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A swimmer in a pool filled with light balls pushes off them and swims faster than in clear water. That is roughly how a trypanosome, a single-celled parasite that causes sleeping sickness, behaves when it enters blood, where red cells occupy nearly half the volume.

Atomic batteries powered by plutonium decay have been running pacemakers and space probes for over sixty years. But the raw material is scarce: worldwide, only a few kilograms of plutonium-238 are produced each year, barely enough for the most critical missions.

The lifetime of the entangled triplet pair in the protein is about 60 picoseconds, which is eight times longer than in solution. Sunlight is like a continuous stream of balls flying at a wall.

At the heart of a future quantum computer might lie a tiny organic molecule shaped like a triangle. It has two 'extra' electrons that don't pair up. Such molecules are called diradicals, and their electrons can store information in a special, quantum way.

Billions of tiny motors hum inside every living creature. Cells ceaselessly pump substances, burn sugar, and build new proteins, and all this invisible motion warms us from within. To maintain order, life must dissipate heat into the environment, like a stove that never goes out. The power of this internal heating is almost independent of size.

In a benzene molecule, electrons buzz around the nuclei like a swarm of bees around a hive. But this swarm doesn't just hum: it pulses: every 856 attoseconds, the electron cloud completes a full oscillation cycle. The hive itself, the carbon nuclei, rocks more slowly, with a period of 36 femtoseconds.

An ordinary phone battery breathes — not with air, but with contact. Inside a solid body, where there are no liquids, lithium presses against the electrolyte (the ion-conducting substance) during charging and pulls away during discharging, like a lung on inhale and exhale. This 'breathing' is not poetry but physics: each cycle creates and destroys the contact points through which current flows.

An ordinary camera flash lasts thousandths of a second. An attosecond pulse is a trillion times shorter — in the time it takes, light travels a distance smaller than the size of an atom. Such flashes act as an ultra-high-speed shutter: they freeze the motion of electrons, letting us see them jump between orbitals or take part in a chemical reaction.

Creating a new material, like a tough alloy, requires thousands of computer experiments. Usually, a scientist manually writes instructions and hunts for errors. AutoMOOSE is a robotic kitchen: say 'I want a light and strong metal,' and five software chefs whip up a recipe, launch the synthesis, and adjust if something goes wrong.

Inside every cell, there is a scaffold of filaments, like construction scaffolding that gives the cell its shape and allows it to move. These filaments are connected by crosslinking proteins: some simply hold them together like ropes, while others act as tiny motors that crawl along the filaments and pull them toward each other.

Cometary ice slams into the young Earth. The pressure at the impact point is like stacking six aircraft carriers on your thumbnail. In the lab, such conditions are reproduced by squeezing a tiny sample between two rotating anvils. This time, adenosine monophosphate — one of the letters of future RNA — was placed under the anvils.

A swimmer in a pool of syrup moves differently than in clear water: each stroke is harder, but you can push off more strongly. Roughly the same goes for single-celled organisms — tiny rowers that propel themselves through fluid using flagella.

A light pulse in an optical fiber is like a starter's pistol shot: short, sharp, and unmistakable against the silence. It is exactly such pulses that the new artificial neuron, built on a silicon chip, produces.

After an injection under the skin, a drug doesn't just spread out like ink in water. Antibody molecules carry an electric charge, and that charge makes them interact with surrounding tissues — much like a magnet attracts or repels iron filings.