The Chinese Are a Magnet Superpower

Have you heard? The U.S. is losing the magnet race! Alert the media, tell the president! When America is no longer the magnet superpower, what's left?

While it might seem like an innocuous honor to lose, it's actually kind of a big deal thatengineers in China have created the world's strongest, biggest magnetic fieldof its kind. And they didn't just do it to make sure their strips of photo booth pictures stay firmly attached to the fridge.

Nope, we use magnets for a lot more these days. From powering the particles zipping around theLarge Hadron Colliderto helping usexplore Marsand create powerful MRI images, magnets are often leading advances in human thought and discovery. So when Chinese engineers announced they had built the biggestsuperconducting magnetbore that could generate thehighest magnetic fields然而,它的大小,它是一个漂亮big deal — even though the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in the U.S. also has notchedsomewinslately.

One of the challenges of these magnets is that themore powerful the magnet, the more narrow the bore. (The bore is the round tube where, for instance, an MRI patient goes.) This is a problem if you're trying to build a crazy precise MRI machine; you obviously need to fit a patient or at least a part of a patient in that hole.

So the Chinese have created a superconducting magnet that has a very wide bore of just over 36 inches (920 millimeters), with a 10 Tesla power. Quick refresher: Tesla and gauss are units that denote the strength of a magnetic field. There are 10,000 gauss in 1 Tesla. The magnet you stick on your refrigerator is 100 gauss,explainsthe folks at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. And while the magnet isn't as powerful as45 Tesla or 36 Teslamagnets, the bore is far bigger. Those have bores of 1.2 inches and 1.5 inches (32 and 44 millimeters), respectively.

While this particular magnet won't be used for MRIs anytime soon, it's a giant step in research toward developing an MRI machine thatcould literally map neurons. Once completed, it'll be available to interested researchers worldwide.