Researchers smashing nuclei in hopes of producing a primordial state of matter called the quark-gluon plasma may have already made the stuff without realizing it. (p. 301)

Researchers have identified more than 400 urban sites that may be highly contaminated with lead but had remained unknown to authorities for decades. (p. 237)

Ultrafast laser pulses may have for the first time revealed the incredibly rapid, step-by-step progress of a complete chemical reaction on a surface, at the actual speed at which it took place. (p. 221)

By detecting vibrations of less than an atom's width of a tiny cantilever, physicists have made the most sensitive measurement of force ever by mechanical means. (p. 221)

Although it's now the fifth element to be made into the strange state of ultracold matter known as Bose-Einstein condensate, helium may prove to be the most revealing so far because of unusually high energies within the newly condensed atoms. (p. 183)

Under the right circumstances, heating a tiny cluster of sodium atoms makes its temperature fall. (p. 143)

New observations that subatomic particles called B mesons decay differently from their antimatter versions may help explain why the universe is made almost entirely of matter, not antimatter. (p. 143)

The discovery that simple, common magnesium diboride can conduct electric current without resistance and does so at a surprisingly high temperature has sent physicists racing to understand its properties and to try to improve upon them. (p. 134)

Using a tabletop laser, researchers produced a medically useful isotope usually made in warehouse-size particle accelerators called cyclotrons. (p. 123)