Should i buy buckyballs

One of the main reasons teenagers found themselves in the ER was because they accidentally swallowed the magnet balls while attempting to imitate fake tongue piercings by placing the balls on both sides of their tongue. It is possible to see why regulatory agencies were concerned by the fact that magnet balls were being marketed to children as toys given the high risk for injury. What makes magnet balls more dangerous than the average magnet?

Magnet balls are the first type: neodymium magnets. They are more dangerous than the other types of magnets because of their high energy range.

This essentially means that they are very strong magnets. This also means that even a small neodymium magnet is powerful. These magnets are so powerful that just placing two magnets near each other can cause them to leap together with enough force to crack or even shatter the magnets. If they are accidentally swallowed they can attract each other through the walls of the digestive tract causing organs to be pinched or perforated.

Larger neodymium magnets can even crush fingers with numerous articles detailing horror stories of individuals injuring extremities after handling these magnets without proper care or protection. Even after all the controversy surrounding magnet balls, they made their way back to the market after being banned for two years and found success catering to adults rather than children.

Magnet balls were rebranded and are now sold as desk toys for adults with purported therapeutic qualities. They can be compressed and molded like stress balls, and can provide individuals with quick brain breaks during the workday. The main difference between magnet balls and regular magnets is their relative strengths.

Magnet balls are more than ten times stronger than the strongest ceramic magnets. So, why are magnet balls so much stronger? Let us start by looking at the material differences between magnet balls and regular magnets.

Magnet balls are made of Rare Earth magnets which are made from combinations of Rare Earth elements. Although these elements are classified as Rare Earth elements, a majority of them are not in fact rare. Magnet balls are neodymium magnets.

The strength of magnets can be evaluated using three main measures: remanence, coercivity, and Curie temperature. We will address the three measures mentioned above in our explanation for why magnet balls are stronger than regular magnets. First, the crystalline structures of Rare Earth magnets have very high magnetic anisotropy. Magnetic anisotropy has to do with the direction in which a magnet is magnetized.

A magnet with high magnetic anisotropy magnetizes along a specific axis and is very difficult to magnetize in other directions. Moreover, this resistance, of the crystal lattice of Rare Earth magnets, to changing their direction of magnetization means that they also have a high resistance to being demagnetized. Thus, Rare Earth magnets have higher coercivity than regular magnets. A magnetic moment describes the strength and orientation of a magnet.

The atoms of Rare Earth magnets can have high magnetic moments because they contain more unpaired electrons. However, when the electrons remain unpaired they align to spin in the same direction and produce a magnetic field.

Thus, Rare Earth magnets produce a stronger magnetic field meaning that they have a greater remanence. For a better idea of exactly how much stronger Rare Earth magnets are than regular magnets, we can compare their remanence values. For example, a neodymium magnet has a remanence value from 1. Now we know that magnetic balls have higher coercivity and remanence than regular magnets. However, Rare Earth magnets will lose their magnetization if heated above their Curie temperature.

On their own, Rare Earth magnets have a Curie temperature below room temperature so they can only be used at low temperatures. However, when combined with other elements like iron or nickel they are able to work at higher temperatures.

We will look at the makeup of magnet balls more closely in the next section. Neodymium was invented in the s and is currently the strongest permanent magnet in the world. Neodymium magnets can have different grades depending on their strength, with higher grades being more powerful magnets. Currently, the highest grade of neodymium available is N The N stands for neodymium and the number following then indicates the grade.

But how do you measure the strength of a magnet? There are two main ways to measure the strength of a magnet. But behind him are pictures of other children. There's month-old Danny Keysar, who died after a crib collapsed on his neck. There's month-old Kenny Sweet Jr. And next to them is the most recent addition to the collage: Braylon Jordan, just 23 months old in the photo.

He must eat through a tube for the rest of his life because he swallowed eight little magnetic balls that tore holes through his intestines like gunshots. Those magnets weren't Buckyballs; they were a competitor's brand.

To Wolfson, they may as well have been Zucker's. It also shows how this small, long underfunded agency has become more aggressive than ever--taking hard-line stances with businesses and using heavy-handed tactics to rid America of the products it deems dangerous.

