The article's title is misleading: they actually mean a new kind of permanent magnet (that was theoretically predicted but hadn't been observed until now), not a new kind of magnetism (as in, something not predicted or accounted for by our existing theory of electromagnetism).

Spintronics, which these magnets might be useful for, have several potential advantages for low power, speed and quantum coherence for quantum computing.

So a very nice discovery. Love how we keep finding strange new useful modes of matter at “the bottom”.

Computing substrates are far from reaching any kind of final form or limit.

Here's a nice non-paywalled article on this:

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-altermagnetism-experimentally....

Whatever happened to "bubble memory"?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory

So in the future Arm vs x86 flame wars will be replaced by spintronic vs quantum vs carbon vs optical computers flame wars.

Does this enable hover-boot, hover-tech capabilities yet?

article limit paywall: any workaround?

Magnets - We thought we knew how they worked.

Spintronic effects is how Saturn is a natural, planet-sized computer.

I thought we had long since established that magnetism is illusory, an artifact of special relativity.

But it seems like a thin film of this stuff would be a good thing to skim an electron beam over, if you wanted some extremely short-waved photons.