Helium—the lightest atom that can be laser-cooled and controlled—powers a new design for high-powered, stable quantum computers.

Which is your favourite chemical element? To mark the International Year of the Periodic Table, our science journalists will be arguing for their pick from the 118 known elements. In this instalment, ...

Credit: NASA Large Binocular Telescope data cut helium measurement uncertainty threefold. Helium, a light chemical element, carries clues to what the universe was like during its first five minutes.

An international research team has made a more precise measurement of primordial helium by studying 15 chemically pristine, ...

Helium atom precision measurements and calculations have a history of nearly a century. In the 1960s, theorists discovered that the fine-structure split (23P0-23P2) of the 23P energy level of helium ...

Liquid helium is vital to many cutting-edge experiments but has become increasingly expensive and difficult to acquire. Its unique cooling ability — down to almost absolute zero — chills magnets for ...

Physicists from Japan have taken to the skies to grow crystals in zero gravity. Helium crystals were grown using high pressures, extremely low temperatures (0.6K/-272°C) and by splashing them with a ...

Harvard is running out of helium — and it is no laughing matter. A global helium shortage is affecting all sorts of consumers, ranging from the National Weather Service, to party-supply stores, to ...

The US must stop selling off its helium reserves so that the country has enough of the gas to meet the needs of researchers and medical programmes. That is the conclusion of a new report, Selling the ...

When you hit the gas pedal in a car, you get pressed backwards in the seat. That’s physics. So why does a helium balloon dart forward, into the acceleration? Is helium immune to physics? The secret to ...