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Medical physicists have devised a new technique that promises to measure the water content of the human body quickly and painlessly. Within two hours of drinking a solution of "heavy water", a patient's water content can be determined from the abundances of isotopes in their breath, according to Simon Davies of the University of Keele in the UK and colleagues. A deficit or excess of body water is a symptom of certain diseases, and accurate measurements are crucial for some treatments, such as kidney dialysis, to work properly (S Davies et al. 2001 Physiol. Meas. 22 651).

An international team of physicists has demonstrated for the first time that pure carbon can be magnetic at room temperature. Tatiana Makarova of the Ioffe PhysicoTechnical Institute in St Petersburg, Russia, and co-workers accidentally stumbled across the magnetic behaviour while searching for signs of superconductivity in polymerized carbon-60. The discovery could eventually lead to metal-free magnets that are cheaper and lighter than their metallic counterparts (T Makarova et al. 2001 Nature 413 716).

According to a well known myth, a scientist once proved that bumble-bees should not be able to fly. The myth started with an over-simplified calculation on a napkin at a dinner party. But even detailed models of the flight of the bumble-bee are limited because they are based largely on the motion of tethered insects. Now physicists at Tsinghua University in China have devised a laser system that can accurately measure the key parameter of any insect in free flight (L Zeng et al. 2001 Meas. Sci. Teclnol. 12 1886).

In 1924 the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose sent a paper to Einstein in which he derived the Planck law for black-body radiation by treating the photons as a gas of identical particles. Einstein arranged for Bose's paper to be translated into German and published. He also extended Bose's calculations to particles with mass and showed that, at sufficiently low temperatures, they would all condense into the same quantum ground state. And for the next 70 years physicists struggled to make a Bose-Einstein condensate – which is sometimes called the fifth state of matter – in the laboratory.

A physicist working outside North America has been elected vice-president of the Optical Society of America (OSA) for the first time. Peter Knight of Imperial College beat two other candidates in the election and will serve as vice-president next year, president elect in 2003 and president in 2004. This is Knight's second big appointment in recent months – in August he became head of the physics department at Imperial.

A new scheme to attract the brightest young foreign students to the UK has been started by Leicester University. Four physics undergraduates who were awarded medals at last year's international physics Olympiad competition held in Leicester have received scholarships to start MPhys degrees at the university. Ken Pounds, head of physics at Leicester, says he is confident that the students will stimulate their fellow undergraduates and he hopes that the scheme can be extended to other British universities in the future.

Cern must put its house in order if it is to avoid further financial crises. That is the message from the management of the world's biggest particle-physics laboratory following the news that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will cost about 30% more than originally thought. The lab will have to cut back or cancel many of its smaller projects to fund the shortfall but will find it difficult to secure significant extra resources from its 20 member states, who are angry at being kept in the dark about the lab's financial position.

When the National Microelectronics Research Centre was set up in Cork in 1981 with just 20 staff, it had two key aims. One was to build up a world-class strength in information and communication technology (ICT). The other was to become a key part of the national science infrastructure by supporting industry and encouraging technology transfer. Some 20 years on, the centre, which is part of the National University of Ireland, Cork, has become one of the country's leading high-tech research facilities. It now employs more than 200 staff, over three-quarters of whom are research scientists or postgraduate students.

A weapons plant in a "secret city" that was once home to the former Soviet Union's nuclear-bomb programme is to be converted into a medical-equipment factory. The plant in Sarov is to be transformed thanks to help from the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). It will be run by a new joint venture set up by Fresenius Medical Care – a leading German-American provider of dialysis products and services – and Avangard Electromechanical Plant, the first Russian firm to manufacture nuclear weapons.

When the author Michael Frayn spent two years writing Copenhagen, he had no idea how successful the play would become. He doubted that audiences would sit through a historical drama about a war-time meeting between Werner Heisenberg – head of Germany's nuclear programme – and his old mentor Niels Bohr in the Nazi-occupied Danish capital in 1941. But Frayn's efforts paid off. Audiences and critics alike have thrilled at the way the award-winning play probes the historical uncertainty that surrounds the encounter.

