Table of contents

Japan, the South Pole, the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva, and even 2 km underground in a mine in Canada. Kern the gnome has probably been where no small ceramic humanoid creature has ever ventured before.

During a recent visit to the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan, your correspondent was talking to Yoshihiko Takano over a cup of green tea about the latest in iron-telluride superconductivity.

Got a spare $7m lying around? Then why not bid for the Broad Band X-ray Telescope (BBXRT), which flew on the space shuttle Columbia for a nine-day period in 1990 and was used to study supernovae and pulsars?

He has already appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as several episodes of The Simpsons, but now Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking has made his way onto the hit comedy TV series The Big Bang Theory.

The first real-time movie of large molecules creating an interference pattern after passing through two slits has been made by an international team of physicists.

Researchers in the US and South Korea have for the first time managed to obtain real-time images of how nanocrystals grow at the atomic scale.

Jianwei Miao of the University of California, Los Angeles and colleagues have produced the first electrontomography images in which they can directly visualize 3D local structures without relying on a priori structural information.

Fossilized raindrops have been used for the first time to determine what the air pressure was on Earth billions of years ago.

A robotic swimmer, dubbed "Robojelly", that mimics the motion of a jellyfish has been built by researchers in the US.

Physicists within the OPERA collaboration at the Gran Sasso laboratory in central Italy are struggling to regain their unity in the wake of the resignations of spokesman Antonio Ereditato and physics co-ordinator Dario Autiero.

NASA is to extend the lifetime of nine key astrophysics missions, including the Kepler exoplanet hunter and the Fermi gamma-ray telescope, until at least 2014 following a recommendation by a "senior review" conducted by the agency.

The head of a team that wants to build a giant $1bn telescope in the Chilean Andes has defended the decision by its board of directors not to seek US government funds.

A physicist at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill has expressed disappointment with his university's actions after being jailed in Argentina on drug-smuggling charges.

Spain's biggest astronomy research centre could be forced to drastically downsize after its budget from central government was cut by a massive 30%.

Four years after India's maiden mission to the Moon – Chandrayaan-1 – the country has announced its first mission to Mars.

Two teams developing rival designs for an international linear collider will continue with their own separate blueprints – even though both teams are joining forces at the organizational level.

India has become the first non-European nation to join the Institute Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, France.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is expected to announce that a mission to Jupiter has beaten two other candidates as the agency's pick for its "large" class (L-class) mission.

Two 4 TeV proton beams were collided at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) early last month, signalling the start of data collection for 2012.

More details have emerged about how a new online open-access journal for biomedical and life-sciences research will run when it is launched later this year.

The world's first "compact" X-ray free-electron laser opened its doors to users in March.

Russia looks set to unveil an ambitious new space strategy that will see the country launch a series of scientific missions across the solar system.

Physicists in the US working on a major new experiment to study the properties of neutrinos have suffered a major setback with the announcement that the US Department of Energy (DOE) will not fund their current plan.

A new £13m centre to co-ordinate the UK's research into carbon capture and storage (CCS) is to be set up at the University of Edinburgh.

The CERN particle-physics lab is not only advancing basic physics, but also playing an invaluable role in diagnostic and therapeutic medicine, as Tami Freeman reports.

Next month's transit of Venus reveals why astronomy has so many trump cards.

Send us your best astronomy images for this month's Physics World photo challenge.

Technologies based on the properties of quantum mechanics have been around for many years, but Iulia Georgescu and Franco Nori argue that we need a new definition for "quantum technologies".

Some historical questions are more difficult to resolve than others. But why, asks Robert Crease, is the discovery of Venus's atmosphere still controversial?

Richard Corfield's article "The perfect storm" (April pp21–25) provided an interesting comment on the variety of factors relevant to the sinking of the Titanic.

In her Forum article "Mending the broken pipe" (April pp16–17), Lesley Cohen showed very encouraging data on the increasing numbers of female physicists at Imperial College London, which is one of the leaders in driving gender equality among academics in the UK.

After describing some recent research on the physics of ponytails, your Quanta article "Fringe science" (March p3) concludes by stating that "why anyone would want a ponytail in the first place, however, remains unanswered".

I read with great interest the article "When north head south" about geomagnetic reversal (March pp51–55).

A short article on quilts inspired by the Large Hadron Collider ("Colliding quilts", April p3) stated that the quilts' areas were between 60 and 130 cm 2. In fact, the quilts measure between 60 and 130 cm on a side, so their total areas are 3600–16,900 cm 2.

A few billion years ago, so the theory goes, a planet-sized object called Theia collided with the early Earth, and our Moon coalesced from the resulting debris.

Steven Judge and Hiroyuki Kuwahara report on efforts to monitor radioactive contamination in areas near the stricken Fukushima Daiichi reactor.

Once thought to offer imaging at unlimited resolution beyond that permitted by diffraction, superlenses never quite worked in practice. Now, physicists have a host of other ideas to make perfect images, but can these concepts succeed where superlenses failed?

Transits of Venus, in which our sister planet passes across the face of the Sun, are predictable but exceptionally rare events. With the next transit due to take place on 5 and 6 June this year, Jay M Pasachoff explores the science and history of these twice-in-a-lifetime occurrences.

The evolutionary biologist and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins has often lamented the fact that physicists are much less antagonistic to religion than biologists are.

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. A metaphorical DNA test, however, suggests that its father is probably that old reprobate, Creativity. The simple fact is that for many inventors, a pressing need is not essential: scientists often create something new just because they can.

Universe Sandbox bills itself as "an interactive space simulator", presumably because "a really cool program that lets you do all kinds of things with moons and planets and stars and other stuff" didn't sound professional enough.

Robert Harris is perhaps best known for his trio of historical novels about ancient Rome that began with his 2003 bestseller Pompeii. Now, the former TV journalist has turned his hand to something very different with The Fear Index – a thriller about an ex-CERN particle physicist called Alexander Hoffmann who sets up an enormously profitable hedgefund firm that trades on the global financial markets.

Those who like their holiday reading a bit more cerebral may prefer an intriguing new trilogy by Stuart Clark, an astronomy journalist who has recently turned to writing fiction.

As opening lines go, the one in Alan Lightman's novel Mr g takes some beating: "As I remember, I had just woken up from a nap when I decided to create the universe".

Catherine Goode describes how a degree in physics and a childhood passion for computer and video games led her to a career in game design.

Physicist Jialin Xie has won China's top science award for his lifetime achievements in the field of accelerator science.

Leonor Sierra is international science and policy manager at the London-based charity Sense About Science, which aims to help people make sense of scientific and medical claims.

In these turbulent financial times, it seems that no-one has a good model for what is happening in the economy.