Magnetic monopoles?

Oh, this is too, too good.

Only 2 days after a New Scientist article discussing some 13 phenomena that science is still unable to understand - including the fact that magnets don't seem to come in a fashionable, slinkier 'monopole' - it's been announced that, in fact, they do.

A magnetic dipole (yes, you can see it with iron filings, but I thought this was prettier)

Haha.

To paraphrase, for those too busy (or uninterested, in which case stop reading), I shall make the attempt:

Magnetism and electricity are very strongly interwoven, as everyone who's done highschool physics knows. However, while we are able to see component parts of electricity - electric charges themselves, such as electrons - the same doesn't hold for magentism. Magnets always come in 'North and South' flavour.

Now, clever people who theorise about these things are sure they must exist, but we just hadn't seen any of them yet. And we can't make (apparently) them either. But we had hope.

And now, vindication! Wahay! Well, sort of. We have, in fact, observed the next best thing to them, says a paper to be published in Science (which means it's probably not a hoax). In essence, two different groups of researchers have dug up differing evidence of these analogues.

Also, the scientists got excited about things like fractioning in 3D and so forth, but this went somewhat over my head...Actually, most of it did, but nonetheless, still very cool.