Scientists Set a New Record for Strongest Magnet

Engineers at a lab in Florida have been working quietly for the last two and a half years on building one of the most powerful magnets in the world.

Lab officials said they tested a 41.4-tesla magnet, which is roughly 20 times the strength of a magnet used in medical imaging machines and vastly stronger than the ones that get stuck to the door of a household refrigerator. The Earth's magnetic field, by comparison, is one twenty thousandth (.00005) of a tesla. A tesla is a measure of magnetic field strength.