Table of contents

If you want to add a physics twist to your seasonal greetings cards, you now can thanks to Germany's Federal Ministry of Finance.

How old is zero? That question has opened up a row between an international group of researchers and the University of Oxford after the Bodleian Library in Oxford noted that an ancient Indian text, known as the Bakhshali manuscript, had been dated to between 300 and 900 CE.

How much would you pay for a short letter written by Albert Einstein on the pursuit of happiness? Einstein wrote the letter during a lecture tour in Japan in 1922 after a bellboy at the hotel where he was staying – the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo – delivered a message to the physicist.

Still on famous physicists, the PhD thesis of the University of Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking has been made freely available to read by the university library's Office of Scholarly Communication.

Two independent experiments have verified that the radioactive nucleus nickel-78 is "doubly magic", as predicted by the nuclear shell model.

Two researchers at Harvard University in the US claim to have created liquid metallic hydrogen in the lab at conditions that exist inside gas-giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn.

The first continuous-wave, solid-state maser to operate at room temperature has been created by researchers in the UK.

A large void hidden deep within Khufu's Pyramid at Giza in Egypt has been discovered by detecting the muons that shower the Earth.

Bullying allegations have resulted in the closure of the Institute for Astronomy at a top Swiss university, as Michael Banks reports

The Trump administration has nominated three new members of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who critics say are undermining laws and "pampering" the industries they are supposed to regulate.

A new Quantum Technologies Innovation Centre (QTIC) will be built by the University of Bristol, UK, at a cost of £43m. According to the university, the centre will allow more than 200 academic researchers to work in partnership with industry.

A blueprint for a ground-based telescope to study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) has been unveiled by US astronomers.

NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) needs to be reduced in scope and complexity if it is to stay within its budget of $3.2bn.

Physicists have drawn up three construction options for the International Linear Collider (ILC), which would each involve starting with a 250 GeV accelerator.

More than 90 senior scientists in the US have written to the leaders of the Senate and House of Representatives calling on them to maintain the nuclear agreement with Iran.

A US government panel on nuclear safety has discovered a series of safety issues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, concluding that government oversight of the lab's emergency preparation has been ineffective.

France is set to open a new €10m low-frequency radio telescope at the Nançay Observatory near Orléans.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published its first international standard for graphene and related 2D materials.

A new PhD programme to develop techniques to handle the vast amounts of data being generated by experiments and facilities has been launched by the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced that it will support the continued operation of the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico, which was hit by a hurricane on 20 September.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN particle-physics lab in Geneva has completed this year's proton–proton collisions, announcing that is has surpassed its luminosity target for 2017.

The start-up company Quantum Circuits Inc (QCI) has attracted $18m in first-round financing.

Construction of a new neutrino facility in Japan called Hyper-Kamiokande (Hyper-K) took a step forward last month with the University of Tokyo setting up a body to promote the project.

Physicists are designing a new breed of space-based gravitational-wave detectors that rely on cold atoms, as Edwin Cartlidge reports

The next Physics World special report on Japan has wider benefits for physics too

Celebrating the top physics discoveries and popular-science books of the year

Robert P Crease meets a physicist who's just had his own musical staged in New York City

In response to a review by Michael Follows of the book The Secret Science of Superheroes.

In response to David Faux's Lateral Thoughts article "The measurement problem", in which the author describes the rather unexpected statistics he noticed in the timings recorded at his son's swimming races.

In response to Robert P Crease's Critical Point article "Making space", where he says that physicists and philosophers can agree on the concept of space.

The concept of the magnetic confinement of plasma, as generally agreed, seems to be that the charged particles simply gyrate around the magnetic lines of force.

Does hot water really freeze faster than cold? Jennifer Ouellette describes what could be a new theoretical understanding for the so-called Mpemba effect – and why it predicts that cold water could even heat up faster than warm water

As the wintry months take their grip on the northern hemisphere, Johan Wåhlin and Alex Klein-Paste explain why salt keeps us safe on icy roads

Even the most avid physics enthusiast does not necessarily awaken each morning and turn their mind to the various physical processes they will encounter over the course of their day. Yet this is precisely the sort of journey that author James Kakalios takes us on in his book The Physics of Everyday Things.

Buy Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise. And read it. Regularly. Indeed, I would go as far as saying the book should be required reading for every physicist, at every level.

It is a difficult project to tackle, in a book – the subject of exoplanets – as it is one of the fastest-moving branches of planetary science. In The Planet Factory Elizabeth Tasker, an astrophysicist at Japan's JAXA space agency, has bravely taken on the role of navigator for this incredible journey of planetary discovery, and the book does not disappoint.

Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaia is surely the only person in history who became a mathematician because of a botched redecoration project. She is one of 25 mathematicians profiled in Ian Stewart's book Significant Figures: the Lives and Work of Great Mathematicians.

Written and directed by Emer Reynolds, The Farthest is a feature-length documentary that brings together 25 original and current mission scientists, engineers and other Voyager team members. Using their tales and testimony, the film weaves together the enchanting, comprehensive and ultimately moving story of this farthest-travelled of space missions.

When I settled down to read The Last Man Who Knew Everything by Davis Schwartz, I was asking myself whether there was any need for yet another Enrico Fermi biography. While navigating this ambitious book, I realized that maybe I knew less than I thought about Fermi, and that maybe there was still a lot I could learn.

In Search of Stardust: Amazing Micrometeorites and Their Terrestrial Impostors by Jon Larsen is a glossy coffee-table affair containing more than 1500 images.

What is time? This is not an easy question for a physicist, or anyone else for that matter, to answer. In How Time Flies: a Mostly Scientific Investigation, writer Alan Burdick tries to address this question by examining the science of how humans and other living organisms perceive the passage of time.

The brief era of manned missions to the Moon retains to this day a gloss of excitement that other space ventures have never quite equalled. Apollo by Zack Scott is a beautifully designed coffee-table book full of every fact you might ever want to know about the Apollo missions, including details only recently released by NASA.

I have lost count of the number of wheezes to get people hooked on particle physics. There have been straightforward scientific accounts, personal tales of discovery, books filled with cartoons, essays and even historical vignettes. In Particle Physics Brick by Brick, science communicator Ben Still has decided to use LEGO bricks to coax readers into learning more about the subatomic world.

Computer scientist Rami Barends describes his unorthodox route through academia that led to him joining Google's hardware lab to build a quantum computer

Anne Kinney, currently chief scientist of the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, has been chosen by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US to lead its Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) Directorate.

Apoorva Jayaraman is a Bharatanatyam artiste who performs solo concerts and conducts workshops across the world.

In this exclusive comic drawn by physicist Nutsinee Kijbunchoo, the LIGO Collaboration gets a surprise visit and an unexpected gravitational-wave signal. We invite you to fill in the blank speech bubble in the last frame. Merry Christmas!