The periodic table has been given four new elements, changing one of science’s most fundamental pieces of knowledge. Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 will now be added to the table’s seventh row and make it complete, after they were verified by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry on December 30th. The new elements were discovered by team from Japan, Russia and the USA, who will all get to name their own new elements.

All of the four new admissions are man-made. The super-heavy elements are created by shoving lighter nuclei into each other and are found in the radioactive decay - which only exists for a tiny fraction of a second before they decay into other elements.

The elements have been worked on since at least 2004, when st ...

Have you ever felt awkward staring into a person's eyes while holding up a conversation? It turns out that there is a good scientific reason why some of us struggle with this. Research tells us that staring while trying to come up with the right words actually uses the same mental resources as sustaining eye contact.

Scientists from Kyoto University in Japan put this to the test in 2016 by having 26 volunteers play word association games while staring at computer-generated faces. When making eye contact, the participants found it harder to come up with links between words, suggesting that there is interference between these processes.

The volunteers were tested while looking at both animations of faces making eye contact and animations of fac ...

When it comes to genome size, a rare Japanese flower, called Paris japonica, is the current heavyweight champ, with 50 times more DNA than humans. It is a slow growing perennial that sports a rare, showy white star-like flower above a single whorl of about eight stem leaves. The exceptionally large genome of P. japonica is due to the fact that it's an octoploid, meaning it has four sets of chromosomes - on the contrary, humans are diploid (two sets). Its 40 chromosomes consist of 150 billion base pairs of DNA per cell, therefore making its genome the largest known genome of any living organism. In fact, the DNA from a single cell could theoretically stretch out to be longer than 300 feet (91 m). ...

We're all thinking it... this watermelon looks like a big green butt. Accidentally grown in Japan, it formed when two watermelons grew too close together and fused. And it turns out that 'Japanese butt melons' aren't all that uncommon

Another look at the goblin shark (Mitsukurina owstoni), a deep sea creature that's been sighted less that fifty times since its discovery. They're the only living representative of the family Mitsukurinidae.

These are all real, and perfectly edible. Baby-shaped pears, heart-shaped watermelons and square apples are hitting supermarkets in China and Japan. But are these fruits just frivolous fun? The answer, for the most part, is yes.

Burger King in Japan has unveiled a new sandwich: the all black Kuro Burger.