Table of contents

Twelve physics labs around the world have conducted a series of quantum-physics experiments with the aid of some 100,000 volunteers.

A 2012 study of the remains of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe concluded that he did not die of mercury poisoning, contrary to 400 years of rumour and hearsay. Now the researchers have looked at the astronomer's hair and found he was regularly exposed to large quantities of gold just before his death.

How much would you pay for a "key moment in the history" of comic book art? An original 1954 drawing by the cartoonist Georges Remi (aka Hergé) showing Tintin, his dog Snowy and retired sailor Captain Haddock in spacesuits and walking on the Moon was sold at auction in Paris for a mouth-watering €1.55m.

The Celestial Fireworks Bracelet, created by ThinkGeek, is decorated with an image taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of Westerlund 2.

A new sensor that measures the local acceleration due to gravity using a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) of ultracold atoms has been made by physicists in Germany, the US and Canada.

Radioactive waste from nuclear reactors could be used to create tiny diamonds that produce small amounts of electricity for thousands of years.

Majorana fermions have been spotted at the end of an atomically thin iron wire by Ernst Meyer and colleagues at the Swiss Nanoscience Institute and the University of Basel.

Consider a spherical star in the vacuum of outer space. Thanks to recent observations made by researchers in Germany this may no longer be a hypothetical scenario.

A new type of composite wing that can change its shape according to flight conditions has been made from a lattice of small, lightweight components.

The Physics World 2016 Breakthrough of the Year goes to the LIGO Scientific Collaboration for the first ever direct observations of gravitational waves, as Tushna Commissariat and Hamish Johnston report

UK and Czech scientists have announced a new €45m solid-state laser "centre of excellence" to help revolutionize industrial material processing.

With Donald Trump set to be inaugurated as US president on 20 January, scientists are voicing their concerns about his administration's approach to science, as Peter Gwynne reports

The European Space Agency (ESA) will receive a cash injection of €10.3bn over the next five to nine years to fund a variety of space activities and programmes.

An agreement that will see India join CERN as an associate member state has been signed by CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti and Sekhar Basu, secretary of India's Department of Atomic Energy.

Pakistan will rename a physics research centre in Islamabad after the Nobel laureate Abdus Salam, who died in 1996.

Switzerland has voted to reject an early shutdown of the country's five ageing nuclear reactors in a referendum.

China was due to have completed the world's longest quantum communication line – a 2000 km link between Beijing and Shanghai, as Physics World went to press.

One of Europe's leading scientific societies is to hold two rounds of membership elections that will be open only to women.

Companies in the European Union increased their spending on research and development (R&D) in the 2015/16 financial year at a higher rate than the global average, according to the latest EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has officially named four new elements: 113, 115, 117 and 118.

The Indian particle physicist M G K Menon died on 22 November 2016 at the age of 88.

The International Linear Collider Collaboration, which promotes the construction of a new linear collider to complement CERN's Large Hadron Collider, has appointed two new associate directors, who both take the reins this month.

The UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has announced £60m for six new research hubs that aim to transform manufacturing in fields such as composite materials, 3D printing and medicine.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has confirmed that the recent crash of a Mars probe was caused by a computer glitch that made it assume it had already landed on the red planet.

Physicists in Argentina have bemoaned cuts to the science budget for 2017 that they say will hurt research and lead to a brain drain.

The costs of clearing up the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident will double to some 20 trillion yen ($180bn), according to the Japanese government.

Physicists in Brazil have called on the government to support a bid to become an associate member of the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva.

The ITER Council has approved an updated schedule for the huge fusion experimental facility that is currently being built in Cadarache, France.

Construction of a major new €1.7bn nuclear research centre is due to get under way in Germany this year. Edwin Cartlidge discusses the project with incoming scientific director Paolo Giubellino

A rocky road lies in store for the global physics community, especially in the US.

Simon Keens warns that the tendering process for supplying scientific equipment to "big science" facilities is threatening small businesses

The results of the recent US presidential election reveal that the traditional model of scientific authority is defunct, says Robert P Crease

In response to the news story (November p10) on the global impact of the 2015 International Year of Light.

In response to letters on the subject of claritons and breakthroughs in physics (Feedback, November 2016).

In response to Peter Lillford's feature "Why physics and food?" (November 2016).

In response to Peter Barham's feature "Penguin physics" (December 2016).

The formation of a drop of coal tar pitch after a 70-year wait reminded me of similar observations made at the University of Queensland, Australia.

In response to a news story about naming a physics lab in Pakistan in honour of Nobel laureate Abdus Salam (7 December 2016).

In response to the Quanta story "toe-tally awesome" (December 2016).

Some scientists claim they can control genetically engineered neurons using magnetic fields. Have they and the high-profile journals that published their research failed to understand basic physics? Edwin Cartlidge investigates

It's hard to get inside another human's head – let alone a member of a different species – but that's where physics and computer models help. Liz Kalaugher reports how researchers are visualizing what birds see in order to help work out why they don't reject intruder cuckoo eggs

Patrick Hayden and Robert Myers describe how the study of "qubits", quantum bits of information, may hold the key to uniting quantum theory and general relativity into a unified theory of quantum gravity

In John Stewart Bell and Twentieth-Century Physics: Vision and Integrity, fellow physicist Andrew Whitaker tells the story of Bell's life and his revolutionary discovery that not everything in physics can be explained using only local variables.

In a series of 20 short, sharp essays by a mix of extraterrestrial scientists and experts, compiled and edited by physicist and TV presenter Jim Al-Khalili, Aliens attempts to answer some big questions.

Mention the Royal Institution and most people will know it best for its long-running and beloved "Christmas Lectures". Compiled by astronomer and writer Colin Stuart, 13 Journeys Through Space and Time: Christmas Lectures from the Royal Institution features shortened versions of lectures on the theme of space and time.

There are various reasons why a section of the population will vocally, and sometimes even militantly, oppose any innovation. Some of those reasons are explored by author Calestous Juma in Innovation and its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies.

Nanoscale Views is a blog written by physicist Douglas Natelson, who heads the physics and astronomy department at Rice University in the US.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has been working since the start of the millennium to create a "map" of the universe. During that time, hundreds of astronomers have built their careers on its data. Here, two of them, Xiaohui Fan and David Law, reflect on how the collaboration shaped their development as researchers

The physicist and advocate of strategic nuclear-arms reduction Richard Garwin has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the US's highest civilian honour, from outgoing US president Barack Obama.

Lucy Heady is an economist who specializes in measuring the social impact and effectiveness of companies and charitable organizations.

Soon after Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock in the 17th century, he observed that pendulums in nearby clocks often synchronize such that eventually their phases are locked. So why then do my two metronomes not follow the herd?