One of the most frequent recommendations we receive when we feel a bit under the weather is to eat foods rich in iron. We've even seen solutions like The Lucky Iron Fish, which aims to combat iron-deficiency anemia in Cambodia. Having a good level of iron in your blood is definitely healthy, but what happens if that iron is exposed to a super neodymium magnet weighing 12 kilograms...?
One of the most memorable moments in the film X2 (the second in the X-Men saga) is when Magneto escapes from his prison by extracting the iron from the blood of the guard that Mystique had previously injected him with. The scene makes us wonder how the guard survived the initial injection, but also raises another question: why doesn't Magneto always do that with the blood of his enemies in the first place?
I imagine Marvel fans and friends of Eric might have some suggestions, however, in real life we discover that the average human body does not contain a large amount of iron: 4 grams in men and 3.5 grams in women. A little more than half is in hemoglobin, whose formula contains barely four iron atoms [C(2952)H(4664)O(832)N(812)S(8)Fe(4)].
But four grams are four grams, and if we use a super neodymium magnet, what happens? As you can see in this recent video on the Brainiac75 YouTube channel, not what we expected. The magnetic properties of iron atoms are not always the same, and that is demonstrated in his experiment with matches.
Now, when doing a similar test with pig blood, not even his 12-kilogram monster (which you can see in action below) seems to have an effect. After placing a little blood in a small cup on a piece of polystyrene floating in water, the surprise came: the blood is repelled by the magnet.
Why do we see that reaction when there is actually a little iron? The key lies in hemoglobin, which, when oxygenated, becomes diamagnetic, and becomes paramagnetic only in the absence of oxygen. The presence of oxygenated hemoglobin in venous blood is from 96 to 99 percent, while in arterial blood it ranges between 60 and 80 percent. If we add the fact that water in our blood is also diamagnetic, the repulsion between blood and the super magnet is logical.
