Table of contents

When nuclear power stations were built, many people saw them as blots on the landscape.

When you are used to a daily diet of rehydrated chicken soup, almost anything approaching proper food is going to taste good.

First there was the "n-word" – for nuclear – now we have the "p-word" – for physics.

If the word "physics" is unsexy, then how about "psychophysics"? That, apparently, is the name given to the branch of science that deals with the relationship between purely physical measurements and human perception.

Water could be flowing somewhere on Mars right now, and it certainly flowed at some point in the last seven years, according to the latest analysis of images from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. Michael Malin and colleagues at Malin Space Systems in California, which operates a camera on board the craft, claim that images of the Martian surface show evidence for liquid water flowing down gullies in the walls of impact craters. If correct, the finding provides tantalizing evidence that the planet could support life (Science314 1573).

The mysterious substance known as dark energy has been fuelling the expansion of the universe for at least nine billion years, according to astronomers in the US. Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University and colleagues used the Hubble Space Telescope to study ancient exploding stars, and have concluded that dark energy appears to be related to Einstein's "cosmological constanty".

These images show how the polarization states of tiny magnetic vortices in certain materials can be reversed, offering a new mechanism for high-density data storage.

For anyone who has ever experienced the frustration of tangled cables, Jens Eggers sympathizes: his team in the UK has spent the last three years trying to understand why knots form. Now the researchers have found that cables above a certain length have the same probability of getting knotted but that the time required to shake out a knot increases rapidly with cable length.

It is a sin that many of us commit on a daily basis: printing out an e-mail or webpage only to look at it once before throwing it in the bin. But while our attachment to paper may be holding back the dream of the paperless office, researchers at Xerox have found a way to at least make it more environmentally friendly: erasable paper. By developing printouts that last only a day, writes Matthew Chalmers, the same paper can be used again and again – significantly reducing overall paper use.

Physicists working on the Tevatron collider at Fermilab near Chicago are increasingly hopeful that they can "scoop" their counterparts in Europe in the hunt for the Higgs boson. Although the €6bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will be better suited to generating Higgs particles than the Tevatron, it has yet to switch on and is unlikely to be properly up and running for two or three years. Researchers at the US lab believe that they still have a slim chance of spotting the elusive particles within this period.

A new €50m brain-imaging centre recently opened on the outskirts of Paris. Housed on the site of the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) in Saclay, the Neurospin centre will use a number of extremely powerful magnets to generate magnetic-resonance-imaging pictures of people's brains, allowing researchers to improve their understanding of faculties such as memory, language and reasoning, and also study neurological and psychiatric conditions such as Alzheimer's disease.

Astronomers in Europe are to start drawing up detailed plans for a huge optical and infrared telescope that would be 100 times more sensitive than any current instrument. The new facility, dubbed the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), will take three years to design and would cost about €800m to build. The European Southern Observatory (ESO), which is funding the €57m study, hopes to choose a site for the telescope next year. If all goes to plan, construction would begin in 2010 and the facility would open in 2017.

Physicists in Canada have made a new type of musical instrument that sounds something like a cross between a guitar and a bell. The "tritare"(rhymes with "guitar") is essentially a three-necked electric guitar with six Y-shaped strings, which produces a range of "non-harmonic" frequencies not generated by conventional stringed instruments. The tritare's creators, Samuel Gaudet and Claude Gauthier of the University of Moncton in New Brunswick, hope to start selling the instrument within months.

Economists and anthropologists are probably not the sort of people that you would expect to find participating in research on the Earth's polar climate. But that is exactly what will be happening as part of the International Polar Year (IPY), one of a number of grand collaborative programmes in geophysics and the earth sciences taking place between now and the end of 2009. In the spirit of encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration, these social scientists will join their more obvious counterparts in the natural sciences to study the effect that accelerating warming might have on the physical and mental wellbeing of communities in the polar regions.

