Flash memory completely overwhelmed it, partly because of the much lower energy requirements (which translates into much higher density) of flash.  Now scientists at MIT has made a surprising advance that might just bring back the bubbles: they've figured out how to reduce the energy required to form and move magnetic bubbles by a factor of at least 10,000. 

This will likely have an impact in other areas as well, including magnetic disk storage (“hard disks”) and magnetic tape storage.  It isn't clear to me that this discovery will also result in an areal density improvement, something the storage industry is always looking for...

Cool!

Take a short length of ordinary copper pipe, and a small stack of powerful neodymium magnets.  Drop the magnets through the pipe, and watch them fall far more slowly than usual.  Why?  Magnetic braking due to the induced eddy currents in the pipe.  Awesome!

This is a Big Deal...

High coercivity magnets without rare earth elements.  If this discovery turns out to be scalable to industrial volumes, it will remove a huge strategic natural resource advantage that China has today...