The magnetic material reacts to the magnetic field applied to it

Jul 19, 2013 21:36 GMT  ·  By

Nanotechnology and self-assembling robots are the stuff of sci-fi movies or nightmares, depending on your perspective. This kind of technology would change everything, from how stuff is made to how we recover from illnesses.

However, things like that are still a few decades away, hopefully not that many.

In the meantime, we can at least marvel at some of the progress made with liquid magnets that arrange themselves in patterns depending on the strength of the magnetic field applied to them.

A new study by researchers ParisTech and Aalto University, published in the journal Science, looked at the various ways magnetic fluids can be manipulated.

"A ferrofluid droplet on a superhydrophobic surface is subjected to increasing magnetic field of a cylindrical permanent magnet. This results in division into numerous daughter droplets that form different static self-assembled patterns to minimize their total energy," Robin Ras, one of the researchers, described the video above.