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On the face of it, there seems to be little that links a positively charged or neutral subatomic particle with a plate of meat and veg.

"I raised with a three of hearts-five of hearts and this lady who I knew to be a very tight player called me from the blinds, and the flop was T-8-2 with a couple of hearts."

A caring personality and a valid driving licence are rarely seen as vital attributes for most research posts.

To all those who take pleasure from identifying or passing judgement on the quality of a bottle of wine, beware, your services may soon no longer be required.

Astronomers in the US claim to have observed dark matter, the elusive substance posited to make up most of the mass in the universe. The alleged discovery, which was made by studying a violent galactic collision called the bullet cluster, gives few clues as to what dark matter actually is. However, it does provide strong support for the standard "cold dark matter" model of cosmology (Astrophys. J. Lett. at press).

Spintronics, we are often told, is the microelectronics of the 21st century. In addition to exploiting the charge of electrons like any other electronic device, a spintronic circuit would also utilize the spin angular momentum of electrons to perform more complex logical operations at higher speeds and with reduced power consumption. However, while various spintronics devices have been built, one crucial component is still missing: a reliable source of spin-polarized electrons that works at room temperature; in other words, a battery.

Cavitation is an unusual process whereby tiny air bubbles grow and collapse inside water droplets.

Physicists in the US have invented a new form of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) that could significantly improve the resolution and sensitivity of the technique. The method, developed by Michael Romalis and co-workers at Princeton University, involves shining a laser on a sample and measuring how the interaction rotates the plane of polarization of the beam. The new technique could lead to real-time 2D imaging of samples, with the resolution limited only by light diffraction.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the hunt for dark matter and the global fight against terrorism have little to do with one another. However, based on technology developed for astroparticle physics, a spin-out company from the ETH-Zurich in Switzerland is about to launch a radiation detector that could make security screening much more efficient, writes Matthew Chalmers.

Physicists working at the DESY laboratory in Germany have passed a couple of major milestones in their quest to build a high-intensity X-ray free-electron laser. They have published the technical blueprint for the machine, known as XFEL, and demonstrated its potential by obtaining record-breaking results in a prototype device. Due to start operating in 2013, the €1bn XFEL will enable researchers to investigate chemical and physical processes at the atomic level in real time, complementing and competing with a number of other similar devices being built around the world.

Time is up for those scientists wanting to test whether an Irish company's simple magnetic device can make energy out of nothing. After placing a £75 000 full-page advertisement in the 18 August issue of the Economist, Steorn – a small Dublinbased firm specializing in fraud prevention – said it will no longer accept any more applications to review its thermodynamics-flouting machine, which supposedly triples the energy input into it.

A continent-sized next-generation radio telescope will be built in either Australia or Southern Africa, it was decided last month.

A satellite to study the Sun's magnetic field successfully blasted off from Japan last month.

Two science and innovation campuses were officially opened by UK science minister Lord Sainsbury last month.

An ambitious project that is helping school pupils get a taste for science is currently under way in Italy and Switzerland. It involves pupils building instruments to detect the showers of subatomic particles that are produced when cosmic rays slam into our atmosphere. A total of 20 schools have joined the project, with a further 50 having asked to take part.

The Royal Society is making its entire journal archive freely available online. For a two-month period until December, anyone can access its scientific papers, which date back to 1665 when Henry Oldenburg began publishing Philosophical Transactions – the first-ever peer-reviewed journal in the English language. The archive contains classic scientific papers by the likes of Halley, Faraday and Einstein, including an article by Newton describing his invention of the reflecting telescope (Phil. Trans. 6 3075).

The use of proton therapy to treat cancer patients could grow substantially, thanks to a new kind of proton source being developed. The Massachusetts-based company Still River Systems claims that its new device will cost just $19m, compared with the $100m or more needed to buy a current proton-therapy system. It also says that its system will occupy just a single, moderately sized hospital room, rather than the four or five large rooms needed by conventional generators of proton beams.

Melvin Schwartz, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize for Physics, died on 28 August at the age of 73. He shared the prize with Leon Lederman and Jack Steinberger for developing a way to generate beams of neutrinos. Their work, which took place at the Brook-haven National Laboratory in the US in the early 1960s, also showed that neutrinos can exist in more than one type, or "flavour".

The possible existence of planets beyond our solar system – and therefore of extraterrestrial life – has been the subject of speculation for much of recorded history. Greek philosophers such as Thales argued for a universe full of other planets, and the Talmud, a Jewish holy text, states there are 18 000 other worlds. Most controversially perhaps, the 16th-century Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno, a contemporary of Galileo, published a book arguing for an infinite universe with a "plurality of worlds", where every star had a solar system and intelligent life populated the planets. For his heresies, the Church burnt him at the stake in 1600.

