A research team has developed an innovative manufacturing process for permanent magnets that overcomes the limitations of conventional techniques. The team’s breakthrough significantly advances the diffusion technology, which is essential for improving magnetic performance, and creates new possibilities for applying high-efficiency magnets in eco-friendly industries such as electric vehicles, wind turbines, and robotics.

The findings are published in the Journal of Alloys and Compounds.

The joint research team from the Nano Technology Research Division at DGIST was led by Dr. Donghwan Kim and Dr. Jungmin Kim.

With the rapid growth of the electric vehicle and wind power sectors, the demand for powerful permanent magnets capable of stable operation at high temperatures has soared. A major example is the neodymium (Nd-Fe-B) permanent magnet, widely used in electric vehicle motors. However, these magnets experience a decline in magnetic performance under extreme heat, requiring the addition of heavy rare-earth elements such as terbium (Tb) and dysprosium (Dy) to maintain their strength. The challenge is that these elements are both rare and expensive.

To address this issue, the grain boundary diffusion process has been widely adopted. This technique enhances magnetic performance by infiltrating a small amount of heavy rare-earth material into the magnet’s surface. However, diffusion in this process is limited to the surface layer and does not penetrate into the magnet’s interior, making it difficult to apply to thick magnets.

To overcome this limitation, the research team combined spark plasma sintering, an advanced manufacturing technique, with the grain boundary diffusion process. By pre-mixing the diffusion material during the powder-based magnet fabrication stage, uniform diffusion was achieved throughout the magnet. Consequently, the diffusion depth increased markedly compared with that achieved by existing methods, allowing for the creation of a core–shell structure in which the magnet exhibits uniform and enhanced magnetic performance.

Remarkably, even with the same amount of rare-earth material, the new process achieved higher diffusion efficiency and significantly improved overall performance. This advancement makes it possible to produce magnets that are smaller and lighter while maintaining strong magnetic strength. It is expected to contribute to the miniaturization, weight reduction, and improved energy efficiency of electric vehicle motors. Additionally, the process shows great potential for application to large-scale magnets.

Principal Researcher Dr. Donghwan Kim stated, “This study presents a method that overcomes the limitations of the conventional grain boundary diffusion technology, enabling uniform performance throughout the magnet. It will make a significant contribution to the development of high-performance permanent magnets required in eco-friendly energy industries such as electric vehicles and wind power generation.”

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I mean, I was talking to someone before these recent layoffs who’d worked at the CDC previously and had been pretty involved in efforts to study the impact of certain diseases or pandemics specifically on pregnant populations, and this person had told me a while ago, that entire team was gone. They didn’t have many people in place anymore who could look at particularly vulnerable populations from a health perspective, which I found pretty sad and disturbing, but now, I mean, it’s just getting so much worse. It’s getting so much worse.

Jake Lahut: And Russell Vought seems to be quite happy about each additional version of this that keeps coming down the pike, so.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. Okay. We’ll talk more about these federal layoffs and how they’ve affected other agencies too in our next segment. But before we go to break, I’ve got a fun and very tech bro scoop for you, Cybertrucks.

Jake Lahut: Yeah. Honestly, I should be paying you to be on the show today, Zoë, so tell me more about it.

Zoë Schiffer: Okay. Well, I found this story so charming because essentially our Features Director Reyhan had said, “Let’s do a photo essay of Cybertruck owners.” And I was like, ‘I volunteer as tribute. I really want to do this.” So I contacted a bunch of people, I was actually going around, and when I saw Cybertrucks, I would leave little notes on their car. Not a single person ever responded to me, I was like.

Jake Lahut: Stalker behavior.

Zoë Schiffer: “Okay, all right.” But eventually I got in contact with this guy who runs Cybertrucks Owners Only, which is this 50,000 person Facebook group that’s really, really active. And he, while very suspicious of the media, like many Cybertrucks owners was like, “I’m game. If you come to Palm Springs on this weekend, we can have a Cybertrucks meetup and you can go meet people, you can take photos and interview them.” I love reporting where your original thesis is completely disproven in the course of the reporting, and the Cybertrucks owners really see themselves as the victims of this campaign. They’re being spit at, they’re being targeted, people yell that they’re Nazis. And to a lot of people who I talk to, they don’t see their purchase of this car as at all political. They’re like, “I just like the car. It’s a cool car, it’s fun and all of these crazy liberal people are screaming at me all day. I have my kids in the car and they’re chasing after me calling me a Nazi.” The article came out today, there’s some really cool photos. I’m curious to hear what you thought.

A massive cloud outage stemming from Amazon Web Services’s key US-EAST-1 region, its hub near the United States capitol in northern Virginia, caused widespread disruptions of websites and platforms around the world on Monday morning. Amazon’s main e-commerce platform and other properties including Ring doorbells and the Alexa smart assistant suffered interruptions and outages throughout the morning, as did Meta’s communication platform WhatsApp, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, PayPal’s Venmo payment platform, multiple web services from Epic Games, multiple British government sites, and many others.

The outages stemmed from Amazon’s “DynamoDB” database application programming interfaces in US-EAST-1, and AWS said in status updates that the problem was specifically related to DNS resolution issues. The “Domain Name System” is a foundational internet service that essentially acts as an automatic phonebook lookup to translate web URLs like “www.wired.com” into numeric server IP addresses so web browsers show users the right content. DNS “resolution” issues occur when DNS servers aren’t accurately connecting these dots and, to keep with the phonebook analogy, are providing the wrong numbers for a given name, or vice versa.

“Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1,” AWS wrote in status updates on Monday. Shortly after the company added: “If you are still experiencing an issue resolving the DynamoDB service endpoints in US-EAST-1, we recommend flushing your DNS caches.”

An AWS spokesperson did not immediately respond when asked for details about the nature of the failure. DNS resolution issues can be malicious—known as DNS hijacking—but there is no indication that Monday’s AWS outages were nefarious.

“When the system couldn’t correctly resolve which server to connect to, cascading failures took down services across the internet,” says Davi Ottenheimer, a longtime security operations and compliance manager and a vice president at the data infrastructure company Inrupt. “Today’s AWS outage is a classic availability problem, and we need to start seeing it more as data integrity failure.”

Problems began around 3 am ET. By 5:22 am ET AWS had applied “initial mitigations” that were starting to take effect. At 6:35 am ET, Amazon said that it had fully addressed the underlying technical issues but that “some services will have a backlog of work to work through, which may take additional time to fully process.”