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You’re at home, sitting on the couch. Outside, there is thunder and lightning. You notice something at the window: a strange, glowing ball of light. As you watch, it appears to pass through the glass. It wanders through the air before abruptly disappearing.

The 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been jointly awarded to Sir John B. Gurdon and Professor Shinya Yamanaka. They received the award ‘for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent’. What does that mean?

Do you own a dog? Do you ride a bike to school? Do you have black hair? Each of these questions divides people into two groups – you either have a dog, or you don’t.

A few months ago, Science by Email reported on the naming of two superheavy elements, flerovium and livermorium. Now a team from Japan has reported making a third atom of another, new superheavy element with an atomic number of 113.

A clock that lasts forever, without batteries or winding up, sounds like something from science fiction. Right now, that’s the case. But a research team led by scientists in the USA thinks it might actually to be possible to make such a device.

Bionic vision technology aims to help people who are blind or vision-impaired regain their sense of sight. Like with the cochlear implant, or bionic ear, Australian researchers are again leading the way, this time to develop a bionic eye.

Scientists have announced the discovery of a new species of monkey in central Africa. It’s only the second new species of primate to be discovered on the continent in 28 years.

Written by Sarah Kellett That’s not paint: this is how the rainbow gum, Eucalyptus deglupta, really looks. Sweeping down the trunks of these trees are streaks of red, green and purple.

It’s Australian footy finals season, and millions of eyes around the country are focused on the football field. Now imagine the area of that football field and fold it in half. Keep folding and folding until it’s small enough to sit in a spoon. Sounds impossible, right?

A few months ago, scientists from the Large Hadron Collider announced they had found a new particle, one that could be the Higgs boson. The Higgs particle is thought to have properties explaining how other particles have mass. But the first signs of this new particle were detected over a year ago.