Table of contents

Can you imagine spending almost 70 years waiting for an experiment to give you some data? That's how long researchers at Trinity College Dublin have had to hang on before finally catching on camera a drop of tar pitch as it fell from its container.

Where did the smiley face come from? Well, according to a report in Symmetry magazine, it originated on 16 September 1982 at Carnegie Mellon University in the US when computer scientist Neil Swartz posed a physics problem on the department's "bboard" – an early online messageboard.

Newly declassified transcripts from the Apollo Moon missions have pointed to some rather unsavoury problems for the on-board astronauts. It seems that Thomas Stafford, John Young and Eugene Cernan, who flew on the 1969 Apollo 10 test mission to try out all the procedures of a Moon landing, had not entirely got to grips with how to use the spacecraft's bathroom facilities.

Physics World has made an unlikely appearance in You and Your Wedding magazine of all places, featuring in an article in the September/October issue about the wedding of ethical fashion designer Feng Ho to accelerator physicist David Kelliher from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

The South Pole Telescope (SPT) has made the first detection of a subtle twist in light from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), known as B-mode polarization.

A new "nanothermometer" that could be used to measure temperature variations in living cells has been created by researchers in the US. The device is based on diamond nanocrystals and is "injected" into the interior of cells using nanowires.

Imagine a way of storing 360 terabytes of data (equivalent to 75,000 DVDs) on a standard-sized glass "memory crystal" that could remain intact for a million years.

Researchers in the UK and France have developed a new highly sensitive method for visualizing fingerprints left on metal surfaces such as guns, knives and bullet casings.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have combined three distinct electronic components to create touch-sensitive "electronic skin" or e-skin.

The Russian government has unveiled a plan to consolidate 15 of the country's largest physics institutes into a single organization.

Brazil's science and technology budget for 2013 has increased by more than 40%, meaning the country is spending more on R&D than ever before.

An analysis by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) suggests that the complete absence of female faculty in more than a third of US university physics departments does not necessarily constitute evidence that they discriminate against women.

Researchers in Canada are warning that the government is increasingly using scientific research as a key source of economic growth – at the expense, they say, of long-term basic research.

A US company has launched a fundraising campaign to build a prototype "slingatron" that could be used to propel a 100 g object to a speed of one kilometre per second.

The 2013 Dirac Medal has been awarded to three scientists whose wide-ranging work has brought profound advances in cosmology, astrophysics and fundamental physics. Thomas Kibble, James Peebles and Martin Rees all receive the honour, which is bestowed annually by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy.

US president Barack Obama has nominated astrophysicist France Córdova as the next director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) – the country's biggest funder of basic research with an annual budget of $7bn.

A NASA space telescope could be given a new lease of life to sniff out near-Earth objects that could be on a collision course with the Earth. Agency officials are currently toying with the idea of reactivating the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), which was left dormant in 2011 after spending two years studying the universe.

Millions of Germans will cast their votes later this month in a federal election that will determine Germany's chancellor for the next four years.

The University of Hawaii will be the new owner of the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) – a 3.8 m telescope based on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

The number of school pupils taking A-levels in physics in England, Wales and Northern Ireland has gone up for the seventh consecutive year, rising from a low of 27,368 in 2006 to 35,569 this year.

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has announced it will spend $90m over a five-year period on condensed-matter physics.

As NASA ends attempts to restore its ailing Kepler spacecraft, Daniel Clery looks at the next generation of planet-hunting telescopes.

Paying tribute to the men and women who have forged exceptional or unusual careers.

The Institute of Physics runs many initiatives that benefit physics and physicists. Peter Knight calls for your help to back a new fundraising campaign to expand the institute's work even further.

Writing a play – even a short one – is harder than it seems, as Robert P Crease discovers.

I found Robert P Crease's article on "The new idols" (June p19) very interesting and would like to add my comments on the modern "idols" that prevent us from seeing nature as it really is.

While I do not wish to belittle the unfortunate conclusions that may be drawn from your news article "Gender bias judges research by women more critically" (May p12), I do want to comment on the way the article is presented.

I was not at all surprised to read in your July special issue on the "physics of cancer" that physics might open some windows that medical researchers might find valuable, or that cancer sufferers might benefit as a result.

I am an A-level physics teacher at a comprehensive school in northwest London. Most of my students do not go on to study degree-level physics because they are not expected to attain the A-level grades desired or required by universities.

According to a member of the international collaboration involved in its design, the proposed Neutrino Factory would have a "potentially enormous" scientific impact, with the capacity to answer some of the biggest questions in physics, including the nature of dark matter.

Patients requiring an organ transplant may one day no longer have to wait for a matching donor. As Stephen Ornes explains, researchers are making progress towards creating human organs with techniques such as 3D printing, using the patient's own cells for ink.

Laura Bassi might not be a household name, but she was one of the shining stars of 18th-century Italian physics – and could well have been the first woman to have forged a professional scientific career, as Paula Findlen explains.

Richard Taylor describes how art and science are intertwined through a shared endeavour to understand nature's chaos.

Picking the seven chemical elements that have done most to change the world sounds like a fantastic science parlour game.

94 Elements is a documentary film project about how people interact with the chemical elements.

The universe is made of (at least) stars and galaxies, dark matter and dark energy, cosmic rays and neutrinos. But cosmology is made of cosmologists.

When the Mars rover Curiosity landed safely after its "seven minutes of terror" descent to the red planet's surface, Roger Wiens' sigh of relief was bigger than most.

In the early 1930s Ernest Rutherford called the energy gained from fusion "a very poor kind of thing", adding that "anyone who expects a source of power from [fusion] is talking moonshine".

What constitutes a hard problem? For a computer scientist like Lance Fortnow, the answer can be summed up by an acronym: NP. In The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible, Fortnow explains what these two letters mean and why it matters.

Industrial scientist Brent Neal explains what physics graduates and PhD students can do to make themselves stand out to recruiters.

With long-term positions in academic research scarce, Mark Hartz can count himself among the lucky ones.

Chris Arnade is a documentary photographer who works among homeless addicts and prostitutes in Hunts Point, New York.

I became a first-time father around the same time my postdoc contract ended.