Magnet

A magnet (from Greek μαγνήτις λίθος magnḗtis líthos, "Magnesian stone") is a material or object that produces a magnetic field. This magnetic field is invisible but is responsible for the most notable property of a magnet: a force that pulls on other ferromagnetic materials, such as iron, and attracts or repels other magnets.

A permanent magnet is an object made from a material that is magnetized and creates its own persistent magnetic field. An everyday example is a refrigerator magnet used to hold notes on a refrigerator door. Materials that can be magnetized, which are also the ones that are strongly attracted to a magnet, are called ferromagnetic (or ferrimagnetic). These include iron, nickel, cobalt, some alloys of rare earth metals, and some naturally occurring minerals such as lodestone. Although ferromagnetic (and ferrimagnetic) materials are the only ones attracted to a magnet strongly enough to be commonly considered magnetic, all other substances respond weakly to a magnetic field, by one of several other types of magnetism.

Magnets (album)

Magnets was The Vapors' second album, released in 1981.

Description

The album continued The Vapors' dark themes, taking them to a slightly darker level, with "Jimmie Jones" being about Jim Jones, "Isolated Case" about state oppression and disillusionment with politics, "Civic Hall" about the assault Dave suffered at the hands of overzealous Metropolitan Policemen, "Spiders" and "Can't Talk Anymore" about mental illness, and the title track being about the assassinations of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. Even those songs about relations - "Daylight Titans", "Johnny's In Love (Again)" and "Lenina" are tinged with an edge of being in a suffocating society and a malevolent state apparatus.

The cover was designed by Martin Handford, later famous for his Where's Wally? books, depicting an assassination scene close up, but from a distance, looks like a man's eye. If you look on the roof at the top right of the album cover, the assassin can be seen putting away his sniper rifle.

Despite positive reviews (particularly for the second single "Jimmie Jones" and the epic final track "Magnets"), the album spent far fewer weeks in the UK chart than the previous New Clear Days, possibly as a result of the lack of promotion on the part of their record label. The United Artists record company had been bought out by EMI in 1980 and later renamed Liberty; many of the bands who came across as part of the deal complained of poor treatment by their disinterested new owner.

Magnets (song)

"Magnets" is a song by British electronic duo Disclosure featuring vocals from New Zealand singer Lorde. The single was released on 23 September 2015, under PMR Records and Island Records, as the third promotional single from their studio album Caracal. The track became Disclosure most successful hit in Australia and New Zealand, peaking at No. 14 and No. 2 respectively becoming their highest charting single on both countries. In the US, "Magnets" became their first single to impact alternative radio and adult alternative radio, placing at #21 on the Rock Airplay chart and #17 on the Alternative Songs chart, with the single being officially released to alternative radio on 10 November 2015.

Disclosure and Lorde performed the song on Saturday Night Live on 14 November 2015.

Magnets was voted in at number 10 in Australian alternative youth radio station Triple J's Hottest 100 countdown of 2015's most popular songs, announced on 26 January 2016.

Critical reception

'Magnets' garnered very positive reviews from critics. Rolling Stone ranked "Magnets" at number 32 on its year-end list to find the 50 best songs of 2015, calling it "the year's most understated dance-world magic". Conversely, Michaelangelo Matos of Billboard called the tune "mildly memorable".

Cobalt

Cobalt is a chemical element with symbol Co and atomic number 27. Like nickel, cobalt in the Earth's crust is found only in chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, silver-gray metal.

Cobalt-based blue pigments (cobalt blue) have been used since ancient times for jewelry and paints, and to impart a distinctive blue tint to glass, but the color was later thought by alchemists to be due to the known metal bismuth. Miners had long used the name kobold ore (German for goblin ore) for some of the blue-pigment producing minerals; they were so named because they were poor in known metals, and gave poisonous arsenic-containing fumes upon smelting. In 1735, such ores were found to be reducible to a new metal (the first discovered since ancient times), and this was ultimately named for the kobold.

Today, some cobalt is produced specifically from various metallic-lustered ores, for example cobaltite (CoAsS), but the main source of the element is as a by-product of copper and nickel mining. The copper belt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic and Zambia yields most of the cobalt mined worldwide.

Cobalt (video game)

Cobalt is an action-oriented side-scrolling video game in development by Oxeye Game Studio and published by Mojang. It was released on February 2, 2016 for Microsoft Windows. In addition to the computer versions, a port is being developed for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One.

Gameplay

Cobalt features several different game modes that are available, such as Capture the Plug (a variation of capture the flag), Deathmatch, TeamStrike (with one life each, inspired by Counter-Strike), Survival, and an upcoming Adventure mode. Along with these features, players can create their own maps with the map editor in-game.

Players play as the main character, known as Cobalt. Some key mechanics of the game include bullet time, rolling (to deflect bullets) and punching which can deal damage and knock back explosives. All of which a player can combo together to produce an advanced level of play.

Development

Alpha

Cobalt was released in its alpha stage of development. Updates to subsequent versions of the game are free. The alpha version was initially solely available for the Windows operating system. A Mac OS X version was released on June 27, 2013, but the game was re-announced as a Xbox 360, Xbox One and Windows 10 exclusive in Gamescom 2014.

Cobalt blue

Cobalt blue is a blue pigment made by sintering cobalt(II) oxide with alumina at 1200 °C. Chemically, cobalt blue pigment is cobalt(II) oxide-aluminium oxide, or cobalt(II) aluminate, CoAl₂O₄. Cobalt blue is lighter and less intense than the (iron-cyanide based) pigment Prussian blue. It is extremely stable and has historically been used as a coloring agent in ceramics, (especially Chinese porcelain), jewelry, and paint. Transparent glasses are tinted with the silica-based cobalt pigment smalt.

Historical uses and production

Cobalt blue in impure forms had long been used in Chinese porcelain, but it was independently discovered as a pure alumina-based pigment by Louis Jacques Thénard in 1802. Commercial production began in France in 1807. The first recorded use of cobalt blue as a color name in English was in 1777. The leading world manufacturer of cobalt blue in the 19th century was Benjamin Wegner's Norwegian company Blaafarveværket, ("blue colour works" in Dano-Norwegian). Germany was also famous for production, especially the blue colour works (Blaufarbenwerke) in the Ore Mountains of Saxony.