Table of contents

Alexander Hartmann is determined to make condensed-matter physics fun. The University of Oldenburg physicist has created a board game for two players dubbed "Spinglas", in which each player has either white or black counters (representing spin up or down) and then takes turns to place three pieces on the board.

Astrophysicist Robert Nemiroff together with graduate student Teresa Wilson from Michigan Technological University recently took up an unusual challenge – they took to the Internet for signs of time travellers (arXiv:1312.7128).

Gérard Liger-Belair from the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne and colleagues have been studying the energy needed to launch a cork from a champagne bottle.

You may remember that we recently reported on how you can navigate around CERN using Google Street View (November 2013 p3). Well, what we didn't know then was that Stefan Lüders, CERN's computer security officer, had decided to stash 20 LEGO minifigures around the CERN computing centre before the cameras rolled.

Astronomers in the US have unveiled a new way of measuring the mass of an exoplanet by studying several different parameters of the body's atmosphere.

The first ever pulsar with two stars circling it has been observed by an international team of astronomers.

Pictured above is the most functionally complex integrated quantum circuit ever built.

Earthquake lights are strange, glowing orbs that are occasionally seen before or during seismic events.

A new way of making ultrathin, flexible and transparent electronics has been unveiled by researchers in Switzerland.

Leaked documents suggest that the US National Security Agency is developing quantum computers to crack cryptography codes, but what progress has the agency really made? Jon Cartwright investigates.

Further details have emerged of a new £270m initiative being funded by the UK government to convert quantum-physics research into commercial products.

Europe's €450m Gaia spacecraft has taken up its position 1.5 million kilometres from Earth where it is set to begin producing the most accurate 3D map of our galaxy ever.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has delayed plans to reform the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) for a year following mass protests.

Nearly five years on from the earthquake that killed 309 people, a new graduate school has been inaugurated to spur the rebirth of the L'Aquila region.

The French Academy of Sciences has issued what it calls a "cry of alarm" denouncing heavy cuts to the 2014 budget for the National Research Agency (ANR), which was set up in 2005 to fund project-based research.

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has successfully launched a rocket that is powered by a home-built cryogenic engine rather than imported technology.

A task force appointed by the astrophysicists subcommittee of NASA's advisory council has published a report looking at the technologies needed to answer three big questions: Are we alone? How did we get here? And how does the universe work?

Researchers in the Netherlands, Germany and Italy have won a €14.3m "synergy grant" from the European Research Council to use a network of radio telescopes to take the first direct "image" of a black hole.

Bill Stirling has taken up the reins as the new head of the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) neutron-scattering facility in Grenoble, France.

Israel officially became a member of the CERN particle-physics lab in Geneva last month, joining 20 other nations at the facility.

Researchers at IBM were awarded 6809 US patents in 2013, more than any other company.

The UN has officially declared 2015 the International Year of Light and Light-Based Technologies (IYL).

An analysis of journal downloads has found that it can take more than six years for papers in physics to reach one half of the number of downloads they will ever receive.

A list of the 100 most popular scientific papers that were discussed on social media in 2013 – those that had the most "likes" on Facebook, Tweets or coverage in blogs – is dominated by papers in biology and the social sciences, with physics and mathematics papers only taking up a couple of places on the list.

"Fictional" models can be surprisingly useful to understand the real world.

Take part in a survey about how you share and access research information.

Robert P Crease observes a simple demonstration that is at once a compelling educational tool and a dramatic lesson in science history.

"Winning the race for growth" is what drives and motivates many politicians, but Peter Goodhew argues that physicists can contribute to the debate by arguing that bigger is not always better.

In reply to a review of Tony Ryan and Steve McKevitt's book Project Sunshine, which explores ways in which the Earth could support a future population of nine billion people (Letting the sunshine in, November 2013 pp50–51, http://ow.ly/r0FTM).

In reply to the physicsworld.com news story "Cosmic neutrinos named Physics World 2013 Breakthrough of the Year" about the IceCube collaboration and its observation of high-energy cosmic neutrinos (13 December 2013, http://ow.ly/rJjLl; see also January p7).

In reply to a review of Mario Livio's book Brilliant Blunders, which tackles history's greatest scientific mistakes ("Wrong turns and dead ends", December 2013 pp29–30, http://ow.ly/rrDmQ).

In reply to the physicsworld.com news article "Metamaterials offer route to room-temperature superconductivity" (3 December 2013, http://ow.ly/rpmWj).

In reply to a review of Ray Monk's book Robert Oppenheimer: a Life Inside the Center ("Making sense of Oppenheimer", December 2013 pp35–36, http://ow.ly/rf0WH).

This image – showing light scattered by dust orbiting the young star HR4796A – was taken by the Gemini Planet Imager, part of the Gemini South Telescope in Chile, and was chosen as our Facebook "Image of the Day" for 8 January.

In reply to Robert P Crease's article "Moving the goalposts" (Critical Point, January p18, http://ow.ly/sBhWQ).

In reply to a physicsworld.com news article on different results for the neutron lifetime obtained using storage-bottle and beam-based experiments ("Mystery of neutrino-lifetime discrepancy deepens", 4 December 2013, http://ow.ly/rrCze).

In our feature article "The echoes of eternity" (November 2013, pp42–46), the rate of sea-floor spreading was mistakenly given as 1 cm per 1000 years. The correct figure is closer to 1 cm per year.

The world can be described using mathematical equations and numbers, but why does maths do it so well? In his new book Our Mathematical Universe, a section of which is abridged and edited here, Max Tegmark makes the radical proposal that our reality isn't just described by mathematics – it is mathematics.

When James Clerk Maxwell set out his famous equations 150 years ago, his model of electromagnetism included a piece of pure fiction: an invisible, all-pervasive "aether" made up of elastic vortices separated by electric charges. Margaret Morrison explores how this and other "fictional" models shape science.

For over 200 years physicists have tried to pin down the value of the gravitational constant. Jon Cartwright finds out what's been taking them so long.

Colin Pask's book is effective as a new translation of Isaac Newton's Principia but less so as an introduction to Newton and his work.

Denise Kiernan's The Girls of Atomic City tells the story of a dozen women who left rural America in the early 1940s and tumbled suddenly, like Alice down the rabbit hole, into the nascent US military-industrial complex, with all its regulations, factory discipline, dangers and surveillance.

Voices of the Manhattan Project was launched in October 2012 with the aim of preserving the memories and experiences of scientists and other workers who participated in the US-led effort to build an atomic bomb during the Second World War.

Werner Heisenberg was not a Nazi, but his willing service to Hitler's government as the head of Germany's wartime atomic weapons project has proved a lasting stain on his character.

The roots of radio astronomy can be traced to the Second World War, when pioneers such as Edward "Taffy" Bowen, Bernard Lovell and Martin Ryle were all part of the British radar effort.

The latest collection of material from the archives of New Scientist magazine isn't about why penguins' feet don't freeze (2006) or whether polar bears get lonely (2008).

Michael Conti-Ramsden describes how a physics degree and the Great Exhibition of 1851 helped turbocharge a career based on solving practical problems in chemical engineering.

Dan Trueman is a composer, Hardanger fiddle-player and a co-founder of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra.

As an astrophysicist, Péter Mészáros – who was recently awarded the 2013 Einstein Professorship by the Chinese Academy of Sciences – is best known for co-developing the standard theoretical model of gamma-ray bursts.

A few months ago I joined the little-known fraternity of people who have opened their freezer doors, looked at their ice cube trays and said to themselves, "What the heck is that?"