He predicted the next few years would be remembered as the "decade of the Wimp", and looked forward to dark matter's properties being exposed via a number of investigation strands that included Wimp production at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

BBC: Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to release first results

The number of documentaries will be reduced from four weekly strands to three, with Your World axed.

BBC: World Service to lose 73 jobs

In particular, this sensitivity makes the new chips better at searching for strands of DNA. At the moment, such searches require the number of DNA molecules in a sample to be multiplied using a trick called the polymerase chain reaction before there is a decent chance of detecting the target.

ECONOMIST: Labs on a chip