Question: Does anything other than metal attract magnets

Giuditta Perversi answered on 12 Nov 2015:

Yep!
Actually, what happens with magnet is that THEY create a “pull” around them and if you put something within range it can react to it.
Something can or cannot react to that pull, that we call “magnetic field” (because just like a soccer field it has a dimension and a direction), it depends on what type of atoms it’s made of and in particular how the electrons are set inside them.

Not even all metals react to a magnet exactly because of this reason: the atoms are not right, the electrons inside them won’t like to move following the field.
The same is true for plastic, or the glass of your window!

Instead, you can have small molecule with the right electrons in the right position that will react to a magnetic field, or even the nuclei of some atoms (that how you do Magnetic Resonance in the hospital, with a huge magnet following nuclei of atoms inside you).

Nice thing to watch on YouTube: oxygen can be liquid if you cool it and press it a lot. Of course when you open the bottle, it will tend to go back to being a gas, but if you pour it between to magnets you can see the liquid oxygen getting struck between them!