Table of contents

It is not uncommon for physicists to marry each other, but could Merva and Tamar Arieli from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, be the first female identical twins who are both physicists? Both have a BSc in physics, are each currently studying for a Master's degree in the subject, and are now planning to do PhDs.

Anyone looking for links between physics and pop music will quickly discover that Queen legend Brian May has a physics PhD and that Max Born's granddaughter is Olivia Newton-John.

Raising the huge amounts of funds required to support a US presidential campaign is typically done behind closed doors.

Father Christmas may have been and gone, but scientists at the European Space Agency last month claimed that the XMM-Newton X-ray observatory had spotted Santa's whereabouts.

The first data from a series of "shining a light through a wall" experiments have put stringent limits on the properties of axions – hypothetical particles proposed over 30 years ago to explain a puzzling parameter in our description of the strong interaction. The results, reported by researchers from the "BMV project" working on the LULI experiment at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, and the GammeV experiment at Fermilab in the US, call into question the merit of similar experiments that are in the pipeline.

Coulomb's law, which states that the force between two electric charges is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, is one of the first things that budding physicists ever learn. But researchers in the US are building an experiment that will put the famous law through its toughest test to date and see just how good a description of the real world it is.

Formed at roughly the same time, orbiting closer than any other two planets in the solar system and possessing the same radius to within 5%, Earth and Venus are often referred to as twins.

As any child knows, the best way to build a sandcastle is to use wet sand because it sticks together, whereas a castle made from dry sand will collapse under its own weight. Now, however, physicists in Germany have turned this law of the beach on its head by showing that – under some circumstances at least – wet sand can flow better than dry sand.

It may be best known for ensnaring flies, but now the Venus flytrap has also captured the attention of some materials physicists in the US. Alfred Crosby and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have been inspired by the carnivorous plant's unusual jaw structure to create a new material that can rapidly change its shape when stimulated by pressure, heat or electrical current. The material could be used to create surfaces that can quickly change their reflectivity or lenses that can switch between focal lengths.

Physicists and astronomers in the UK are coming to terms with a massive funding crisis that engulfed one of the country's main funding agencies last month. As a result of an £80m black hole in the budget of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), it has decided to stop funding research into the International Linear Collider (ILC), withdraw from the Gemini telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, and cease all support for high-energy gamma-ray astronomy and ground-based solar–terrestrial physics. Research grants in particle physics and astronomy could also be cut by up to 25%, which may lead to job losses at university departments.

A longer-than-expected maintenance shutdown of the Canadian nuclear reactor that produces North America's entire supply of molybdenum-99 – from which the radioactive isotopes technetium-99 and iodine-131 are made – caused delays to the diagnosis and treatment of thousands of seriously ill patients last month. Technetium-99 is a key component of nuclear-medicine scans, while iodine-131 is used to treat cancer and other diseases of the thyroid. Production eventually resumed, but only after the Canadian government had overruled the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), which was still concerned about the reactor's safety.

The prospect of a ground-based telescope that can directly see extrasolar planets, the earliest stellar systems and the birth of distant galaxies is nearing reality after the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation pledged $200m to the Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT).The telescope is being developed by a consortium of astronomers in the US and Canada, including the California Institute of Technology and the University of California. "With this commitment, we can complete the TMT design and initiate construction,"says Gary Sanders, TMT project manager.

The new Australian Labor government led by Kevin Rudd is to help science by offering 1000 new four-year fellowships to the county's top researchers. The fellowships will be worth A$ 140 000 (about €84 000) per year and include a further A$ 50 000 for lab infrastructure and equipment. The new government has also promised to double the number of postgraduate awards for PhD and research Masters students to nearly 10 000 by 2010.

The condensed-matter physicist Tony Bland from Cambridge University in the UK died on 2 December at the age of 49. Bland had a wide range of research interests but was best known for his pioneering work on the magnetic properties of thin films. In particular, he developed techniques to "inject" – and also detect – spin-polarized electrons into semiconductors such as silicon. Such techniques are essential in the emerging field of "spintronics", which could lead to the development of devices that exploit the spin as well as the charge of electrons.

