[Corvettaholic]

So its pretty common knowledge that iron is ferrous, and great for magnets. Plain 'ol iron, just chilling there all by itself. So if you have a compound, such as iron oxide, does the ferrous properties follow the iron? I don't remember if rust is as magnetic as regular iron or not. What else besides iron is ferrous anyways? Dunno if I asked the last question on another thread or not, real short term memory  

[Scratch-]

Iron oxide is magnetic I think but not as much. You can refine iron ore from plain dirt by running a rare earth magnet through it.

[Corvettaholic]

Really? I got some pretty big rare earth magnets I scavenged from a SCSI hard drive. Those things can smash your fingers if you aren't careful! The only compounds I really know that involve iron is well.. iron, and iron oxide. Steel has iron and a bunch of other goodies in it, and thats kinda magnetic too. So maybe ferrous properties DO follow the iron around, but are mitigated by other stuff thats stuck to it. I imagine the oxide portion of iron oxide doesn't want its electron spin messed with unlike iron.

[Scratch-]

I think that’s generally true but there are other magnetic substances.

[Corvettaholic]

When I find out what they are, I want to play with them. Any of them liquid? I think it'd be really neat to mess with liquid magnetics. Some company used to sell some stuff they called ferrofluid that was magnetic, but I don't remember what was in it.

[Scratch-]

I think it was nanoparticles of iron.

[Corvettaholic]

How do you make nanoparticles of anything? Gotta be expensive!

[Scratch-]

I don't know, but you can buy atomized metals.