"Despite the growing interest in the field of ultracold chemistry, experimental progress has been hampered by a lack of appropriate methods to trap and cool molecules. Laser cooling, while very successful, is limited to a small number of atoms in the Periodic Table because few atoms and no molecules have closed cycling transitions. The main methods to produce cold molecules of chemical interest can be divided into two groups. Buffer gas cooling relies on collisions with cold helium in a dilution refrigerator to cool paramagnetic molecules and trap them in a magnetic trap. Super-sonic expansion is used by other methods to precool the molecules. The resulting cold molecular beams have been slowed and trapped in some experiments by interactions with pulsed electric fields Stark decelerator, by interactions with pulsed optical fields, by spinning the nozzle, and by billiardlike collisions. Finally, laser-cooled alkali-metal atoms are used to produce cold molecules via photoassociation. None of these methods have, to date, achieved the phase space densities required to observe reaction dynamics at ultracold temperatures. We recently demonstrated a general method to stop and eventually trap paramagnetic atoms. Our method is based on the interaction of a paramagnetic particle with pulsed magnetic fields. It operates in analogy with the Stark decelerator by reducing the kinetic energy of a para-magnetic atom passing through a series of pulsed electro-magnetic coils. The amount of kinetic energy removed by each stage is equal to the Zeeman energy shift that the atom experiences at the time the fields are switched off."