The way Dr Hau and her team have slowed down light by a factor of 600 million or so is to use a group of atoms called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC).

BBC: A Bose-Einstein condensate: It slows down light

Nerve cells transmit their signals using electrically charged atoms (called ions) of sodium and potassium, which work rather like electrons in a metal wire.

ECONOMIST: Synthetic biology: Expanded vocabulary | The

Their H2O turns into H (ie, hydrogen atoms) and OH (so-called hydroxyl molecules).

ECONOMIST: Creative destruction

This is able to happen because the space between the electrodes is filled with a material called an electrolyte which allows ions (electrically charged atoms, or groups of atoms) to pass from one electrode to the other and thus combine with their chemical complements.

ECONOMIST: Electricity storage

The group at CERN, called the ALPHA collaboration, was looking at antihydrogen atoms in which a positively charged antielectron, also known as a positron, orbits a negatively charged antiproton.

ECONOMIST: Are matter and antimatter truly opposites?

Applied NanoMaterials, a New York-based firm that is commercialising some of his work, has launched a lubricant called NanoLub, which is made of nested spheres of tungsten and sulphur atoms.

ECONOMIST: Nanotechnology: Pipe dreams | The

Most plants use an enzyme called rubisco to convert carbon dioxide (CO2) into sugars containing three carbon atoms a process known as C3 photosynthesis.

ECONOMIST: Genetic modification

All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.

UNESCO: The UNESCO Courier