PARIS A Russian-led team of materials scientists say they have stumbled across the world's first non-metal magnet which works at room temperature, an invention with potentially myriad uses in electronic gadgets, AFP reported. The discovery breaks with conventional wisdom that says for a material to be magnetic, it must have some metallic atoms -- the only known exception being a handful of exotic organic compounds that show some magnetivity when chilled to near absolute zero (minus 273.15 C, minus 459.67 F). A team led by Tatiana Makarova of Russia's Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute, Saint Petersburg, said they accidentally found magnetism in a form of Fullerene -- a kind of carbon that is created by exposing graphite to very high temperatures. Fullerene is named after the U.S. architect R. Buckminster Fuller, the creator of the geodesic dome, whose three-dimensional geometry is similar to the substance's 60-atom spherical molecule. Makarova's team heated graphite and subjected it to extremely high pressures to transform its long monomer molecular chains into rhombohedral, two-dimensional chains of polymers. The resultant sample of Fullerene was found to be magnetic to 226.75 C (440.15 F), they reported in **** Nature ****, the British science weekly. They added they carried out a battery of tests to demonstrate that the sample was pure and had not been contaminated by metallic atoms, and were able to duplicate the result. Fellow materials physicist Fernando Palacio of University of Zaragoza in Spain said the discovery had yet to be confirmed independently, and predicted a "lively discussion" was in store. But if the result was confirmed, it will "represent an important breakthrough in the magnetism of metal-free materials," he said. Metal-free magnets would be cheaper and lighter than their metallic counterparts and also be insulators of electricity and heat, rather than conductors of them, opening up exciting possibilities in computing and electrical appliances, he said.