American Shani Davis celebrates after defending his Olympic title in the men's 1,000-meter speedskating. Jamie Squire/Getty Images When he won this race four years ago, Davis became the first African-American athlete to win an individual gold at the Winter Games.
What is Gauss? Gauss is a unit of measurement used to describe both the coercivity of a magnet and its saturation magnetization. Basically, it describes how strong the magnetic fields are extending from the magnet and how strong of a magnetic field it would take to de-magnetize the magnet. The name comes from the mathematician physicist Carl Freidrich Gauss.
Gadolinium is a chemical element with symbol Gd and atomic number 64. Gadolinium is a silvery-white, malleable, and ductile rare earth metals. It is found in nature only in oxidized form, and even when separated, it usually has impurities of the other rare earths. Gadolinium was discovered in 1880 by Jean Charles de Marignac, who detected its oxide by using spectroscopy.