Happy Valentine's Day from the magnetite world. Submitted by Lucía Gutiérrez, UWA, Perth, Australia and ICMM, Madrid, Spain.

Deep-Sea Vents Dispense Nutritious Pyrite Nanoparticles! Click HERE for the full story

Magnetic fields around the sun.

Well coated superparamagnetic nanoparticles make beautiful ferrofluids (right), while less stable ones (left) agglomerate in high salt concentrations (e.g., blood!) under the influence of an applied magnetic field. This movie is from Prof Etelka Tombacz at the University of Szeged in Hungary (2010).

Separation and subsequent culturing of MCF-7 breast cancer cells on self-assembled protein-coated magnetic beads in a microfluidic chip. By Sivagnanam and Gijs et al.

Micrograph of a vesicle which includes about 20 superparamagnetic
beads being chained up. Such particles might be useful for micromixing. By Franke et al 2009.

SEM (a,b,c) and TEM micrographs (d,e) of superparamagnetic nanostructures of %u03B1-Fe2O3 taken by Cao et al 2009..

Interesting scan of a magnetite crystal.

Levitation of a chaperoned droplet with a magnet. The adhesive and magnetic forces in the porous Si chaperones are sufficient to allow pick up and placement of a 2%u20134 mm diameter aqueous droplet. Dorvee J, Sailor M, Miskelly G (2008). Dalton Trans 6, 721-730.

Neutron lauegram of the first chemically and magnetically chiral molecular magnet (Clara Gonzalez and Fernando Palacio).

Transportation of magnetic particles in a staircase pattern of magnetic cylinders (2x6x0.1 µm) in an applied rotating magnetic field. Movie by Klas Gunnarsson et al., Adv Mater 2005, 17, 1730-1734

Magnetic 2 µm polymer cubes were made using the PRINT technology (particle replication in non-wetting templates) by K.P. Herlihy and J.M. DeSimone, Proc. SPIE 6517, 651737 (2007).

Many magnetic iron oxides have distinct coloures, as shown in these colour tables from Cornell & Schwertmann 2003.

3D MRI reconstruction of mouse brain following injection of magnetically labeled neural stem cells shows widespread dissemination of cells throughout the brain (courtesy of Piotr Walczak and Jeff Bulte).

Magnetic separation on a chip is nicely shown by this movie that you see after clicking on the chip! High field gradients along the magnetizable strips efficiently separate the particles. Courtesy of Sang-Hyun Oh, University of Minnesota.

Incorporating magnetic nanoparticles into a spider silk "beam" led to a magnetically responsive structure (magnet held above the silk) (Jiamei Bai et al, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada).

The magnetic stent, presented at our conference in Lyon, demonstrates that magnetic microspheres carrying therapeutic substances can be delivered to magnetized cardiovascular implants by simple intra-arterial injection (Benjamin Yellen et al 2004).

These pictures are on our 2006 conference poster. They show magnetic coils on a silicon chip and were developed by Dr. Qasem Ramadan, Nanyang University, Singapore.