In a basement on the outskirts of Paris a cylinder of platinum-iridium alloy sits in a safe under three layers of glass. The cylinder belongs to the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) and defines the international standard for the kilogram. It is the descendent of one of the two original pieces of platinum that defined the kilogram and the metre when the metric system was born at the time of the French Revolution. It has only been removed from its safe on a handful of occasions in the last 100 years.

Scientists at France's largest nuclear-physics laboratory reacted with delight at the end of September as the first radioactive-ion beams circled in their new machine, dubbed SPIRAL. The researchers, based at the GANIL lab in the Caen, had to wait almost two years before beginning experiments on SPIRAL after the authorities held an enquiry to ensure that the machine was safe (Physics World November 1999 p9).

News in Brief articles for November 2001

When the first Bose-Einstein condensate was created in an atomic gas in 1995 –a feat that has just been recognized with the award of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Physics (see page 5) – the World Wide Web was in its infancy. Although some organizations issued press releases by e-mail at the time, journalists had to wait for a fax from Stockholm to find out who had won the prize.

All is not well at the birthplace of the Web. In June the CERN particle-physics laboratory was issuing press releases headlined "1745 days to die LHC and counting". By the end of September Physics Web was running stories headlined "Collider costs shake CERN". It is now obvious that the lab has substantially underestimated the cost of its flagship project – the Large Hadron Collider – by some SwFr 850m. The final cost to the lab is now expected to be almost SwFr 3.7 bn (see page 7). CERN's member states are understandably angry.

A loose interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics is that "there is no such thing as a free lunch". And so it is with energy production. If you burn things, you get greenhouse gases and asthma-triggering particulates. If you build dams, you destroy the ecology of entire valleys. Nuclear power generation is no exception. If you carry out controlled fission, you get long-lived radioactivity – and lots of it.

Scientists often take the word "records" to refer to publications. When I contact scientists and ask to see their records, they usually start by showing me their preprints. History, to them, seems to mean old journal articles and personal recollections.

The recent letters in Physics World about software training make a lot of sense. As someone who works in a commercial software environment – in which C, C++, VB, Java, Perl and so on are the normal tools – I am minded to take Christopher Walker's stance that C++ is superior to Fortran in many non-scientific areas (September p19). However, I also agree with Simon Richards (October p19) that when deciding which software to use, it is all about using the appropriate tools for the job.

I have been teaching physics since 1976 at several schools and would like to think that I have done this successfully. However, I was left speechless when I read Kate Searle's article about her experiences as a physics teacher, in which she states that teachers have 20 weeks' holiday a year (October p36).

In your news story on the state of physics in Italy 100 years after the birth of Enrico Fermi (September pp5–6), Claudio Pellegrini, the Italian physicist who is chair of the physics department at the University of California at Los Angeles, says that "the US [academic] environment is much more open and competitive". He also says that when recruiting physicists for academic posts, the US always looks "for the best candidate worldwide".

I enjoyed Sidney Perkowitz's review of Robert Ehrlich's book Nine Crazy Ideas in Science (August p43). Might I suggest, though, that Ehrlich's view that quantum physics is an example of a "valid though apparently crazy" theory may yet fail the test of time? The weird parts, at least, come more under die heading of "unproven", and very likely also qualify for mention under the heading of "data that have changed in translation".

I was surprised that Charles Lineweaver used the German word Bildungsroman to describe Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman's book Genesis of the Big Bang (August p42). The word is made up of two parts – Bildung and Roman (novel, or story). However, like the inadequate translation of Wissenschaft to science, finding an equivalent English word for Bildung is an impossible task.

Sir William Stewart, former chief science adviser to the UK government, was the 2000 –01 president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Sir Howard Newby is the current president, and not Will Stewart of Marconi, as stated last month (p39).

One of the most challenging problems in modern physics is the application of quantum theory to the universe as a whole. Progress in this area has been plagued by two types of problem: conceptual and technical. The conceptual problems arise from the old difficulties of interpreting quantum theory. The standard interpretations require that the measuring instruments and observers are outside the quantum system described by the wavefunction. In the late 1950s, however, Hugh Everett proposed an interpretation of quantum theory that might apply to systems that include the observers and measuring instruments, but the adequacy of such interpretations has remained controversial to this day.

