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Next > Carbon in the News Again Magnetic carbon has been reported
by experimenter Tatiana Makarova, a Russian scientist working in Sweden. The third
form of carbon, buckyballs, the soccerball-shaped structures containing 60 carbon
atoms created in laboratories, exhibit magnetic properties when compressed at a
million lbs/in2 at a temperature of 1,300 ° F. Only iron, cobalt, nickel
and gadolinium, are naturally ferromagnetic at room temperature, which means they
can be permanently magnetized through exposure to a magnetic field. The complicated
proof of existence for these strange non-metallic magnets, involving quantum mechanics,
the Pauli exclusion principle and Heisenberg theory, is left to the reader as an
exercise.
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