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TV viewers in Ireland have been enjoying a cartoon series featuring a cat called SC that aims to explain the mysteries of quantum physics to children.

It is probably rare for meetings of the Royal Society in London to be so popular that people are turned away at the door. But that was the case at the end of November when several members of the public, plus the news editor of Physics World, were prevented from attending. The meeting in question was held to discuss who had made the bigger contribution to science – Newton or Einstein.

Fans of Einstein can, however, take consolation from the fact that the German physicist has published his first paper on the arXiv.org preprint server.

In a welcome break with tradition, last month's Solvay conference – the 23rd in a series that dates back to 1911 – opened its doors to the public for the first time. Always held in Brussels, the conferences let the world's top physicists mull over the latest developments in the subject in splendid isolation.

Snoop Dogg is the unlikely star of a new paper by Reginald Smith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, who has examined the network of collaboration among rap musicians (arXiv.org/abs/physics/0511215).

By encoding information in the quantum states of individual atoms, quantum computers have the potential to make the latest Intel Pentium chip look as outmoded as the abacus. But before such a quantum device can even begin to compete with its classical counterpart, we first need to find a way to scale up individual quantum bits, or qubits. Physicists in the US have now made an important step towards this goal by creating an ion trap on a semiconductor chip. Such micrometre-scale traps could allow many qubits to be integrated in a workable quantum computer (Nature Physics at press).

Astronomers have made the most accurate measurement ever of the distance from the Sun to the Milky Way's nearest spiral arm, known as Perseus. They estimate the distance to be about 5.86 × 10¹⁶ km (about 6198 light-years). The result also resolves a long-standing discrepancy between two different techniques for measuring distances in the Milky Way (Sciencexpress 1120914).

From oceanography to metrology, 2D turbulence is a common feature of geophysical flows. Key to this behaviour are boundaries such as coastlines or mountains, which lead to the formation of vortices that play an important role in the transportation and mixing of, say, pollutants.

An outlandish new type of dark matter – balls of atoms some 20cm across and weighing up to 10¹¹ kg – has been predicted by two theorists in Scotland and Denmark. Although difficult to detect, the super-dense balls may exist inside heavy stars where they eventually explode and release huge amounts of energy. According to the calculations, there could be one dark-matter ball for a volume of space about the size of our solar system (Phys. Rev. Lett. 95 231301).

Electromagnets based on high-temperature superconductors have been successfully trialled in Japan's famous "maglev" trains, writes Matthew Chalmers. The technology, which enabled the levitating trains to reach speeds of over 500 km h^–1, could save a staggering $1bn in Japan's planned high-speed rail connection between Tokyo and Osaka.

An optical system that projects an image of a patient's veins onto their skin could soon be helping medical professionals locate deep and buried veins, writes Jacqueline Hewett. Developed by US firm Luminetx, the VeinViewer is capable of mapping veins that are up to 14mm deep, making vascular surgery much easier to perform.

Space scientists have received a welcome boost from the 17 member states of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Canada, which have provided nearly all of the money the agency had asked for over the next three to five years. The €8.25bn of funding was agreed by ministers at a meeting in Berlin last month as part of a roughly triennial process used to set Europe's space priorities. The money, some 98% of what the agency had requested, will allow scientists to embark on a number of new projects, including a robotic mission to Mars and an Earth monitoring system.

Physicists are set to begin a range of exotic experiments at a new underground lab below the Pyrenees in northern Spain. Carved from the rocks of the "El Tobazo" mountain, the Canfranc Underground Laboratory (LSC) will let researchers carry out a wide range of noise-free experiments in particle physics and astrophysics when it opens in the first half of this year. The lab, which replaces a smaller facility on the same site, is being built jointly by the Spanish government and the University of Zaragoza.

The phenomenon responsible for the Northern and Southern lights could one day be used to power spacecraft. That is the conclusion of a study carried out by researchers at the European Space Agency (ESA), which reproduced the results of earlier experiments performed in Australia. These experiments exploit the properties of a plasma – an electrically charged gas – to create a type of thruster that is far more efficient and long-lived than existing space-propulsion engines.

Particle physicists have released their first tentative design for the International Linear Collider (ILC), a multibillion dollar accelerator that could switch on by the middle of the next decade. The outline design calls for the collider to be 20 km long, with an option to later double its length. The plans also state that the machine should be built in two underground tunnels even though it would be much cheaper to use just one.

