Mrs Roberts: What do you think you're made of? Mr Spellman: Big question. Grit, determination, hard-working, handsome, charming, funny. Mrs Roberts: Well, I guess. But you're actually made of atoms.

Physicists have finally done what once sounded like science fiction: they have read the X-ray “fingerprint” of a single atom, isolating the signal of one of nature’s smallest building blocks from the ...