Age-old and endlessly fascinating, they’re not just for keeping postcards on fridges or sticking behind save-the-dates or sending coins through villainous mutant skulls….
This past month, scientists reveal cool new uses for magnets: destroying tumors and boosting blood flow (but not at the same time).
1. Fry tumors
By injecting mice with tiny magnets and turning up the heat, researchers have eliminated tumors with no apparent side effects.
In May, I wrote about putting the heat on tumors, and now a team led by Jinwoo Cheon of Yonsei University figured out how to kill those cancer cells without harming the body’s own cells – all of which start to die when temps get above 109 F.
Magnetic hyperthermia involves injecting microscopic nanoparticles made of iron into tumors to make them magnetic. Then the patient is put into a magnetic field that reverses direction thousands of times per second. Excited by the applied field, the magnetic nanoparticles begin to get hot. That heats up and destroys the surrounding cancer tissue, but since healthy tissue isn’t altered by the magnetic field, that stays undamaged.
But too many nanoparticles could cause our immune systems to attack. So what Cheon and colleagues did here is create a two-layered nanoparticle of magnetic minerals that heats up hotter – 10 times hotter – than traditional nanoparticles so fewer need to be injected into the body.
Mouse tests (pictured) show that all traces of cancer can disappear in just 10 minutes of being inside a wire coil.
The study was published in Nature Nanotechnology this week. Via ScienceNOW.
2. Prevent heart attacks and strokes
Strong magnetic fields can dramatically reduce the thickness (or viscosity) of blood flowing through a tube. Now, if veins and arteries are simply tubes also, there might one day be a magnetic alternative to blood thinning medicines like aspirin.
High blood viscosity lies behind strokes and heart attacks: thicker blood damages blood vessels, and to repair that damage, the vessels start to build up fatty deposits.
Physicists Rongjia Tao of Temple University and Ke Huang of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, designed a tool that reduces blood viscosity by up to 30% in just 1 minute.
They allowed blood to flow inside an electromagnet producing a field of about 1.3 tesla (magnets of 1 to 3 tesla are used in MRIs), and they arranged the components so that blood flowed in the same direction as the magnetic field lines.
The iron-based hemoglobin in red blood cells aligned the cells along the straight field lines, reducing viscosity by streamlining flow and encouraging cells to stick together, cutting down on surface area and friction.
The research will be published in Physical Review E. Via ScienceNOW.
Images: top from Jae-Hyun Lee et al., lower by Jeff & Paula via Flickr
