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It is "just so damn funny" according to the 2005 physics Nobel laureate Jan Hall from the University of Colorado and it seems that others agree.

Roll up, roll up. It's first come, first served as NASA offers US schools, universities and non-profit museums a chance to get their hands on some space-shuttle relics.

Still on space, last month saw an unfortunate case of mistaken identity when a member of the public muddled a distress flare with something much more mundane.

Want to find the Higgs boson all on your own? Well, now there is an app for that.

And finally, possibly the worst physics rhyme ever has been spotted in a new song about recent claims that neutrinos may travel faster than light.

A common type of active galactic nuclei (AGN) could be used as an accurate "standard candle" for measuring cosmic distances – according to astronomers in Denmark and Australia.

A new type of gyroscope based on interfering atoms has been developed that can determine the latitude at which the instrument is located – and also measure true north and the Earth's rate of rotation.

Researchers in the US have looked at how neurons work to "code position in space" – in other words, how your brain perceives the space you are in and what helps you to navigate within it.

If an unfortunate insect finds itself trapped inside a Nepenthes pitcher plant, its chances of survival are pretty slim – these tube-shaped plants are lined with a slippery surface that causes its victims to slide into a chamber filled with digestive juices.

Scientists in the US have developed a new way of pumping ferrofluids without the use of any mechanical components.

The 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to Saul Perlmutter from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, US, Adam Riess at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Brian Schmidt from the Australian National University, Weston Creek, "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae".

The 2011 Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to Daniel Shechtman from Technion – Israel institute of Technology for his discovery of quasicrystals, which are materials that have ordered but not periodic structures.

Policy-makers would be better placed to combat the effects of global warming if scientists had access to accurate measurements of the Earth's radiation balance from a dedicated satellite.

After 26 years of colliding protons with antiprotons at energies as high as 1.96 TeV, physicists and dignitaries gathered at Fermilab on the outskirts of Chicago on 30 September to mark the final day of the Tevatron particle collider.

The German physicist Rudolf Mössbauer, who won the 1961 Nobel Prize for Physics, died on 14 September at the age of 82.

China has launched an experimental space lab that will pave the way for the country's ambitious plans to construct a 60 tonne space station by the early 2020s.

The University of Colorado, Boulder, has beaten seven universities including Arizona and Southern California to host the National Solar Observatory (NSO).

A court in the German state of Baden-Württemberg has ruled that the University of Konstanz was correct to withdraw the PhD from physicist Jan Hendrik Schön.

A UK-led project to investigate the feasibility of injecting particles into the stratosphere with the aim of cooling the Earth has been delayed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

A physicist in Mexico has called for the Mexican government to ban a widely used drugs detector because he claims it does not work.

Scientists in Russia have built a prototype of a compact plasma accelerator, raising the prospect of "desktop" accelerators that could exceed the power of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at a fraction of the size and cost.

Around half of all academics in Australia intend to retire, move to an overseas university or leave Australian higher education within the next 10 years, according to a survey of more than 5500 researchers based at 20 universities in the country.

A raft of "family friendly" policies to give scientists the flexibility to pursue their careers while taking care of family responsibilities has been announced by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the main funder of basic research in the US.

The UK's nuclear plants are safe and the government's strategy for new reactors is adequate, according to a report by Mike Weightman, the UK's chief nuclear inspector.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California has discovered more isotopes than any other lab, according to a new ranking developed by physicist Michael Thoennessen of the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University.

The average research impact of UK publications now surpasses that of the US, according to a new study from information-services firm Thomson Reuters.

When the OPERA collaboration announced on 23 September that it had observed neutrinos apparently travelling faster than the speed of light on their journey from the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva to the Gran Sasso underground lab in central Italy, the announcement made headlines around the world.

Physicists in Japan have drawn up plans to build a vast underground neutrino detector that would dwarf similar existing facilities.

Why have only two women ever won the Nobel Prize for Physics?

New rules to judge research quality in the UK could be detrimental to women who take maternity leave.

When physicists in Italy claimed to have seen hints of faster-than-light neutrinos, it initiated a media frenzy as well as criticism of publicity-seeking.

Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711–1765) was one of the most far-sighted, polymathic and colourful scientists who ever lived.

In his letter (August p18), Michael Duff points out that grant applications rejected by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for "office reasons" count towards the council's Repeatedly Unsuccessful Applicants Policy, which restricts such applicants from submitting more than one application in a 12-month period.

I wish to thank Srinath Perur for his review of Geek Nation by Angela Saini (September pp46–47).

Your report on the resignation of the editor of the journal Remote Sensing (October p9) quoted several of the protagonists, giving a "balanced" view of the issue.

James Poskett's excellent article about Ernest Rutherford (September pp39–42) marking the centenary of his discovery of the structure of the atom mentioned that, to inject engineering capability into the skills at his disposal at Cambridge, Rutherford had to turn to Russia and Pyotr Kapitsa.

Regarding Duncan Watts' article on common sense and social science ("Why everything that seems obvious isn't", October pp30–34), the problem with common sense is that we live in a very narrow "linear-ish" band of a very nonlinear world, and most people only exist within or observe a relatively small range of reality.

I have to take issue with the comment made by University of Manchester physicist Brian Cox in the Daily Telegraph, which you included in October's "For the record" (p3).

We were interested to read Michael Huber's response (September p21) to our letter (August pp18–19) about physics in primary schools.

I read with great interest Richard Taylor's article "Coming soon to a field near you" (August pp26–31), but was somewhat amazed that he presents crop circles as relatively modern works.

In the article "Evaluations evaluated" (October p23), the challenge for prospective PhD students that was attributed to Demetris Charalambous was originally posed to him by Joe Vinen of Birmingham University.

We all know that if the Earth absorbs more heat than it emits it will eventually get warmer.

Thanks to a technique that reveals galaxies in 3D, astronomers can now show that many galaxies have been wrongly classified.

Light-emitting diodes are more efficient than conventional lighting, but high production costs limit their uptake. Organic versions that can be produced using a cheap newspaper-style "roll-to-roll" printing process are likely to revolutionize our lighting and signage.

A rare event took place in June, when not one but two new elements were added to the periodic table.

Let's get the main message out straight away, before we get down to the details and maybe a few quibbles: in Rising Force, James Livingston has written an account of magnetic levitation that is a pleasure to read, informative, succinctly explained and scientifically accurate.

How far can people trust what scientists say about science?

With Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt sharing this year's Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, you may well want to speed up the rate of increase of your own knowledge about the cosmos.

Talking of things getting bigger, back in 1999 Martin Rees published a book called Just Six Numbers, in which the Cambridge University cosmologist tried to explain how the shape and size of our universe depend on just six key fundamental constants.

Science is all about certainty, precision and objectivity. But it is also about wonder, mystery and creativity.

NerdyDayTrips is the brainchild of Ben Goldacre, a prominent science blogger and author of the "Bad Science" column in the Guardian newspaper.

When people think of NASA, the first thing that comes to mind is probably an image of astronauts floating around the International Space Station, or perhaps the great discoveries that have come from the agency's space programme.

Hannu Rajaniemi is an Edinburgh-based science-fiction writer whose first novel, The Quantum Thief, is published by Gollancz in paperback this month.

Someone being awarded a new chair in condensed-matter physics is rarely big news – but it is when the chair in question is said to be the world's most lucrative in theoretical physics.

A century ago a remarkable group of scientists met in a room at the Hôtel Métropole in Brussels.