India has joined the €10bn effort to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion energy known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).

The largest-ever contract in European ground-based astronomy was completed last month when the European Southern Observatory signed a €147 m deal with an industrial consortium consisting of Alcatel Alenia Space, European Industrial Engineering of Italy and MT Aerospace of Germany.

The public is still sceptical about nuclear power, according to a major survey of 18 000 people in 18 countries carried out for the International Atomic Energy Agency.

When Ian Halliday left the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) in March last year he could take a certain satisfaction at a job well done. As chief executive of the council since 1998, he secured major funding increases for particle physicists and astronomers, reversing a previous long-term decline in their budgets. In those seven years, UK researchers gained access to the European Southern Observatory's world-leading 8m telescopes, carried out key research for the proposed multi-billion-dollar International Linear Collider, and started to develop a new type of high-power computing known as the Grid.

A mission designed to collect the first-ever sample from an asteroid looks as if it will return to Earth empty-handed. Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft was supposed to retrieve fragments from the surface of the Itokawa near-Earth asteroid, which could have helped scientists learn more about the role of asteroids in the early solar system and improve their understanding of the threat asteroids pose to Earth. But technical faults on the spacecraft have prevented this from happening and have also put back the spacecraft's return to Earth by three years.

On or shortly after 11 January, an AtlasV rocket is due to lift off from Cape Canaveral carrying a NASA spacecraft to the outer reaches of the solar system. Its destination is the Kuiper Belt – the disc-shaped region of rocky objects that includes the planet Pluto and its moon Charon. The New Horizons craft should reach Pluto in 2015.

Groups of scientists that have pioneered a new type of "left-handed" material with unusual electromagnetic properties and used astronomical bodies known as pulsars to study fundamental physics won a share of the 2005 Descartes Prize from the European Union. The prize, worth €1m, was also awarded for research on climate, social science and disease management. A separate €250000 prize was given to five outstanding communicators of science.

Looking after historical artefacts is a tricky business. Archaeologists, art historians, and museum curators cannot analyse and preserve their exhibits as much as they would like, for fear of damaging them, either physically or chemically. To overcome this problem, a growing number of such cultural experts are turning to synchrotron, neutron and laser sources. These instruments enable materials to be examined in more detail than is possible with conventional desktop tools, allowing objects to be examined and returned to museum shelves and gallery walls intact. In addition, lasers may be used to restore objects with minimum damage.

Freezing weather on both sides of the Atlantic and last month's climate-change talks in Montreal have helped to put energy and the future of nuclear power right back on the political agenda. The issue is particularly pressing for those countries where existing nuclear stations are reaching the end of their lives.

Physics is fun, or so the science popularizers like to claim. Anyone who is up all night writing a PhD thesis is likely to disagree, as will final-year undergraduates with exams on quantum mechanics looming on the horizon. But a new page in Physics World – entitled Quanta – is our attempt to root out the lighter side of physics. It consists of amusing, noteworthy or memorable things people have recently said, as well as short items about physics that are entertaining or just quirky.

Pythagoras's theorem changed the life of the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Until he was 40, Hobbes was a talented scholar exhibiting modest originality. Versed in the humanities, he was dissatisfied with his erudition, and had little exposure to the exciting new breakthroughs achieved by Galileo, Kepler and other scientists who were then revolutionizing the scholarly world.

In their recent letter, Peter Zimmerman and John Connett criticize new work that points to the existence of "hydrinos" – states below the ground state of the hydrogen atom (November p21). However, they ignore the overwhelming amount of data supporting hydrinos and the unprecedented success of applying classical laws to the atom. Hydrinos and the power released from the catalytic reaction to these lower states have been experimentally confirmed and published (see www.blacklightpower.com/techpapers.shtml).

I was greatly encouraged to read the Lateral Thoughts article by self-styled "grumpy old physicist" Keith Atkin about what is wrong with physics today (November p56). Having taught physics for more than 45 years, my reaction to his article was one of intense relief.

I read with interest Heinrich Jaeger's article on granular media (December pp34–39). However, I would like to add two other types of behaviour that set granular materials apart. First, the conventional egg timer has markings that are equally spaced because the flow rate is independent of the head of sand but proportional to g^1/2d^5/2, where g is the acceleration due to gravity and d is the diameter of the orifice. Failure therefore occurs in a hemispherical region in the orifice and the flow rate is governed by free fall.

