Question: whats so important about magnets and why do we need them, and is it an essential to make them using unusual properties?

Fiona Coomer answered on 18 Jun 2013:

Magnets are incredibly important, particularly due to the relationship between electricity and magnetism, discovered by Faraday. All the data stored on your computer hard drive, or on your phone, is stored by magnetising tiny magnetic domains on the disc. Part of the research into magnetic materials is directed towards trying to make these domains much smaller, so that computers could be made much more powerful than they are at the moment.

The behaviour of magnetic atoms in a solid is a bit like the way atoms behave, forming different phases, a bit like solid, liquid and gas. There is even the magnetic equivalent of glass (spin glass) and other more unusual phases. Understanding these can help us understand how atoms interact with each other, and who knows what this will help us to understand!