Cut a magnet in half and you get two complete magnets

Anecdota
Cut a magnet in half and you get two complete magnets
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⚛️Science

Cut a magnet in half and you get two complete magnets

You cannot separate a north pole from a south pole: every piece of a broken magnet instantly has both, right down to the atomic scale. Magnetism comes from the motion and spin of electrons, which are tiny magnets themselves. Some theories predict an isolated magnetic monopole, but despite decades of searching, nobody has ever observed one.

Encyclopaedia Britannica
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⚛️Science

Liquid oxygen is blue and sticks to magnets

Cooled below −183 °C, oxygen turns into a pale blue liquid. Pour it between the poles of a strong magnet and, instead of flowing away, it hangs suspended between them. The reason lies in its unpaired electrons, which respond to the magnetic field. Liquid nitrogen, by contrast, is colourless and pours straight through.

Royal Society of Chemistry
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⚛️Science

A man broke the sound barrier with no vehicle at all

In 2012, Felix Baumgartner jumped from a capsule hanging beneath a balloon, about 39 kilometres up. In that extremely thin air almost nothing slowed him down, and he reached around 1,358 km/h in free fall, or Mach 1.25. He became the first person to exceed the speed of sound with nothing but his own body.

Guinness World Records