Gidding, a product-safety lawyer based in Bethesda. The agency's lawsuit has riveted small-business advocates, and they aren't the only ones watching. Consumer-interest groups and product-safety lawyers are glued to it, too. The outcome could have implications for anyone who sells stuff in America. Zucker smiles when he tells the beginning of the story. He was in his 20s and had just failed launching a product called Tap'd NY--filtered New York City tap water that he bottled and sold back to New Yorkers as "local.

Looking around for his next thing, he had come across a YouTube video marketing tiny balls of neodymium that snapped together to make cool shapes. He thought he could sell them better. They made the brand all about fun. At early trade shows, the founders concocted origins for Bucky on the spot.

Sales took off right away. At each new trade show, the founders signed up dozens, sometimes hundreds, of new retail accounts. But in January , at a gift show in Atlanta, Zucker received an ominous call from a sales rep. The 2-year-old son of a retail client had swallowed two magnets.

The boy was fine--the balls passed through his system without harm--but the store didn't want to carry Buckyballs anymore. Unsure what to do, he went back to his booth and wrote more orders. Oddly enough, the CPSC's inquiry wasn't related to the incident with the 2-year-old. It had to do with the warning labels on the Buckyball packages. Zucker didn't realize it at the time, but magnets were a sore spot for the agency.

When Congress established the CPSC, in , it gave the agency sweeping authority to set safety standards, ban products, order recalls, and levy fines in more than 10, product categories.

But in , the Reagan administration slashed its budget and added onerous rules that cowed it to industry. For instance, the CPSC had to get companies' permission to disclose their brand names during most recalls. So it cut a lot of deals. If a company agreed to recall a product quickly, the agency allowed it to deny its product posed a hazard--vital armor against the nation's hordes of personal-injury lawyers.

But in , crisis struck. An investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune published a series of scathing product-safety articles.

The first began with a preschool teacher pleading with a rep on the CPSC's hotline: Magnets from a building toy called Magnetix had come loose, a 5-year-old boy had swallowed them, and he'd almost died. The agency took the report but did nothing. Six months later, little Kenny Sweet Jr. The story, which later won a Pulitzer Prize, showed a pattern of ignored warnings, ineffectual recalls, and avoidable deaths--much of it because, the series alleged, the CPSC was "a captive of industry.

Later in , millions of toys were recalled for illegal levels of lead--news that dominated the headlines, given that it raised concerns that America had ceded quality control to China. In , Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation to overhaul the agency.

A separate rule banned children's toys with neodymium magnets small enough to swallow. A printout is tacked on Wolfson's wall next to the children. The headline: Not Until a Boy Died.

Zucker wasn't up on this history, but he hired a lawyer who was. Alan H. Schoem was a product-safety lawyer and a year veteran of the CPSC. Together he, Zucker, and Bronstein untangled the warning-label issue. To be extra safe, they changed the warnings to Keep away from all children! Just 50 sets were returned. Zucker felt he was securely on the right side of the law.

The children's-toy standards didn't apply, because Buckyballs was not a children's product. Schoem agreed. Bronstein left the company after disagreements with Zucker but kept a 50 percent stake. There had been more ingestion incidents, but Zucker had stayed in front of the issue, participating in a CPSC press release that warned parents. To him, the good news outweighed the bad: Buckyball sets were becoming a hot holiday gift, making People magazine's "hottest trends of the year.

Unfortunately, some wound up in children's stockings. This is not just a thought exercise meant to make you curl your toes in discomfort. This happened to more than a few children who unwittingly swallowed pieces of the desk toy. In , a 3-year-old in Oregon swallowed a cringe-worthy 37 magnets , which bored four holes in her gastrointestinal system.

In , a 6-year-old in Ontario swallowed 19 , leaving her with two holes in her bowel. And the list goes on. In , the Consumer Product Safety Commission initiated a recall of neodymium magnet toys, citing examples like these.

But last week, an administrative judge ruled in favor of an appeal by Zen Magnets to lift the ban, citing an improper cost-benefit analysis by the CPSC. In other words, the judge determined that the harms associated with these toys were overstated — and the benefits of the toys overlooked — when the CPSC made its decision.