Table of contents

Power and beauty are the essential ingredients in an unusual competition currently being held in Russia.

That the world is made up of tiny, vibrating loops of string and that it exists in 11 dimensions may not be immediately obvious to the person in the street (or, indeed, to many physicists).

Trying to get across sometimes quite complex physics within a punchy storyline can be a tricky business, as demonstrated by Dan Brown's antimatter yarn Angels and Demons.

It's not just your bank balance and scientific reputation that benefit when you win a Nobel prize, according to new research.

In a performance more akin to a magic trick than a delicate optical experiment, physicists in the US have stopped a pulse of light in one location and then retrieved it unaffected in another. This extraordinary feat was carried out using Bose–Einstein condensates, and could one day allow optical information to be processed directly rather than electronically as it is in current communications networks.

Two logic gates that operate via tiny bubbles moving in a fluid have been created by researchers in the US. The gates, which perform different logical functions, could be combined to perform any computation currently done by a conventional computer. This "bubble logic" was also used to create a one-bit memory for storing information, meaning that researchers now have all the components necessary to build a "bubble computer" (Science315 832).

The colourful patterns produced by these tiny polymer disks hold the key to one of the biggest nuisances in industrial-processing plants: jamming.

Disasters that occur when too many people are crammed into the same space can be avoided by looking for phase transitions in pedestrian motion, claim physicists in Germany. By analysing video images of last year's hajj (the pilgrimage to the city of Mecca) at which 300 people lost their lives, Dirk Helbing and Anders Johansson of the Dresden University of Technology have identified a clear transition from "laminar" to turbulent flow, which could help avert such disasters in the future (arXiv.org/abs/physics/0701203).

Vegetable oil, washing-up liquid and chain grease are just some of the things that amateur skiers apply to their skis in order to get them down the slopes quicker. At least that is what UK chemical engineer Peter Styring found when he visited a dry ski slope with his daughter in 2004. What set the former competitive skier thinking, however, was the huge mess that these lubricants left behind on top of the slope – revealing that very little was actually being used as intended. Fast-forward to 2007 and Styring – who is based at the University of Sheffield – is now holding discussions with major sports manufacturers about how they might incorporate his novel "smart waxing technology" into their skis in time for next year's ski season, writes Matthew Chalmers.

Particle physicists last month published detailed plans for their next big accelerator project and revealed how much they expect it to cost. According to their "reference design" report, the core construction costs of the International Linear Collider (ILC) will be $6.7bn, although the 31 km-long machine could consume as much as $15bn by the end of its 20-year operating lifetime.

The outlook for physicists in the US has suddenly brightened. Instead of freezing 2007 funding at 2006 levels as looked likely in January, Congress has in fact approved substantial increases in funding for this year. There is further good news in the Bush Administration's budget proposal for 2008, which sees significant rises across the physical sciences.

Geothermal energy could supply as much as 10% of America's electricity needs – similar to the amount currently supplied by nuclear power and by hydro power – according to an international panel sponsored by the US Department of Energy. This would involve developing new technology to extract heat stored in the Earth's crust but would be both economically competitive and environmentally friendly, says the panel.

A researcher in the US has converted technology designed to detect missiles into a form of treatment for breast cancer. The method, which focuses microwaves on tumours in the breast, has recently shown its promise in two small clinical studies on human patients. Although the technique is unlikely to be able to cure breast cancer, it could reduce the chance of tumours recurring if used in conjunction with surgery, chemotherapy and other forms of radiation treatment.

There can now be little doubt that the climate is hotting up – both the actual climate and the political discussion of it. In its first scientific review of global warming for six years the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last month stated that humans are almost certainly raising the planet's temperature, a conclusion that throws down the gauntlet for politicians to take action. But what do individual researchers make of the report – do they believe it accurately reflects the current state of climate science?

Rusi Taleyarkhan, a nuclear engineer from Purdue University, is not guilty of research misconduct, according to a committee set up by Purdue to examine accusations that he had tried to prevent other scientists from carrying out and publishing research that contradicted his positive findings on sonofusion.

The world's most powerful heavy-ion accelerator has been switched on in Japan.

While physicists will immediately recognize the traditional yellow and black "trefoil" symbol warning people of ionizing radiation, others it seems have no idea what it means.

The idea of harnessing the process that powers the Sun has been a dream of scientists for decades – and it is easy to see why. Generating energy by fusing light nuclei together would produce little radioactive waste and no greenhouse gases. There is an almost limitless supply of fuel in sea-water and there would be no danger of nuclear meltdown. But actually making a practical fusion-energy source is a huge technical challenge, and massively expensive.

