SULPHUR SUPERCONDUCTIVITY . Squeezed in a diamond anvil press, sulphur undergoes a number of changes, including a transition from insulator to conductor at a pressure of 90 giga-Pascals (1 GPa is about 10,000 atmospheres). Scientists from the Institute of High Pressure Physics in Troitsk, Russia and the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC have squeezed harder still and made sulphur into a superconductor. Above 162 GPa the superconducting transition temperature went up to 17 K, the highest for any elemental solid. (Struzhkin et al., Nature, 27 November 1997.)