Table of contents

If you have ever pondered how many ways there are to tie a necktie, then wonder no more.

Here we go again. It's the return of the strangelets – postulated lumps of stable matter containing many strange quarks that can absorb normal matter.

While some children get their parents to help them with homework, four-year-old Lucas Whiteley from West Yorkshire in the UK can boast to his friends of having had a NASA engineer help him.

Want to get your hands on a periodic-table-inspired chopping board? Then log on to the online shop Elysium Woodworks, based in Santa Rosa, California, which is selling these novel kitchen objects on Etsy.

Researchers in the US have created an optical fibre that is very good at transmitting images even though it is highly disordered.

Membranes made from graphene oxide could act as perfect molecular sieves when immersed in water, blocking all molecules or ions with a hydrated size larger than 9 Å.

Determining the most efficient way to pack simple objects such as spheres has entertained and infuriated mathematicians from Aristotle to the present.

Inspired by the whiskers that many different animals use to gauge the wind and to navigate around obstacles, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have made highly sensitive, lightweight electronic versions that can detect the lightest of touches or a gentle breeze.

A new type of memory device based on the interference of spin waves has been unveiled by scientists in the US and Russia.

A scathing report into the management of the ITER fusion experiment has thrown the whole project in the spotlight and even calls for the director-general to go, as Daniel Clery reports.

A key facility at the $1.5bn Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) in Tsukuba has been reopened almost a year after a radiation leak at the facility put the whole complex out of action.

CERN has announced that it is creating a new department to consolidate its activities in medical physics.

The planned $880m Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), to be built in Chile, could be boosted by astronomers from the Brazilian state of São Paulo, who are considering contributing $40m to the 25 m telescope.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has selected a craft to study planets outside our solar system for launch in 2024.

Rush Holt, the physicist elected to the US House of Representatives in 1998, has announced that he will leave Congress at the end of the year.

The first ever science exhibition at the British Library in London has begun, looking at the role that data visualization plays in the scientific process.

Work has started on a huge underground neutrino lab in China.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has announced it will launch the country's first dedicated mission to study the Sun.

The first evidence for the primordial B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background has been detected by astronomers working on the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP2) telescope at the South Pole.

The UK government has announced £290m to help build a trio of next-generation physics facilities.

The Science Council of Japan has chosen 27 science projects that it deems "high priority" for construction in the coming decade.

A new chair designed to lure the world's brightest minds in cosmology to the University of Cambridge has generated a heated debate among physicists at the institution.

Marco Antonio Raupp, the mathematical physicist who is now Brazil's minister of science, technology and innovation, talks to Physics World about the challenges and opportunities for Brazilian research.

Sanctions imposed on Iranian researchers are hurting their physics community.

Our latest special report looks at the challenges for physics in World Cup host Brazil.

Are you aware of cases where patents have hindered or prevented fundamental research? If so, Robert P Crease wants to know.

Abbas Ali Saberi calls for an end to sanctions that are hurting physics and physicists in Iran.

In reply to Max Tegmark's article "It's all just mathematics" (Features, February pp22—27).

In reply to Jon Cartwright's article "The lure of G" (Features, February pp34—37, http://ow.ly/ulHIw).

In reply to Robert P Crease's article "The spot in the shadow" (February p16, http://ow.ly/ulHSX).

In reply to Patricia Fara's review of Colin Pask's book Magnificent Principia ("From Euclid to Einstein", February pp38—39, http://ow.ly/ulIk9).

In reply to the video "How do figure skaters exploit Newtonian physics when they spin?" (100 Second Science, 10 February, http://ow.ly/usDJo).

In reply to the physicsworld.com news story "Ballistic electrons go further in nanoribbons" (6 February, http://ow.ly/ulJaS) by physicworld.com editor Hamish Johnston.

In reply to the physicsworld.com news story "Dark field illuminates X-ray imaging" (25 February, http://ow.ly/ulJnl), which concerns new research by Robert Cernik and colleagues (Proc. R. Soc. A 10.1098/rspa.2013.0629).

In reply to a physicsworld.com blog post about a talk by Amy Smithson, a non-proliferation expert, in which she criticized scientists who work on nuclear, chemical or biological weapons ("A question of responsibility", 16 February, http://ow.ly/ulIWu).

In reply to a physicsworld.com blog post about a proposal to build a successor to the Large Hadron Collider in Texas, using the partially completed tunnel of the ill-fated Superconducting Super Collider ("Rebirth of the SSC", 26 February, http://ow.ly/ulIxa).

In reply to a physicsworld.com blog post about BioLEIR, CERN's first major facility for biomedical research ("CERN creates new office for medical research", 25 February, http://ow.ly/ulIHY and p8).

It is well known that the Milky Way rotates around a supermassive black hole, but researchers have found that our galaxy undulates up and down as well like a giant galactic merry-go-round. Katia Moskvitch reports on this surprising finding.

Collaboration, engagement, outreach — the modern physicist is continually encouraged to keep talking and communicating. Felicity Mellor wonders if it would be better if we simply stayed silent.

With almost 1700 planets beyond our solar system having been discovered, climatologists are beginning to sketch out what these alien worlds might look like, as David Appell reports.

The hunt for the Higgs boson may have dominated headlines for the last few years, but Ray Jayawardhana's book The Neutrino Hunters makes it clear that the neutrino is, if anything, even more worthy of publicity.

The electrolights blog aims to "explain day-today phenomena in simple terms and [show] that physics, though mind-boggling sometimes, is really about the basic things in life".

"Optics is light work" was one of Arthur Schawlow's favourite slogans, and it didn't just appear on the T-shirt he wore while giving lectures at Stanford University.

The fact that Albert Einstein won his Nobel prize for explaining the photoelectric effect, and not for his special or general theories of relativity, is often regarded as an anomaly.

In any conversation about the philosophy of science, the word "reductionism" is seldom very far from the lips.

Gerontechnologist Lawrence Normie describes his work on devices that improve the lives and health of older adults.

Tom Brake is the member of parliament for Carshalton and Wallington and deputy leader of the UK House of Commons.

Two groups of optical scientists have been awarded shares in the 2014 Rank Prize for Optoelectronics.

When Jackson Pollock first dripped paint onto horizontal canvases to create works such as Autumn Rhythm (1950, MoMA), he became the founding spirit of a major art movement, Abstract Expressionism.