Many of us are not at our most alert when we examine our faces in the mirror first thing in the morning. It is therefore not too surprising that few people wonder how that thin metal film on the back of a glass sheet provides such a jaw-dropping image! Our jaws would perhaps drop even further if we were told that by drilling an array of microscopic holes in the metal film our mirror could suddenly become transparent; but this is precisely what recent experiments with metal films have shown.

Textbooks on quantum mechanics traditionally divide elementary particles into two types: fermions and bosons. Fermions such as electrons have antisymmetric wavefunctions, which means that a minus sign (i.e. a phase of π) is introduced into a system when two fer-mions in that system are interchanged. Bosons such as photons, on the other hand, have symmetric wave-functions that do not change when two bosons are exchanged. Fermions and bosons also have different intrinsic angular momentum or spin: fermions have half-integer spins in quantum units, while bosons have integer spins.

The network supports universities and businesses working in the ink-jet and display fields Every time you buy a new computer, you know that within months it will be superseded by a machine that is faster, cheaper and boasts even more memory. However, it is easy to forget that a similar revolution has quietly been taking place in the world of printing. Desktop printers, which now cost as little as $100, are marvels of scientific and technological achievement.

Entanglement lies at the heart of quantum mechanics, and has sparked fierce debate between physicists over the years. The phenomenon, whereby two particles become inextricably linked without actually interacting with each other, certainly goes against intuition. For instance, two photons can be created in an experiment such that if one is polarized in the vertical direction, the other is always polarized horizontally. By measuring the polarization state of one entangled photon, we therefore immediately know the state of the other – no matter how far apart the photons are.

The problem with all books on military technology is that they deal with topics that are subject to secrecy, hype and misinformation. Judging the reliability of the information in such books can therefore be tricky. One good sign is when authors include plenty of high-quality references and can be seen to have drawn on technical reports as their main source of evidence. I was not therefore filled with confidence when I saw that this book's bibliography opens with The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy.

The Joseph Henry Press has published the latest in a series of books on space and astronomy for visually impaired readers.

What do you believe to be true, even though you cannot prove it? This was the question posed by the New York literary agent John Brockman for his online forum edge.org last year.

In this age of Google, blogs and e-books, there is something reassuring about the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, which is now in its 86th edition.

I am not sure how many physicists would agree with David Kaiser that there are no theories – only tools – in theoretical physics. Even the Standard Model of particle physics, Kaiser argues, is just a set of techniques for calculation, rather than a conceptual framework for understanding and explanation, as well as a paradigm for guiding further research. However, I am sure that Kaiser enjoys strong support from his colleagues in the field of "science studies".

Three of my top picks are Silent Springby by Rachel Carson (1962) because it changed the world for the better; The Cosmic Connectionby Carl Sagan (1973) because it was as movingly written as it was factually informative; and Naturalistby E O Wilson (1994) because the author shared his childhood fascination for his subject in a manner likely to inspire young readers to pursue careers in science.

From public relations for a science organization to probing journalism for a news outlet, and from preparing briefings for politicians to organizing campaigns for non-governmental organizations – jobs in science communication are many and varied. They can offer opportunities to physics graduates who want to stay in touch with science but who are not attracted by the specialization required of a research career. The difficulty is getting started.

My interest in science was first sparked by my grandfather, who was an engineer and mathematician. Later I started reading science-fiction and popular-science books by the likes of Carl Sagan and Douglas Hofstadter. I finally decided to study physics when I was doing my military service, which would have been an intellectual vacuum for me had it not been for some science and philosophy books that I managed to read. In 1987 I went to the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, graduating in 1994.

David Deutsch of Oxford University, who pioneered the field of quantum computation in the 1980s, has won the $100000 Edge of Computation science prize. The prize is awarded by the Edge Foundation, which runs the online forum edge.org. Supported by the science philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein, the prize was given to Deutsch for "expanding our understanding of the notion of computation" and for the "enormous potential of quantum computing in studying the architecture of the brain".

What do physicists do to unwind and relax? Many I know are into all manner of physical pursuits, including hiking, running, swimming and climbing. Some of us have even been known to play golf, as this photograph makes clear. Taken from Arthur Stewart Eve7apos;s 1939 biography of Ernest Rutherford, it shows (from left to right) Ralph Fowler, Francis Aston, Rutherford and Geoffrey Ingram Taylor.