The four new elements, discovered by scientists in Japan, Russia and America, are the first to be added to the table since 2011. They will be officially named by the teams that discovered them in the months to come. However, chemist Dr Kat Day has put in an early bid for element 117 to be named “octarine” after Terry Pratchett’s novel The Colour of Magic. In his novel, Pratchett writes that octarine is “the King Colour, of which all the lesser colours are merely partial and wishy-washy reflections. It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself. But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.”

A veterinarian’s survey lists the top ten names for dogs and cats in Ireland. The Irish seem way more likely to give “people names” to dogs than to cats!

What can be a name? One mother was recently banned from naming her baby daughter Cyanide, meant as a reference to Adolf Hitler.