Many physicists are dedicated to their work. Some perhaps are almost obsessed. But there are surely few who could match the single-mindedness displayed by Carl Wieman as an undergraduate. Although nominally following a degree in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wieman in fact devoted most of his time to carrying out laser-physics research in his own lab at the university. After spending many late nights taking data, and then showering in the sports centre after exercising each afternoon, he concluded there was little point paying lots of money for student accommodation. So he moved into the lab – taking just a sleeping bag, a toothbrush and a few clothes that he stuffed into a filing cabinet – and then remained there for the next six months.

There is a strong scientific case for a relatively cheap radioactive-beam facility in the US. That is the conclusion of a committee of the National Academy of Sciences, which was asked to evaluate the merits of building a $550m Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB). Until the Department of Energy decided to cut costs earlier this year, owing to tight competition for nuclear-physics funds, the budget for such a device had been $1.1bn.

The European Union's Seventh Framework programme for research begins this month after it was approved by the European parliament at the end of November last year. The massive €54.6bn programme, which will run for the next seven years, is designed to boost Europe's competitiveness and increase economic growth. The bulk of the money – some €32.4bn – will be spent on large multinational projects in areas such as nanotechnology, IT, energy and space.

More than a year after US President George Bush announced that astronauts are to travel to the Moon and Mars, NASA last month unveiled its plans for a lunar base.

Reading University in the UK has decided to shut its physics department despite strong protests from the science community.

Scientists in the UK have received £8.5m to develop a new type of compact particle accelerator that could be used in proton therapy and have applications in energy and materials research as well as fundamental physics.

Physicists need to keep abreast of the latest changes in science publishing Whenever physicists are asked what good they have done for society, they love to point out that it is they who "invented" the World Wide Web. Certainly the Web has had a profound impact on many aspects of modern life, not least scientific publishing. Long gone are the days when typewritten manuscripts would be posted to a publisher before being read months later in a printed journal in the library. Publishing is now almost entirely electronic and papers can be downloaded from a journal's website in seconds.

A story in the New York Times about dark matter and dark energy published last October referred to me as "a physicist and blogger at the California Institute of Technology". This is a perfectly accurate description of course – as would have been "physicist and poker player" or "physicist and jazz buff", although I doubt that newspapers would ever refer to me in that way. Why should my blogging be singled out?

Until quite recently, letters were the most common way – and often the only way – for scientists to communicate informally with each other. It is not surprising therefore that science historians have long relied on letters as invaluable sources of information.

I read with interest Philip Anderson's critique of the reductionist tendencies of particle physics (November 2006 pp10–11). Like many physicists of my generation, I grew up with Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and its attempted synthesis of reductionist and holistic methods of scientific explanation. Furthermore, I am sure most physicists recognize the importance of Anderson's favoured philosophy – emergence – in the context of thermodynamics, whereby temperature, pressure and entropy appear at first to owe little to our understanding of the properties of individual atoms or molecules since no single atom can be said to possess any of these properties.

It is quite correct for physics teacher Geoff Piper to state that UK physics exams have changed over time (September 2006 p18). However, to attack the standards of those exams with nothing but anecdotal evidence is unworthy when rigorous evidence is available. The Qualification and Curriculum Authority (QCA) is responsible for upholding exam standards in the UK, and it takes its role very seriously. In May 2003 I was one of a team of 17 physics specialists that took part in the QCA's most recent review of how standards in physics exams have changed in the period 1996–2001 (www.qca.org.uk/downloads/12888_physicsreport.pdf).

Your recent letters concerning the stability of bicycles (October 2006 p18; November 2006 p19) remind me that in Covent Garden, London, there used to be a performer who invited the public to try to ride a specially adapted bicycle a few metres from one white line to another for a small fee and the promise of a prize for those who succeeded.

I find it amazing that you have given prominence to a book by the stage magician Uri Geller, who has made millions out of fooling people that he does his tricks by supernatural power (November 2006 p3).

Your editorial scrutiny accepts the statement by Antonio Castro Neto and co-authors (November 2006 p35) that: "with a value of 1 divided by 137.035 999 11 ± 0.000 000 46, (the fine-structure constant) is one of the most precisely measured physical quantities in nature".

