The Many Adventures of Magnets

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) is more than just a loud scanner! Doctors use it to look inside your body, neuroscientists can explore your brain and thoughts, and chemists –like me– to understand how drugs work or why some plants don’t freeze. In this talk we will go beyond medical scans. Join me on a journey inside tissues to observe the molecules in motion and to learn about the future in diagnosis and therapies. Together we will discover how NMR reveals the invisible.

What happens if you hold a magnet up to a glass of water? It’s not a trick question – nothing at all! Now imagine that water had thousands of tiny little magnets floating around in it. What would happen if we held a magnet up to that? Liquids containing tiny magnets are called ferrofluids and they have all sorts of weird and wonderful properties. More importantly, they have some incredible applications, ranging from rocket fuel to cancer treatments! Join me for a crash course in all things ferrofluid, and the story of my mathematical quest to find the ferrofluid doughnut.