Table of contents

It was meant to lead to a new generation of space technology, but the Wirefly X Prize Cup competition – held at a desert airfield in New Mexico at the end of October – was marred by disputes, disqualifications and crash landings.

Making your presence felt in space needn't set you back the millions of dollars needed for a trip to the International Space Station, thanks to the ingenuity of a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US.

India has an interesting problem on its hands: what to call the people it hopes to launch into space in the next few years.

For some, string theory is elegant mathematics that has little or nothing to say about the real world.

Several new particles have been discovered by two groups on opposite sides of the globe, providing insights into the force that binds quarks together. The particles are types of "baryon" – particles such as protons that contain three quarks. The heaviest baryons ever discovered, weighing in at 5.8 GeV or about six times the proton mass, have appeared in the CDF experiment at Fermilab in the US. Meanwhile, researchers working on the Belle experiment at the KEK laboratory in Japan have discovered two further kinds of baryon weighing about half as much.

The existence of a new state of matter called a supersolid is the subject of two independent reports by researchers in the US and Finland. Physicists at Cornell University say they have reproduced the previous findings of a supersolid transition in helium below a temperature of 250 mK (Phys. Rev. Lett. 97 165301). On the other hand, a group from the Helsinki University of Technology has found no such transition despite cooling helium down to 10 mK (Phys. Rev. Lett. 97 165302).

It may look like a footprint left by one of the Apollo astronauts, but this lunar feature – which is about 1.5 km across – has convinced some researchers that the Moon's geology is much more active than had previously been thought.

If you and your best friend argue and stop talking to one another, you might think that your entire social network is about to split in two. In fact, physicists studying the communication patterns of 4.6 million mobile-phone users have found that your social circle is more likely to break into smaller clusters if you lose contact with more casual acquaintances (arXiv.org/abs/physics/0610104).

Before you crank up your central heating to stay warm this winter, you might want to consider exactly where that heat is going. In a typical house in the UK, for instance, more than a third of the heat produced escapes through poorly insulated walls, ceilings and roofs – increasing energy bills and contributing unnecessarily to greenhouse-gas emissions. One of the worst offenders in reducing energy efficiency is windows. But that may be about to change, writes Matthew Chalmers, thanks to physicists in Germany who have developed vacuum-insulated double-glazing.

The enormous Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and the network of 10 radio dishes known as the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) are among a number of high-profile observatories that could be closed following a review of astronomy funding in the US. The review, carried out for the astronomy division of the National Science Foundation (NSF), was designed to square the increasing cost of new telescopes with an NSF astronomy budget that shows no sign of rising beyond the rate of inflation.

Portable devices such as mobile phones could one day be recharged simply by leaving them on a table top, according to a group of physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US. Marin Soljacic and colleagues have calculated that a particular form of electromagnetic field can be used to transfer energy between devices positioned up to several metres apart. If their theoretical work does lead to working devices, it could do away with the need for electrical cables in many applications (arXiv.org/abs/physics/0611063).

Over the past six years, many scientists in the US have criticized the Bush Administration and the Republicandominated Congress for paying far too much attention to religious fundamentalists opposed to stem-cell research and to businesses that do not believe that humans are heating up the planet. Not surprisingly, much of the American scientific community welcomed last month's mid-term elections, which saw the Democrats take control of the Senate and the House of Representatives for the first time in 12 years.

Antiprotons should be four times better at destroying tumours than their antimatter equivalents – protons – according to physicists at the CERN particle-physics laboratory in Geneva. The findings, due to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Radiotherapy and Oncology, could lead to new cancer-treatment techniques that minimize the damage done to healthy tissue surrounding tumours.

NASA has decided it will, after all, extend the life of the ageing Hubble telescope. The agency had cancelled all future Space Shuttle missions to Hubble on safety grounds after the loss of Columbia in 2003. But following outrage from astronomers, a change in leadership at NASA and the success of recent Shuttle missions, astronauts will now be sent to repair Hubble and equip it with two more instruments. This work should keep the telescope operational until about 2013 and increase its observational power by up to a factor of 100.

Lord Sainsbury last month resigned as the UK's science minister, a post he has held since 1998, saying he wished to renew his business and charitable activities.

After years of uncertainty, the UK has finally decided what to do with its nuclear waste – it will bury it.

The UK could be spending tens if not hundreds of millions of pounds too much on decommissioning its nuclear power stations, according to an expert on the nuclear industry.

