The researchers caught an intermediate step in the process by which hydrogen is removed from tryptamine, namely the point at which a proton disappears from a carbon atom as the carbon-hydrogen bond breaks.

ECONOMIST: Biochemistry: Evolving enzymes | The

Hydrogen, the simplest atom, consists of a single proton encircled by a single electron.

ECONOMIST: Biochemistry

The nebulous field of nanotechnology, freighted with as much hype as legitimate promise, boils down to the process of manipulating matter on a molecular scale (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter, about ten times the width of a hydrogen atom).

FORBES: The science of small

Even if experimenters bounce the beams to and fro to increase the effective length of an interferometer's arms to more than 100 kilometres, the expected difference in length between the two beams' paths still amounts to less than a hundred-millionth of the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

ECONOMIST: Fundamental physics

These are an amine group, an acid group (hence the name), a hydrogen atom, and a fourth chemical group that can be any one of 20 different clusters of atoms.

ECONOMIST: Folding stuff

Bombard an ordinary hydrogen atom with microwaves of the right frequency and you will lift it out of its ground state by flipping the spin of its electron.

ECONOMIST: Are matter and antimatter truly opposites?

That means each of its molecules contains an oxygen atom as well as the carbon and hydrogen found in an alkane.

ECONOMIST: Biofuels are back. This time they might even work

In fact, Honda (nyse: HMC - news - people ) delivered the car to me on the back of a truck, lest one atom of precious hydrogen be wasted.

FORBES: Fueling Hope

The carbon combines with the hydrogen in water to make carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas--the old "town gas"--but then the catalyst prompts a rejiggering of the atoms into methane (one carbon atom attached to four hydrogen atoms).

FORBES: Entrepreneurs