The German physicist Rolf-Dieter Heuer has been appointed as the next director general of the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva.

George Smoot, who shared the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics with John Mather for discovering anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, has donated most of his winnings to help set up a new cosmology centre in the US.

Chris Llewellyn Smith, who was a director general of CERN in the 1990s, has taken up a key role in the €10bn ITER fusion experiment that is about to be built at Cadarache in the south of France.

Torraca in southern Italy is perhaps not the first place you would expect to find a technological revolution taking place. But this ancient village of 1400 inhabitants perched on a hill above the Mediterranean has just converted all 700 of its street lamps from standard electric-discharge tubes to light-emitting diodes (LEDs). This achievement, according to the town's mayor Daniele Filizola, makes Torraca the first "city" in the world to be entirely illuminated by LEDs.

An innovative new centre designed to get the public interested in science and technology will open at Trinity College Dublin later this month. The centre, known as the Science Gallery, will allow scientists and the public to debate and exchange ideas through a variety of interactive exhibitions, workshops and other events. The first exhibition will be "Lightwave" – a nine-day, city-wide festival about the principles of light and the technologies used to control it.

Warp drives are a staple of science fiction, transporting the heroes of shows like Star Trek between galaxies in a matter of hours. Now, increasing numbers of cosmologists are wondering whether this technology might eventually become science fact. Dozens of scientific papers on warp drives have appeared since 1994 when Miguel Alcubierre – a theoretical physicist then at the University of Wales in Cardiff – first argued that a warp drive was theoretically possible (Class. Quantum Grav.11 L73)

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word "heretic" as "the holder of an unorthodox opinion". By his own admission, physicist Freeman Dyson has most definitely not been a heretic as far as his contributions to science are concerned, having carried out significant research on quantum electrodynamics and the stability of bulk matter. However, he certainly has unorthodox views when it comes to social issues related to science, which he has discussed at length in a number of books over the last two decades.

UK physics could be irreparably damaged by an £80m funding shortfall "Total disaster"; "crazy"; "catastrophic"; "scientific vandalism"; "savage"; and "bombshell". These were some of the words used by physicists and astronomers last month to describe the potential impact of an £80m funding shortfall in the budget of the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Rumours of a deficit had been circulating for several months, and researchers' worst fears were confirmed when the government announced how much it will spend on science over the next three years (see p7).

Its progenitor once described the Dictionary of Scientific Biography – or DSB, as it is known to historians – as a "gothic cathedral". The analogy is apt: this vast 18-volume reference work is a landmark collaboration, painstakingly crafted by experts, the scope and influence of which have grown over time.

The article by Peter Crouch and colleagues on 50 years of Fortran (December 2007 pp31–33) provides an interesting history of the language, together with an insight into the many pragmatic trade-offs between programming languages. However, the article is incorrect to state that the Java language is interpreted (i.e. non-compiled).

Richard Corfield's article "Sputnik's legacy" (October 2007 pp23–27) states that the satellite on board the US Vanguard rocket, which exploded during launch on 6 December 1957 two months after Sputnik's successful take-off, was "a hastily put together contraption of wires and circuitry designed only to send a radio signal back to Earth". In fact, the Vanguard satellite was developed over a period of several years and put together carefully using the best techniques and equipment available at the time – such as transistors from Bell Laboratories/Western Electric. The satellite contained not one but two transmitters, in which the crystal-controlled oscillators had been designed to measure both the temperature of the satellite shell and of the internal package.

Joanna Brunker (September p64) wants to improve the public's familiarity with physics terms. Her intention is laudable; her proposed method dubious. She imagines generations of children using "physglish" (physics English, and presumably its counterparts in other languages) to describe going upstairs as raising their potential energy, riding a swing as executing simple harmonic motion, and the fun of a see-saw as resting on a rough balance of moments.

During editing we incorrectly stated (December 2007 p16) that the Casimir force pushes two metal plates apart, when the force actually pushes such plates together.