A small scientific revolution is taking place at a former beach hotel in the seaside resort of Muizenberg near Cape Town, South Africa. The newly refurbished four-storey building is home to the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), which provides intensive research training to some of the continent's most talented young science graduates that would be nigh-on impossible in their own countries.

A medical physicist from Ireland has devised a deceptively simple technique that could provide salvation for many of the billion or so people without access to clean drinking water. The technique, developed by Kevin McGuigan from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, involves placing dirty water in clear plastic bottles and leaving them out in the Sun. Ultraviolet radiation from the Sun can kill water-borne pathogens, particularly if the water heats up.

Earlier this year Jorge Hirsch believed he had found a flaw in the reigning "BCS" theory of low-temperature superconductivity, claiming that in certain circumstances it violates Lenz's law of electromagnetism. The University of California San Diego theorist was keen to put his claim to the test but no experimentalist was willing to take him up on it. To drum up interest and collect "seed money" for an experiment Hirsch turned to a novel solution. He put out a challenge on his website, asking for 500 physicists who did not believe him to bet $100 each that the experiment would prove him wrong and so verify BCS theory.

Physicists who use muons to probe the atomic structure of matter are hatching plans to build dedicated particle accelerators for their research. Positively charged muons – fundamental particles with an eighth of the mass of a proton – are used as sensitive magnetic probes of a wide range of materials, but currently they are only produced parasitically in facilities primarily designed to generate neutrons or other particles. Researchers believe that machines specifically designed to produce muons could offer significant advantages, potentially leading to breakthroughs in areas such as superconductivity and hydrogen storage.

A new institute to study the physics of the early universe is to be set up at the University of Cambridge.

The management may have changed, but security breaches at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico seem still to be continuing.

A blueprint for a new type of "silent" aircraft that could be inaudible to people living near airports was unveiled last month by engineers from Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Being able to build devices from the bottom up has been the dream of nanotechnologists since Eric Drexler first put forward the idea in 1981. Drexler and his followers say that such an ability, could, for example, reduce the size of computers by as much as a factor of 10¹² over today's devices. Now, to try and at least start turning this vision into reality, an interdisciplinary group of about 30 researchers will gather in the UK next month. Their ultimate aim is to construct a "matter compiler", a device that converts designs encoded in software into macroscopic objects by manipulating individual atoms and molecules.

A physics-based company spun out of London South Bank University has produced a new type of skin-testing device. Biox Systems developed the hand-held instrument to measure the amount of water vapour lost at the skin's surface, which could help improve the performance of cosmetics, medical patches and wound dressings.

An educational centre in Cape Town shows what can be done to boost science in Africa Physics, like Physics World, is an international endeavour. In this age of rapid global communication, it is essential for all physicists to know what their colleagues around the world are doing. No physicist could possibly build a successful career by only talking or listening to people in their own country. From CERN's Large Hadron Collider to the ITER fusion experiment, and from blogs to online journals, physics is a truly global subject.

Why is James Clerk Maxwell such an obscure figure in the eyes of the public? As most readers will know, 2005 was the International Year of Physics, marking the centenary of Einstein's five great papers on relativity, light and atoms.

In 1623 Galileo crafted a famous metaphor that is still often cited by scientists. Nature, he wrote, is a book written in "the language of mathematics". If we cannot understand that language, we will be doomed to wander about as if "in a dark labyrinth".

Victor J Stenger's review of Francis Collins' book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief is unworthy of Physics World (October pp45–46). It is as offensive for him to imply that non-believing scientists "dodge the topic of religion" in order to avoid jeopardizing their funding, as it is to describe a scientist as eminent as Collins, who was head of the Human Genome Project, as having a "blinkered mind" in being able to reconcile science with Christian belief. It is similarly offensive to dismiss CS Lewis as "an author of children's literature" when it is the latter's acclaimed scholarly and theological writings that are pertinent.

Your interesting article about Thomas Young (March pp30–33) rightly stresses some of the basic contributions that Young made to physics and to other fields. However, one rather fundamental discovery made by Young is not mentioned.

Your correspondent (October p18) pointed out correctly that Sommerfeld's fine structure constant in SI units reads α=e²/4π₀ch, where e is the charge on the electron, ₀ is the permittivity of free space, c is the speed of light and h is Planck's constant divided by 2π. In fact, this expression is valid in arbitrary units.

I was interested to see (October p3) that 2006 is Maxwell Year.

