Two new superheavy elements have been fleetingly created in a Russian lab. Each has many more protons and neutrons in their nuclei than any naturally occurring elements found on Earth.

Call it the 135 K wall. What might sound like the end of a torturous foot race is a temperature barrier (135 degrees Kelvin) that scientists have yet to breach in their quest for new materials that, when properly chilled, carry electricity without any resistance.

At the first twinge or sniff, they trawl medical websites and fear the worst. GPs’ surgeries are deluged with their demands. Peta Bee on a new and virulent strain of hypochondria.

For decades, consumers worldwide looked to Japanese companies such as Sony, Sanyo, and Matsushita for consumer-tech hits like VCRs, portable cassette- and CD-players, camcorders, and DVD players. But in recent years, nimble Asian upstarts have challenged Japan’s dominance by dipping into a common pool of electronic components to assemble those gizmos at prices the Japanese […]

A team of US researchers has made an inventive attempt to discover how much an unborn baby can hear in the womb — by making recordings from the inner ear of a fetal sheep.

The notion that the inorganic world is alive is as old as mythology; think of Poseidon, the Greek personification of the sea. However, the tools available to examine life at its most essential - DNA sequencing, bioinformatics, gene chips - are new.