It is intriguing to note that modern science began shortly after the invention of the printing press. When Nicolas Copernicus presented his heliocentric and heretical view of the universe in 1543, he was only able to do so, claim some historians, because he had access to a diverse range of printed sources that enabled him to compare and contrast older ideas. Such materials are also said to have allowed Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and others to pick up where Copernicus left off, free of prejudice and armed with precise mathematical tables that would prove vital in driving the scientific revolution forward.

The scientific community has welcomed the idea of open access to the research literature through the Internet with open arms. Various initiatives, statements and declarations in recent years have all recommended free access to scientific results through self-archiving, the creation of new open-access journals and the conversion of subscription journals into open-access publications. Increasing numbers of funding agencies even force their grant holders to make their papers freely available online.

Scientific publishing, like so many other aspects of human life, has been transformed by the Web. Almost all journals can now be read online and papers downloaded at the click of a mouse without ever having to visit a library. Indeed, the traditional commercial publishing model is being challenged by open-access pre-print servers like arXiv.org, which – as a survey carried out for this special issue of Physics World reveals – is used by almost everyone in the physics community to access the latest research.

Peer review has traditionally been regarded as central to scientific progress. The scrutiny of scientific papers by other experts in the field is designed to prevent poor-quality papers from being published and also to improve those articles that are accepted for publication. It lies at the core of the vast majority of research journals, with those publications that have a more stringent peer-review process generally ending up with a better reputation than those where the barrier for acceptance is low.

It is a sobering fact that some 90% of papers that have been published in academic journals are never cited. Indeed, as many as 50% of papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, referees and journal editors. We know this thanks to citation analysis, a branch of information science in which researchers study the way articles in a scholarly field are accessed and referenced by others.

The earthquake that launched the career of the world's most famous seismologist, Charles Richter, struck Long Beach near Los Angeles in 1933. With a magnitude of 6.4 on what would soon become known as the Richter scale, it killed 120 people and caused property damage estimated at $50m in depression-era dollars, including the collapse of several poorly constructed schools. Only the lateness of the hour – just before 6 p.m. – saved hundreds of schoolchildren from almost certain death.

"Mass hysteria: boffins go barmy over baffling formula." If tabloid newspaper the Sun had been around in 1905, that might have been the headline covering Einstein's equation E = mc².

Marcus Chown's new book The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead attempts to address the "ultimate questions": What is beyond the edge of the universe? Why do we experience a past, present and future? What are the limits of what we can know? Whether such philosophical inquiries really represent the "dispatches from the front line of science" of the book's subtitle is debatable.

What you need: aquarium air pump, thread reel, thread, and elastic band.

Why have there been so few female Nobel laureates in science – and just two in physics? The usual retort is to blame universities for not allowing women to study there until well into the 19th century. Since few women took up physics and mathematics at that time, so the argument goes, fewer still would be brilliant enough to deserve prizes. But women will get there in time. One of the "side dishes" offered by Out of the Shadows is to show that this argument is flawed. The very few women who did have the courage to study physics and mathematics were extraordinarily talented and many of them deserved to be in the Nobel club. It was prejudice that made that impossible.

Web logs, or "blogs", are frequently updated online diaries that have become an Internet phenomenon (see page 14). Many professional physicists are now writing about their life and work in this way. In this new monthly column, Physics World examines these blogs and the physicists behind them.

It is nothing new to say that the scientific publishing industry has changed a lot in the past couple of decades. Electronic mail, online publication, preprints and more recently innovations in open-access publishing are some of the most important developments. And yet the core task of the industry remains the same – to enable research scientists to make their work available to their peers.

How did your interest in physics first develop? For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by the nature of the universe. Even at an early age I tried to imagine whether the universe had an edge or if it was infinite. As a teenager I read popular books on astronomy and cosmology, and spent many hours pondering the scale and structure of the universe that was portrayed in them. I decided that the best way to study the universe was to pursue a degree in physics.

Nobel winner bags education award Nobel laureate Carl Wieman has been awarded the 2007 Oersted Medal, the highest honour bestowed by the American Association of Physics Teachers

Right now, millions of researchers around the world are working on countless exciting and as-yet unsolved scientific problems. Students are slaving, postdocs pondering, supervisors wrinkling. But the odds are that many of them are doing it wrongly in exactly the same way.