Understanding how the universe works at the most fundamental scale is often likened to peeling away the layers of an onion. The outermost layer of the onion represents atoms, and we have known about these for a century or so. The next layer of structure, which was revealed by Rutherford in 1911, is the atomic nucleus – a much smaller object that contains almost all of the atomic mass. Some 20 years after that discovery, physicists realized that the nucleus is composed of more fundamental objects called protons and neutrons. However, peeling back the next layer of the onion has turned out to be much more of a challenge.

You may not realize it, but the sky is littered with black holes – regions of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. In the Milky Way, for instance, black holes a few times more massive than the Sun grow by accreting gas from companion stars within binary systems. At the centre of most galaxies, however, lurk black holes that are millions or billions of times more massive than the Sun, accreting gas that has been lost by stars or that has fallen into the galaxy.

Unless one is a poet, a war hero or a rock star, it is a mistake to die young. James Clerk Maxwell – unlike Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, the two giants of physics with whom he stands – made that mistake, dying in 1879 at the age of just 48. Physicists may be familiar with Maxwell, but most non-scientists, when they switch on their colour TVs or use their mobile phones, are unlikely to realize that he made such technology possible. After all, in 1864 he gave us "Maxwell's equations" – voted by Physics World readers as their favourite equations of all time – from which radio waves were predicted.

Most physicists can point to a popularscience book that has inspired them more than any other or perhaps even encouraged them into science as children. For some it is The Double Helix – James Watson's frank and amusing account of the discovery of the structure of DNA. For others it may be Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Millions of people bought Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, although few now judge it as a good way into physics.

Welcome to this special Physics World Christmas books crossword compiled by Peter Wade-Wright.

Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing are perennially fascinating figures. They left an indelible mark on modern thinking by demonstrating previously unsuspected limits to mathematics. But their difficulties with conventional social interaction eventually brought their lives to tragic and enigmatic ends. Small wonder that both have attracted writers intrigued by the combination of intellectual achievement at a level most of us can only dream of and personal drama of equally high order.

At a time when most of the public probably associates physics with esoteric (and possibly untestable) ideas such as 11D string theory and multiple universes, it is refreshing to be reminded that the subject is also grounded in the everyday devices of modern society.

"Drain three pointers, slam dunk easily, and sink that buzzer-beater from half court with the help of simple science."

The physics of TV and films is almost as common a choice for popularizing science as the physics of sport, with Lawrence Krauss' The Physics of Star Trek being a classic of the genre.

Albert Einstein recently came fifth in Forbes magazine's list of the highest earning dead celebrities – good news for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which owns the rights to his name.

Science and poetry do not always make great companions, as demonstrated by Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek's efforts in his recent book Fantastic Realities.

Still waiting in vain for your rocket-powered flying car or robotic kitchen? In Follies of Science brothers Eric and Jonathan Dregni take an amusing look at what early 20th-century futurists predicted that has not been delivered, illustrated from magazines of the period.

The US plan to mount a manned mission to Mars is controversial, with many environmentalists arguing that we should resolve problems on Earth before venturing into space.

The short-term future of the Hubble Space Telescope has just been secured, as NASA announced that it will fly a mission to repair it in 2008.

We all have an innate understanding of gravity – otherwise how would we catch a ball – but this weakest of the fundamental forces still eludes a complete explanation.

For many years my parents' basement was filled with no-longer-functioning remains of clock radios, garage-door openers and other electronic devices. Like many other experimental physicists, I suspect, I wanted to know what made those mysterious black boxes work. Over time I learned not only how to put them back together but also how to change the way they functioned – sometimes even for the better.

Why did you decide to study physics? I was a bright student, and I was moved up two years in school from an early age. That meant I wasn't mature enough to really appreciate the literature and poetry I was taught, and I always preferred trying out practical things to exerting rhetorical skills. Mathematics seemed too abstract, and biology wasn't really a scientific subject at that time, so I was drawn to physics. I chose to study at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris, a prestigious higher-education establishment with top-rated physics laboratories.

New academy for nuclear industry The UK government has announced plans for a vocational academy for nuclear engineers as part of its flagship National Skills Academy programme. Three academies were launched this year – in financial services, construction and manufacturing – and nine more are planned by 2008. The academies aim to fill skill shortages in the UK and will be jointly funded by the government and industry. The nuclear academy is the latest in a string of projects to prepare the UK for a new generation of nuclear power stations, as much of the current workforce reaches retirement age.

The answers to this year's quiz are all based on events that were reported in Physics World over the last 12 months.