Table of contents

Golfers who have had a good round might claim – metaphorically at least – to have set the course on fire. But James Earthman, a materials scientist at the University of California, Irvine, has now found that golfers can literally create sparks if they strike their clubs too fast against a rock.

Here's a thought for anyone planning a scientific meeting. Organizers of this year's annual conference of the Middle European Cooperation in Statistical Physics, held at the Coventry University in the UK last month, asked all registered participants to guess how many people they thought would attend the meeting.

This column has long featured celebrities venting their love of physics – a trend that looks set to continue after Fred Durst told Kerrang! magazine that he is "obsessed" with physics.

We were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves last month after posting an April Fool's joke on the Physics World blog about a call by astronomers at Jodrell Bank Observatory in the UK for a one-day, global microwave-oven ban.

A quantum-information analogue of the transistor has been unveiled by two independent groups in Germany and the US.

Picking up a tiny flake of material just one atom thick and placing it with precision onto a substrate is no easy task.

The blue hues of this colourized, scanning electron micrograph show localized damage on the shell of a windowpane oyster (Placuna placenta).

A micron-sized microbial fuel cell that contains multilayer graphene and works using saliva or other waste liquids has been created by an international team of researchers.

The first room-temperature, high-sensitivity infrared photodetector has been designed by a team in the US.

Does BICEP2's measurement of primordial B-mode polarization open a window on the early universe or has it fallen foul of an unexpected signal from galactic radio loops? Tushna Commissariat investigates.

NASA's astrophysics programme could be threatened by the rising costs of building the agency's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) – an instrument to study the nature of dark energy and search for exoplanets.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has launched the first satellite belonging to a dedicated programme that will monitor the Earth in unprecedented detail.

The director of a leading Spanish observatory has resigned in protest over drastic budget cuts to the facility.

A review of the programme at one of the UK's main funding agencies – the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) – has warned that the council faces a "catastrophic" future if its budget does not increase in the coming years.

The rector of Moscow State University has unveiled plans to build a massive 60 m optical telescope on the Canary Islands.

Women in the UK are less successful than men at securing research council funding at almost every stage of their careers, according to an analysis published by Research Councils UK (RCUK) – the umbrella organization for the country's seven research councils.

A new computer-based tool designed to help find the best sites for nuclear-waste repositories and to win public confidence in them has been developed by researchers in Germany.

France Córdova has been sworn in as head of the National Science Foundation (NSF) after confirmation by the US Senate on 12 March.

Ofqual – the independent body that monitors exam standards in England – is to reform science A-levels from 2015 so that final grades are based entirely on written tests, with practical exams no longer counting towards a student's final mark.

The first antenna for South Africa's new radio telescope – the MeerKAT array in the Karoo region – has been installed.

A technology largely abandoned by plasma physicists is making a comeback and might even be the one to give us commercial fusion energy, as Edwin Cartlidge reports.

Opening up science is the best way for scientists to earn the trust of politicians.

Removing practical exams from science A-levels is a bad idea.

Penny Gowland calls for publishers to implement "double-blind" peer review – where not only are the reviewers anonymous, but the authors too.

Robert P Crease thinks he might know why science has lost its authority when it comes to political decisions.

In reply to Philip Moriarty's article "The power of YouTube" (March p31–34, http://ow.ly/vAL2T) in the Physics World special issue on education.

In reply to James Dacey's article "The MOOC point" (Features, March pp43–46, http://ow.ly/uqH4W) about the rise of MOOCs in science education.

In reply to the article "Learning by doodling" (March pp40–41) in the Physics World special issue on education.

In reply to Martin Hendry's article "Taking modern physics into schools" (Forum, March pp21–22).

In reply to Robert P Crease's article "Feynman's failings" (March p25, http://ow.ly/uKDFS), which asked why Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics are still popular 50 years after they were published.

In reply to Robert P Crease's article "Patenting science" (April p16, http://vQkje), which asked for readers' examples of cases where patents have hindered or prevented fundamental research.

In reply to the physicsworld.com news story "BICEP2 finds first direct evidence of cosmic inflation" (17 March, http://ow.ly/vyMOO, see also pp6–7) and to the follow-up article "Neil Turok urges caution on BICEP2 results" (18 March, http://ow.ly/vyNen).

In reply to the news story "Cambridge physicists divided over Hawking chair" (April p12, http://ow.ly/vyLil) about the university's new Stephen W Hawking Professorship, which must, according to its philanthropic funders, have an associated salary "equal to or greater than the average" for other professorships of similar rank in the department.

In reply to the physicsworld.com news story "Graphene oxide could make textiles smarter" (10 March, http://ow.ly/uqScv), which described a new type of fibre with an electrochemical capacitance of up to 410 F/g.

In reply to the physicsworld.com news story "Interferometry tips the scales on antimatter"(7 April, http://ow.ly/vvQVF), which described an experiment designed to test whether antimatter "falls up" under gravity.

In reply to Richard Gill's letter "Approximately correct" (March p16), which stated that the trajectory of an object thrown in the air is an ellipse rather than an upside-down parabola.

In reply to "Penalizing Iranian research" (Forum, April p17) and "Tied in knots" (Quanta, April p3).

When physicists at Trinity College Dublin began looking after an antique funnel full of pitch, they had no idea their humble experiment would spawn one of 2013's most "viral" news stories. Shane D Bergin, Stefan Hutzler and Denis Weaire reflect on the value of "slow science" to a hyper-connected, social-media world.

To many physicists, "Tsallis entropy" has been a revolution in statistical mechanics. To others, it is merely a useful fitting technique. Jon Cartwright tries to make sense of this world of disorder.

A main limiting factor in climate predictions is that we do not understand atmospheric processes as a function of height. An upcoming European and Japanese space mission called EarthCARE seeks to remedy this, as Martin Caldwell explains.

One of the most basic questions, and one that natural philosophers have pondered for many millennia, concerns humanity's place in the universe: Are we alone? Although the history of this question dates back to the ancient Greeks, and it was surely asked for many years before that, the first inklings of an answer did not come until a few centuries ago, when Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton demonstrated that other worlds qualitatively similar to our Earth orbit around the Sun.

Mahalo.ne.Trash is the personal blog of John Asher Johnson, an astronomer at Harvard University in the US who began blogging in 2007, when he was about to begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Hawaii.

The idea of building a missile system to defend a nation from the horrors of nuclear attack first entered the public consciousness in the 1980s, when US president Ronald Reagan – backed by prominent (and controversial) scientific advisers such as the physicist Edward Teller – promoted the Strategic Defense Initiative as a supposedly impenetrable shield against the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal.

Nanoscience is a fascinating and diverse field, one that uses tools from chemistry, biology and physics to investigate objects that are bigger than atoms, but smaller than most living organisms.

Kyle Palmer describes how his childhood dream of space travel led to a career at Europe's largest satellite firm.

Since 2004 Physics World has interviewed more than 100 people who studied physics at university and then went on to do amazing things in other fields. But sometimes we learn about the exploits of extraordinary "once a physicists" only after their deaths.

This month's spotlight is on Mildred Dresselhaus, whose pioneering work in carbon nanoscience earned her the nickname "the queen of carbon".

To the true physicist, there is surely no area of life that lies beyond the illumination of physical thinking.