Paperclips attracted: it’s a magnet all right!

But it’s perhaps not like any other magnet you’ve seen. It’s made of a ceramic material – a type of pottery – which is laced with a magnetic metal called niobium.

Here’s what you do with them: you take a pair of these magnets, and hold them apart so you can just feel them pulling together.

When you let go, they pull each other together. What’s surprising is that they make a fantastic rattling noise, that rises in pitch. This sound is slightly lost on the webpage – we’ll see if we can’t get a little video clip up so you can see what’s going on.

Now, normal magnets just click together, which is rather dull.

Particularly when they’re quite hard to pull apart again.

But these magnets are coated in a thin layer of a slightly springy, elastic material. Because the ceramic is so hard, that’s enough to make them bounce off each other.

So they click – bounce – click – bounce – click – bounce… and it’s that rattle, repeated very quickly, that you hear as a buzzing sound.

They work best if you throw them in the air.