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Maybe bbc did not understand the article, because what they wrote does not make sense.

If someone really did discover a magnetic monopole, that would be HUGE! So I doubt that's what it really is.

They're not true magnetic monopoles. If I understand correctly, they're unusual crystal structures that approximate the behavior of a monopole in some ways, but they aren't true monopoles. Div(B) still equals zero.

Here's an article I found from a month ago that explains spin ice better than the OP:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/09/10/physici...

Thanks for the nice article. I read magnetic monopole and I became utterly confused.

What has been discovered are not of the exact sort of magnetic monopoles that Direc predicted, but these spin ice crystals have clearly divided north and south poles with measurable separation between the two poles.

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