Sometimes the simple things in nature can be the most puzzling. Take the humble snowflake, that familiar winter icon immediately recognizable by its beautiful structure and distinctive symmetry. One might think that the process whereby water vapour condenses into crystalline ice would be well understood. A closer look, however, reveals that even some very basic questions about how snow crystals form remain unanswered.

Eighty years ago theoretical physicists had a problem: they lacked a mathematical description of elementary particles that was consistent with the principles of both Einstein's special theory of relativity and the newly formed theory of quantum mechanics. In 1927 Erwin Schrödinger had written down the quantum mechanical equation of motion for the electron, but this did not take into account the fact that electrons are relativistic particles. Troubled by this situation, Paul Dirac set about finding a solution.

One of the biggest challenges when teaching physics is to bridge the perceived chasm between the abstract "scientific" world and the "real" world of experience. Newton's first law of motion, for example, states that an object remains in motion in a straight line unless acted on by an external force. However, our experience tells us that most objects keep moving only as long as something pushes them. The key to mastering physics lies in the ability to abstract the "law" from a reality that includes friction and other effects.

Few groups of scientists can have been studied more intensely than 20th-century German physicists, thanks to both their extraordinary successes and their involvement in the upheavals of the first half of the century. That attention has produced a number of first-rate accounts of these physicists and their community through the Third Reich (1933–1945), thus enabling us to gain a considerable grasp of their science and its broader cultural and political context. The same cannot be said, however, for the postwar period, especially the chaotic years following the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 through to the founding of East and West Germany – then under Allied occupation – in 1949.

Who is the blog written by? Dave Bacon is a physicist at the University of Washington in the US who works in the departments of physics and of computer science and engineering. He is interested in quantum-information science; in particular how to build a quantum computer, and what to do with one once it is built.

Upon receiving this book I was somewhat sceptical to see that the author, David Toomey, is not a physicist but instead has a PhD in English literature and teaches technical and non-fiction writing at the University of Massachusetts in the US. As I began to read it, however, my attitude changed. To many physicists, a book about time travel would be virtually indistinguishable from a piece of science fiction, particularly when there are no equations or experimental results provided. To have any chance of presenting the work in a convincing manner, therefore, any author of such a book must be quite skilled. Toomey not only accomplishes this, but also makes the book an enjoyable read.

The physicist Vikram Sarabhai is best known – if at all in the West – as the founder of India's space programme.

The laws of thermodynamics govern everything in our lives, from the direction of time and how messy our desk is to the ultimate fate of the universe.

"Physics without philosophy would be blind; philosophy without physics would be lame."

When I left the University of Reading in 2005 with a BSc in physics and meteorology, it was an easy decision to join the energy industry. I had studied climate science during my degree and I wanted to do something that would help curb the impact of electricity production and confront the challenge of climate change. With my physics background, the nuclear industry seemed a logical place to invest my skills and a few months later I joined British Energy as a graduate trainee.

Europe targets exceptional talent The European Research Council (ERC) has at last released the details of its Advanced Grant scheme, which will fund some of Europe's best researchers to the tune of €4bn over the next six years. Until now the ERC, which finally came into being early last year, has only been offering "starting grants" to support promising young researchers during the early stages of their careers. In contrast, the Advanced Grant scheme will be open to any researcher working – or planning to work – in Europe who has at least a 10-year track record of significant achievements (as judged by the number of their papers, patents and invited presentations), and who has already established themselves as an "exceptional leader" in their field. Depending on the nature of the research, individual grants could be worth up to €3.5m over five years. The ERC is accepting applications now, which will be judged solely on their scientific excellence.

Why did you originally choose to study physics? I was really interested in science at school, and I also read a couple of fascinating popular-science books about quantum mechanics and special relativity. My interest in these topics made me decide to study physics at Oxford University. Straight after I graduated in 1967 I did a theoretical-physics DPhil, also at Oxford.

We recently renovated our bathroom. One of the things that my wife – also a physicist – and I both agreed on was the absolute necessity for a large bathtub in which to stretch out, read a book and think. I find that most of my best ideas occur to me in the bath, and apparently I am not alone – the distinguished nuclear physicist Leo Szilárd is also reputed to have used bathtub meditation.