Nathan Myhrvold has only ever worked for three people: first Stephen Hawking; then Steve Ballmer, current chief executive of Microsoft; and finally Bill Gates. "Each had more money and less formal education than the last," jokes Myhrvold, "so I had nowhere left to go." Maybe that is part of the reason that Myhrvold, a former physicist, left his job as chief strategist and head of technology at Microsoft in 2000 and set out on his own to revolutionize the intellectual-property market.

Ever since the days of Maxwell, Thomson and Rutherford, the University of Cambridge has been rightly recognized for the quality of its physics research. But physics at Cambridge, which is centred on the world-famous Cavendish Laboratory, is about to boosted by the building of a new centre for the physics of medicine and a cosmology institute. The university is also making a string of new appointments in physics.

Astrophysicists who use high-energy gamma radiation to probe the universe are eagerly awaiting the launch of two new space telescopes that are due to take off later this year. First up will be the Italian Space Agency's AGILE telescope, which is set to blast off from India on 31 March. The €40m mission is designed to study gamma rays with energies up to 50 GeV. Then in November NASA will launch the much larger Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) from Florida. GLAST will look for gamma rays with energies up to 100 GeV – the highest that can be easily detected from space. The $350m mission is designed to last for five years, but could be extended to a decade if all goes to plan.

Life is far from simple in the post-Cold War world. The neat US–Soviet divide is long gone, having been replaced by a more complex geopolitical reality in which countries like North Korea and Iran have fledgling nuclear programmes. So what should a country like the UK do about its nuclear weapons? The answer for the British government is simple. Its view is that as no-one knows what the world will be like politically in 30 years' time, the UK needs to keep an independent nuclear deterrent as an "insurance policy" against the uncertainties and risks of the future. That argument makes sense, but it is not clear why this means we need to replace the UK's Trident nuclear-weapons system, as the government recommended in a White Paper last year.

This month the UK parliament will vote on one of the most important defence issues the country has faced: whether or not to replace its Trident nuclear-weapons system when it reaches the end of its lifetime some 20 years from now. Britain, along with the US, Russia, China and France, is one of the original nuclear powers, having first exploded a nuclear bomb in 1953. A decision in favour of replacing Trident would mean the UK retaining its nuclear capability into the 2040s. But there are strong arguments against such a decision, a move that would set in motion the UK's eventual departure from the nuclear club.

When the 14-year-old Richard Feynman first encountered e^ix + 1 = 0, the future physics Nobel laureate wrote in big, bold letters in his diary that it was "the most remarkable formula in math". Stanford University mathematics professor Keith Devlin claims that "like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's equation reaches down into the very depths of existence". Meanwhile Paul Nahin – a retired US electrical engineer – says in his recent book, Dr Euler's Fabulous Formula, that the expression sets "the gold standard for mathematical beauty".

In reference to your debate on the future of open access (OA) publishing (January pp22–23) it is important to distinguish between two different approaches, sometimes called "gold" OA and "green" OA. In the former a journal charges nothing for reader access, at least to its electronic version, while in the latter the journal charges for subscriptions but allows authors to deposit copies of their papers in freely accessible archives.

We at CERN enjoyed your special issue in October 2006 dedicated to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is on schedule to start up this November. It therefore came as a surprise to read in your news story about the search for the Higgs boson that "the LHC is not set to start for another two years" (January p6).

It was fascinating to read Francis Everitt's article about James Clerk Maxwell, which reviewed the considerable contributions that this great physicist made to science (December 2006 pp32–37). One topic that Everitt did not mention was Maxwell's ingenious method for estimating the effective electrical conductivity of an isolated cluster of spherical particles embedded in an infinite matrix, which he published in 1873.

Laurie Mansfield's defence of standards in UK physics exams (January p16) is absurd. Standards have dropped dramatically over the past few decades, and the same is true of mathematics and science exams throughout Europe, North America and, no doubt, elsewhere. It is true that I cannot properly quantify Mansfield's (rather short) period of evaluation of 1996–2001. But the situation between 1960 and 2006, during most of which I have been teaching maths and physics, is absolutely clear.

As theories go, quantum mechanics has certainly been successful. Despite its many counterintuitive predictions, it has provided an accurate description of the atomic world for more than 80 years. It has also been an essential tool for designing today's computer chips and hard-disk drives, as well as the lasers used in the fibre-optic communications of the Internet. Now, however, the ability to manipulate the quantum states of individual subatomic particles is allowing us to exploit the strange properties of quantum theory much more directly in information technology.

