Gadgetory

you might think that magnetism might only matter to three kinds of people physics professors the refrigerator industry and insane clown posse fans but magnetic forces are actually responsible for so many things that we take for granted in modern life including that sweet gaming rig next to you and that phone in your back pocket now for a long time electricity and magnetism were thought to be unrelated phenomena but as our scientific understanding evolved over the years we found that electricity and magnetism were part of the same fundamental force called you guessed it electromagnetism one of the four basic forces that make just about everything in the universe possible now every electric current produces a magnetic field from the tiny traces on your motherboard to huge high-voltage power lines that carry electricity across great distances but this effect is usually weak enough that is not obvious or impactful so when we want to harness magnetism so we can actually do useful stuff with it the conventional way to achieve this is to loop a wire carrying a current around and around many times in order to concentrate the magnetic field then if you want to get really fancy with a nice strong magnet you can loop the wire around a magnetic core iron is great for this this is a pretty simple concept but it forms the basis for many modern electromagnets making the electromagnetic force an incredibly versatile tool especially since you can control how strong the magnet is simply by changing the number of turns or coils of wire or by adjusting how much electricity is flowing through them but Linus all I've ever seen electromagnets used for is picking up cars or scrap metal at the junkyard how is that relevant to me well for starters that hard drive that's probably clicking away inside your computer right now relies on electromagnets to read and write data it has tiny little heads that look like the needle arm on a record player that are really just small electromagnets that orient the magnetic Maine's in the spinning hard drive platter a certain way as it flies past to represent the zeros and ones of data the current hard drives rely on thin films rather than conventional coils for writing yay progress on to another example what if all that computer use has led to some sort of repetitive strain injury well your doctor might use magnetic resonance imaging that are known as MRI to have a look at the inside of your hand this works by using a very strong magnetic fields to excite protons in your body which then actually give off radio waves that can be captured to form an image and then when you're done with your imaging and it's time to go home the ease of varying the strength of an electromagnet as I mentioned before has even made travel via maglev train possible electromagnetics attached to the bottoms of these trains push the entire train up and forward allowing them to hover over a metal rail and in doing so travel without friction so thanks to this the fastest maglev trains today can travel at 270 miles or 430 kilometers per hour fast enough to rival some turboprop airliners but even if you've never ridden a maglev or had to stick an appendage in an MRI machine you've still benefited from electromagnets as they actually supply nearly all of the world's electricity whether most of your country's energy comes from coal oil hydroelectric solar wind or nuclear almost all power plants eventually convert whatever kind of energy source they use into mechanical energy they use that to drive a turbine which spins a coil of wire surrounded by a large powerful you guessed it magnet this causes an electrical current to flow through the wire which is sent to the electrical grid and ultimately to your house so while watching this episode of tech quickie isn't exactly the same as getting your PhD in physics hopefully you now understand the fundamentals of electromagnets and how do and you didn't even need to talk to a scientist to do it speaking of 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