Table of contents

Can you spot the changes made to the new logo for the DESY lab in Hamburg? On close inspection you might make out the addition of a small orange dot after the word DESY, while the lines that go through the six balls now stop rather than sticking out at the other end (and are slightly thicker).

Physicists Edward Ramirez and Stephen Hagen from the University of Florida have devised a way of quantifying and comparing the fame of individuals.

Still on celebrities, Time magazine has named its 100 Most Influential People of 2018. In among the sports stars, politicians and media wonks is the Chinese physicist Jian-Wei Pan.

If you fancy listening to some soothing jazz, why not check out Milky Way Blues by astronomer Mark Heyer from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Two research teams have independently calculated a relationship between the mass and the radius of neutron stars using data from the GW170817 event – the first ever observation of gravitational waves produced by a neutron-star merger.

The early universe has been mimicked in the lab using a ring-shaped Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) of ultracold atoms.

Quantum entanglement has been tested with the help of some 100,000 computer gamers around the world.

We all know that elephants are loud, but the rumbles from their trunks don't just travel through the air. According to a team of geophysicists and biologists in the UK, elephant rumbles can also propagate for distances of more than 6 km through the ground.

Physicists are voicing concerns over academic freedom and the value of international collaboration after the Trump administration revealed that it is considering restricting Chinese scientists' ability to carry out research in US universities and institutes.

The US's dominance in scooping Nobel prizes for work in the natural sciences could be nearing an end, according to a new analysis of previous winners.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has released the latest star map of the Milky Way taken by its Gaia mission. After 22 months of charting the sky, the new data includes high-precision measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars as well as measurements of asteroids within our solar system. Gaia was launched in December 2013 and started observations the following year.

Plasma physicists who publish on the arXiv preprint server have the widest range of research interests. So says a new analysis carried out by theorist Sabine Hossenfelder at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) in Germany and Tom Price, who have introduced a new way to quantify a scientist's "scientific broadness".

Over two-thirds of researchers have released the results of at least one study they authored before the findings were formally published.

Physicists have drawn up a blueprint to investigate, for the first time, whether gravity can affect a quantum state, as Michael Banks reports

A new report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine has called on colleges and universities in the US to develop programmes in higher education that integrate science and technology with the humanities and arts.

NASA has launched a mission that will probe deep beneath the Martian surface to measure the seismology of Mars for the first time.

An Italian experiment is to hunt for hypothetical particles that could carry a fifth force, as Edwin Cartlidge reports

The European Space Agency has selected three missions for further study for a launch slot in 2032.

The theoretical physicist Steven Cowley will become the next director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) on 1 July.

NASA has announced it will send a 1.8 kg helicopter to Mars that will accompany the Mars 2020 rover, which is scheduled to launch in July 2020.

Construction of a new Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (Super-CDMS) dark-matter detector can begin now that the next round of funding for the experiment has been approved by the US Department of Energy (DOE).

Jim Bridenstine's appointment as the next head of NASA has garnered praise and disapproval, as Peter Gwynne reports

As the Royal Air Force turns 100, find out how physics helps planes spot submarines

Enrico Sacchetti argues that the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" is truly apt when it comes to the photography of large physics experiments

James McKenzie reflects on the importance of intellectual property, which is a key part of commercializing technology

Robert P Crease wants to know your most discerning metaphor for doing physics

The discovery that the universe is expanding with increasing speed may have bagged a Nobel prize, but some cosmologists are still not sure if dark energy is the explanation for it. Keith Cooper looks at the arguments for and against this mysterious phenomenon

Far above the ocean's surface, aircraft hunt for an unseen enemy below the waves. To mark the centenary of the Royal Air Force, tactical co-ordinator Jason Furlong and pilot John Ryder describe how they use physics to find submarines

The race to the riches of asteroids is on, with several private companies vying for funding to become the first space miners. Andrew Glester digs into the issues involved in making money from asteroids

Physicist and writer Anthony Zee has written a number of specialized books on various physics topics. His latest offering, On Gravity: a Brief Tour of a Weighty Subject, was written "to help people bridge the gap between popular books and textbooks on Einstein gravity".

Science(ish): the Peculiar Science Behind the Movies started life as a podcast, explaining this book's conversational tone, sometimes stretched to the point of teasing banter between its two authors, Rick Edwards and Michael Brooks.

Books about Einstein – the man, the myth and the theories (both special and general) – pop onto my desk so often that, in most cases, I simply set them aside. But the tiny neon-orange How to Understand E = mc² by Christophe Galfard caught my eye.

To say that I eagerly anticipated the arrival of my review copy of Jean Bricmont's latest book, Quantum Sense and Nonsense, would be an understatement approaching "we physicists have maybe got one or two loose ends to tie up when it comes to interpreting quantum mechanics" proportions.

With its complex procedures, unknown evaluations and unconscious biases, applying for research funding is no mean feat. Dalmeet Singh Chawla investigates if it is time to revamp the grant-funding process

French astrophysicist Jean-Loup Puget, one of the principal investigators of the Planck space mission, has been awarded the 2018 $1.2m Shaw Prize in astronomy for "his contributions to astronomy in the infrared to submillimetre spectral range"

Arie van 't Riet is an artist in the Netherlands who uses X-ray equipment to create "bioramas" – X-ray portraits of animals and plants

Another panel reviewing grants. Hours of argument when, with the funding available, only the top-rated one will get funded. I sigh. Surely there might be other ways...