If, in this season of bonfires and fireworks, you find yourself holding a sparkler, you might like to consider the remarkable chemical reaction that is taking place before your eyes. You are actually witnessing a self-propagating high-temperature synthesis reaction – one in which the energy generated by the reaction of magnesium and oxygen to form magnesium oxide is enough to overwhelm the usual reluctance of the reactants to burn. The process leads to a chain reaction that sees a "solid flame" make its way down the length of the sparkler.

Over the last 50 years, a number of techniques have been developed to analyse surfaces, near-surface layers and interfaces. Each technique has its own peculiar characteristics, and offers a different view of surface phenomena. Positron-annihilation spectroscopy has unique capabilities for detecting vacancy-like defects, ranging from individual missing atoms to micro-voids.

Earlier this year a group of some 70 scientists spent an intense week in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado reviewing the current understanding of the radiation budget of the atmosphere. The meeting the latest in the series of Chapman Conferences organized by the American Geophysical Union, focused on the so-called anomalous absorption of solar radiation in the atmosphere (see agu.org/meetings/cc01fprog.html).

A Computer is a physical device that consists of components that are all subject to the laws of physics. Since computers deal exclusively in information, there is a close connection between information and physical systems. But what happens if the components inside the computer become so small that they must be described by quantum mechanics rather than classical physics? The seemingly unstoppable decrease in the size of transistors and other components will force the computer industry to confront this question in the near future.

On 10 December this year the Nobel Foundation will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the award of the first Nobel prizes. As the winners of this year's physics prize – Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl Wieman – gather in Stockholm and Oslo, along with the rest of the 2001 prize winners and numerous laureates from previous years who are taking part in the celebrations, it is easy to forget that they represent only the most visible part of the Nobel institution. Since only a maximum of three people can share each prize, one can count scores of unlucky candidates who naturally will not have been invited.

The excavation of several thousand life-size terracotta warriors in China has fascinated the world ever since the army was first uncovered by archaeologists in 1974. Buried in moist ground, these clay figures have remained mostly intact for over 2000 years. As soon as they are exposed to air, however, the paint on the warriors curls up and breaks into small flakes. Conservators are deeply worried.

There has been a growing awareness in the scientific community – and to some degree among the reading public – that the Sun is a marvellously variable and mysterious object about which we have only a limited understanding. The standard theoretical model of the solar interior has now been verified through helioseismology to an accuracy of 0.2% – a major triumph. However, the internal convection generates magnetic fields that drive the Sun through a variety of regular and irregular cycles of activity. The accumulated records show that the various magnetic moods of the Sun drive the Earth's climate into warm and cool phases from one century to the next by means that are not fully understood.

Have you ever wondered – or noticed – that lakes generally have only one river draining out of them, but that there are usually many rivers feeding into a lake? Perhaps, after a brief moment's thought, you will conclude that it could only be thus. Yet, I would wager, most have never noticed or felt moved to explain why this is the case. As the old Russian saying goes: "Old Baikal had more than three hundred sons and the sole daughter, beautiful Angara." The quote – which refers to the famous Lake Baikal in Siberia – can be found in this very enjoyable book on physics and related topics at the start of the chapter "Rivers from lakes".

In the mid-1970s, Barry Barnes and David Bloor (at Edinburgh University), along with Harry Collins, who was then at the University of Bath, were leading lights in the development of what became known as the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). If Barnes and Bloor were the theorists of the movement, then it was Collins who pioneered the empirical study of scientific controversies, in which, it was argued, the role of nature "factors out". Their work highlighted the "social construction" of science – the fact that the substance of scientific knowledge is somehow conditioned by the distinctly social conditions (interests, conventions, social structures) of its production and use. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, this "relativism" of SSK generated its own controversies and plenty of scholarly arguments in the philosophy of science – and a good time was had by all.

I was weaned on the foundations of quantum mechanics. My PhD thesis was on an alternative interpretation of quantum electrodynamics. I leap from the Copenhagen interpretation to the many-worlds interpretation in the blink of a photon. I have attended many workshops on the foundations of quantum mechanics. Not so long ago these workshops were held with minimal funding in seedy places such as the Super 8 Motel at Newark Airport in New Jersey, attended by a mixed smattering of deep thinkers and dangerous cranks.