Many in the astronomical community are unhappy at a new definition of the term "planet" recently approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which demotes Pluto to the status of "dwarf planet". Over 300 astronomers and planetary scientists have signed a petition condemning both the definition itself and the way in which it was arrived at.

Sitting on the terrace of Brian May's Surrey mansion on a sunny late summer's day, at times it is easy to forget how May made his name. Aside from his trademark long, curly locks, there is little to suggest that this is the guitarist in one of the world's most famous and flamboyant rock groups – Queen – and the writer of hits such as "We will rock you" and "Fat bottomed girls". Chatting to Physics World in a quiet, unassuming way, he talks about a wide range of topics, from his fascination with Victorian stereo photography and his fondness for archiving, to speculation about the origins of life on Earth. He also discusses another life-long passion, and the reason for the visit from this magazine: astronomy.

"Yes, we have problems. The same problems as physicists everywhere – no money and not enough good students." So says Sergei Garnov, vice director of the Prokhorov Institute of General Physics in Moscow. But despite his defiant attitude, times have been bleak for science in Russia since the fall of Communism a decade and a half ago.

Anyone who is not a particle physicist is likely to look on in envy at the massive sums being spent on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It has cost €1.8bn to build the machine's accelerator, which will whip protons in opposite directions around a 27 km-long underground ring before smashing them together at energies up to 14TeV some billion times a second. The four giant detectors – including the two general-purpose experiments CMS and ATLAS – have swallowed up several more billion Euros. Then there is the new Grid computer system, which is meant to analyse the vast streams of data spewing out from the detectors every second. The total bill? A cool €6.3bn, give or take the odd bottle of champagne.

US particle physicists, along with their funding agencies, are anxiously anticipating what is in store for the 14 TeV Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Discovery expectations are extremely high – in particular the prospect of finding the Higgs boson or evidence for supersymmetry. The LHC was an opportunity that opened up in Europe after a similar US programme – centred on the 40 TeV Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) – was cancelled by the US Congress in 1993 after about $2bn had already been spent building the $8.25bn machine. That decision, while devastating, was mitigated by the ability of US physicists to go to CERN, help build the LHC and harvest the physics discoveries.

With the final preparations for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) now in full swing, the chance that particle accelerators might produce an abnormal, dangerous form of matter has once again returned to haunt planners. Some theorists have recently speculated that if the universe has extra dimensions, mini black holes could be created in collisions between protons in the LHC (Phys. Rev. D. 74 014007). These black holes could then evaporate, releasing Hawking radiation and particles, including – possibly – the elusive Higgs boson. Is this dangerous?

After reading Geoff Piper's letter, it seems I am not alone in my scepticism of the "whizz-bang" approach to enticing students into physics (August p18). It would be a shallow student indeed who decided whether or not to study physics based on a few exploding balloons or some other demonstration with a high "wow" factor. The trouble is that such marketing ploys, which feature heavily in many science roadshow presentations, help to sway impressionable young minds. This is worrying because the reality of exam courses in science usually does not match the promise of the science show.

Your article about infrasound (August pp21–25) repeats the common misconception that sound with a frequency below 20 Hz is inaudible. In fact, infrasonic hearing thresholds have been measured down to 4 Hz for "free field" listening and down to 1.5 Hz for earphone listening. While the infrasonic thresholds are high in terms of numbers of decibels, they may be exceeded by fans, compressors or any other machinery that moves large quantities of air at low cycling frequencies.

Why is it that textbooks and prestigious publications such as Physics World persist in getting the definition of the fine-structure constant – a dimensionless number that describes the strength of the electromagnetic force – wrong (September p4)? The expression "e²/ch-" is clearly not "dimensionless" because it has the dimensions of charge squared on the top and mechanical units on the bottom, nor does it have the expected value of 1/137.

Nick Chohan is looking forward to Christmas. For the last three years the amiable CERN physicist and his team have been working around the clock in a large metal hangar that straddles the Franco-Swiss border, carefully testing the 1232 superconducting magnets that will soon guide protons at almost the speed of light around the world's most powerful particle accelerator. This is no mean feat – it takes three people up to 12 hours just to connect one of the 15 m long, 35 tonne cylindrical dipoles to the test rig, and each one costs close to a nerve-wracking SwFr1m (over €600000). But this month the last magnet is due to arrive at Chohan's lab, and by the end of the year all of them will have been cleared for installation underground.