Over the last century our window on the universe has been widened by a staggering amount. From observations in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum, which spans one octave, astronomers have extended their view in two different directions. We are now able to study the cosmos in the long-wavelength radio and microwave regions right up to the ultrashort wavelengths of X-rays and gamma radiation – an increase of over 70 octaves. As many celestial objects and processes are only accessible at wavelengths beyond the optical range, this has provided us with a much more complete view of the universe.

If you think of medical prostheses, then artificial limbs, hip replacements or cochlear implants may spring to mind. These are all undoubtedly impressive feats of medical engineering, but scientists are now attempting to develop something altogether more complex – a retinal prosthesis. This is a device designed to restore some vision to blind people by bypassing damaged photoreceptors in the retina and stimulating the neuronal cells at the end of a still healthy optic nerve. Some dozen research groups around the world – both academic and commercial – are developing these devices, bringing together ophthalmologists and surgeons with physicists and engineers.

From mobile phones and laptops to Xboxes and iPods, it is difficult to think of any aspect of modern life that has not been touched by developments in electronics, computing and communications over the last few decades. Many of these technological advances have arisen from our ability to create ever smaller electronic devices, in particular silicon-based field effect transistors (FETs), which has led to denser, faster and less power-hungry circuits. The problem is that this device miniaturization, or "scaling", cannot continue forever; fundamental scientific and technological limitations exist that will make it impossible to build better performing silicon devices below a certain size.

The decision last August to strip Pluto of its status as a planet came as close as physics gets to a major international incident. The General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in Prague opened with a proposal that would have expanded the number of planets in our solar system to 12, but ended by adopting a definition that left Pluto as a lowly "dwarf planet" – asteroid number 134340. Something about Pluto's plight captured the imagination of a public that grew up with nine planets, catapulting the story into the mainstream media.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, has made a name for himself by popularizing science.

Frank Close's The Cosmic Onion, first published in 1983, is regarded as a classic of popular science.

Who is the blog written by? Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist at the University of Padova, Italy. He is a member of both the CDF collaboration at Fermilab in the US and the CMS experiment, which is due to begin studying particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN next year.

Can there be too many science metaphors in a play for even a physicist reviewer? That was the question I found myself asking while watching Strings, a new physics-based play that opened for a three-week run over Christmas in a small theatre in New York City. The witty and enjoyable play was written by US novelist Carole Buggé and starred a competent cast of experienced actors. The storyline involves three physicists on a train journey from Cambridge to London, who, in a self-referential touch, are going to see a performance of Michael Frayn's own intellectual science play Copenhagen.

When I finished my physics degree at the University of York in 2004, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my career. I had enjoyed my degree and was interested in a career with a scientific bent, but at the same time I wanted to feel like I would be contributing something useful to a company. As I searched through various careers websites I came across E.ON UK, which at the time I had never heard of. I soon discovered that E.ON is the parent company to the electricity and gas supplier Powergen, and that it has its own centre for science and engineering in Nottingham called Power Technology.

How did your interest in physics develop? My father was an engineer so I grew up in a technical household, and physics was always what I was good at in school. I was also inspired by Richard Feynman's lectures and books. When I was 17, I moved from South Africa to Canada, and then to the University of Pennsylvania to study a dual degree in business and physics. It was an unusual combination, and I enjoyed the physics more. I'm not sure I would study business again if I could replay things.

Swift recognition The team working on NASA's Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer mission has been awarded the 2007 Bruno Rossi Prize by the American Astronomical Society. The Swift probe, launched in November 2004, was designed to rapidly locate and observe gamma-ray bursts – powerful flashes of light that last from milliseconds to minutes. Gamma-ray bursts were discovered in the 1960s and remained a mystery until the 1990s, but they are now thought to be emitted by a star as it collapses into a black hole. Swift has detected over 200 gamma-ray bursts, including the most distant example ever seen, 13 billion light-years from Earth. The Bruno Rossi Prize is awarded annually for significant contributions to high-energy astrophysics.

The American-born scientist Benjamin Thompson – later Count Rumford – is best known for his pioneering work on thermodynamics. The major events of his life have been well documented in books such as Sanborn Brown's 1979 biography. However, few people know that during a career that frequently veered between fame and disgrace, Thompson also gave birth to the "tog" rating used to classify the insulating properties of duvets and sleeping bags the world over.