The largest scientific expedition ever mounted is preparing to set out. The team has gathered the best equipment it can muster, debated the challenges it will face, and drafted the most detailed maps it can of the terrain ahead. It aims to explore the "inner space" of matter, thousands of times smaller than a proton. Now, with the world's most powerful particle accelerator nearing completion at CERN, near Geneva, two decades of planning are about to be put to the test.

As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) takes shape, analogies abound about the amount of data it will produce: enough to fill a stack of CDs higher than Everest each year, for example. This unprecedented flood of information will present physicists with huge problems of storage, access and processing power. But a solution has long been promised in the form of a miraculous computing "Grid" that will grant physicists limitless computing power on demand with no more difficulty than plugging into the electricity mains. With only a year or so to go before the first data streams out of the LHC detectors, physicists and computer scientists are working harder than ever to ensure that the Grid is more than just a fairytale.

Our current understanding of matter and forces at the subatomic scale, as embodied by the Standard Model of particle physics, is widely considered incomplete. Its most famous missing ingredient is the Higgs boson, thought to endow all particles with mass, but there are strong indications that other pieces of the theoretical jigsaw are missing too.

In the small French village of St Genis, a few kilometres away from the CERN laboratory, a dozen or so physicists are crowded around a computer screen. The atmosphere is tense. After turning a few knobs and typing a few commands, an image comprising a few nondescript straight lines appears. It is greeted with cheers and relief: the date is early June 2006, and the huge "TPC" tracking detector of the ALICE experiment has just recorded its first particle ever, a passing cosmic ray. With champagne corks popping in the background, this event marked another milestone in the life of the largest and most complex detector ever devoted to the study of nuclear collisions.

Over the next two to three years the physicists who have spent much of their careers designing and building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN expect to start seeing the fruits of their labour. They believe that the machine's enormously energetic – 14TeV (14×10¹² electron-volts) – proton-proton collisions may generate the Higgs boson, a previously unobserved particle that is thought to endow all particles with mass. Discovering the Higgs would be the crowning achievement of the Standard Model, the theoretical framework that describes the fundamental particles of matter and their interactions.

Most scientists do not believe in God for two simple reasons: they see no evidence for him; and they find no need to include supernatural elements in the models they build to describe their observations. Still, they are largely content to assign religion and science to separate domains, which Stephen Jay Gould calls "non-overlapping magisteria". This allows non-believing scientists to dodge the topic of religion altogether, thus avoiding jeopardizing what is most precious to them – their funding. It also permits scientists who do believe in God to compartmentalize their thinking and never discuss science and religion in the same breath.

Drawing links between quantum physics and human consciousness is controversial territory.

The European space programme occupied a back seat in the mind of the public during the space race between the US and the Soviet Union.

"All is for the best," said Voltaire's Dr Pangloss, "in this, the best of all possible worlds."

What are the three best popularscience books? Steven Weinberg's The First Three Minutes was the first book I ever read about cosmology, and it was largely responsible for me deciding to work in this field. You might argue that Weinberg has a lot to answer for, but the book is still a masterpiece.

In Bertolt Brecht's The Life of Galileo, the ongoing conflict between rationalism and religious authority is portrayed through Galileo Galilei's epic battle with the might of the Vatican. The play depicts the later years of the Italian astronomer's life as he struggles to promote the ideas of Copernicus in the face of fierce opposition from the Catholic Church. In the 17th century, claiming that the Earth rotates around the Sun was tantamount to heresy; as the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno found out to his cost in 1600, when he was burned at the stake for refusing to recant his heliocentric beliefs. According to Brecht's Galileo, Bruno's only mistake was that he had no proof.

After graduating in physics, the world is your oyster, with career opportunities ranging from academic research to teaching and finance.

Why did you choose to study physics at university and how much did you enjoy it? I had a fantastic physics teacher at secondary school; lessons were full of practicals and we learned a lot about the physics of everyday things. I decided to study science A-levels and learn about arts subjects in my spare time, which turned out to be rather naïve! When I was offered a place to read physics at Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1999, I didn't have to think twice. I most enjoyed my fourthyear master's project in astrophysics. It used all of the elements of the previous three years' work and I discovered that I knew more than I had given myself credit for.

Institute of Physics awards 2007 Dirac medal and prize David Sherrington of the University of Oxford for his work in spin glasses.

Dear Son, Just thought I would pen you a few lines to cheer you up now that you're back at university. I was thinking that you, your physics mates and your lecturers might be short of something to do this year, so I have come up with a cunning plan to occupy any spare leisure time you might have and also make us a few quid along the way. I will, of course, manage the cash side, so there's no need to worry on that score. In any event, I don't expect you all to be lying around all day wasting my hard-earned savings.