Table of contents

When China's president Xi Jinping visited the UK's new National Graphene Institute in Manchester in October he was presented "with a gift of traditional Chinese-style artwork" by the Nobel-prize-winning Manchester physicist Kostya Novoselov.

After spotting a paper on arXiv with the title "Planckian interacting massive particles as dark matter" we immediately wondered what acronym the researchers had given this new hypothetical particle (arXiv:1511.03278). Upon reading the abstract our worst fears were confirmed: "PIMP".

When most people see a chocolate fountain, they're probably wondering what treats to dunk into the liquid-chocolate curtain. But when physicists look at one, they can't help but notice the interesting fluid dynamics at play.

The artist Frank Espinosa and Princeton University's Sajan Saini have joined forces to create a 12-page comic book called A Star For Us.

The first direct evidence of magnetic fields near a black hole has been found by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which has seen such fields around Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) – the Milky Way's black hole.

A new laser based on a swirling vortex of light has been created by physicists in the US.

On 27 April 2014, photographer Jeff Dai was shooting the night sky over the Himalayas, near the border of Tibet, China and India, at an elevation of 4700 m above sea level.

Researchers in Sweden have created electronic circuits and devices that are integrated within living plant material.

Redox-flow batteries could safely store excess energy in electricity grids. But they are not widely used as they have far lower energy capacities than conventional lithium-ion batteries. Now, however, a new type of redox-flow battery that offers both safety and higher energy capacity features has been built by researchers in Singapore.

The Physics World 2015 Breakthrough of the Year is the simultaneous quantum teleportation of two inherent properties of a photon, as Tushna Commissariat and Hamish Johnston report.

A new painting of Albert Einstein's field equation from his 1915 general theory of relativity was unveiled in a ceremony in November 2015 by the Dutch physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf, who is director of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study in the US.

The organization building the ITER fusion reactor in France has asked for more money and more time after presenting a revised schedule and costing to its governing council in November 2015.

The Pierre Auger Observatory – the world's largest cosmic-ray observatory – is set for a $14m upgrade that will also see its operations extended until 2025.

The UK's science budget will be protected in real terms until 2020, dispelling fears among many scientists that it would be cut.

An Estonian start-up company has claimed to have transferred data wirelessly at up to 1 gigabit per second using pulses of light.

Hawaii's Supreme Court has ruled that the construction permit for the $1.4bn Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on top of Mauna Kea mountain is invalid.

A new facility has opened at the University of Surrey to use terahertz radiation for quantum computing. The Hyper Terahertz Facility (HTF) is a joint collaboration between the University of Surrey and the National Physical Laboratory (NPL).

The European Space Agency (ESA) has launched a concept mission to test the technology required for a space-based gravitational-wave observatory.

The Japanese Space Agency's $220m Akatsuki spacecraft has finally entered orbit around Venus after taking a five-year detour through the solar system.

The number of UK graduate students choosing to become physics teachers saw a 14% increase in 2015 according to figures released by the Department of Education.

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded $13.5m to Stanford University over the next five years to build a particle accelerator "the size of a shoebox".

Fabiola Gianotti speaks to Michael Banks as she takes over this month as director-general of the CERN particle-physics lab as it hunts for physics beyond the Standard Model.

What lies in store for physics in 2016?

Sekazi Mtingwa calls for physicists to get behind African plans to build the continent's first ever light source.

An encounter between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein reveals much about the conflict between the humanities and the sciences, says Robert P Crease.

In reply to the infographic "Nobel physics laureate migration" (November 2015 pp16–17, http://ow.ly/STSV7) and the accompanying article.

In reply to Physics World's Special Report on Mexico: Physics for culture and development, http://ow.ly/RSeZU.

In reply to Robert P Crease's article "Logo motives" (Critical Point, December 2015 p17) about logos in physics.

In reply to the article "Cold comfort" (Quanta, November 2015 p3), about...well...hmm.

Technological devices are getting ever smaller, but as they approach the scale at which quantum physics matters, our understanding of how they interact with their environment evaporates. James Millen and André Xuereb explain how a better understanding of quantum thermodynamics could kick-start a new industrial revolution on the tiniest scale.

Michael Peel, Matias Vidal, Clive Dickinson and Paddy Leahy explain the discoveries underlying this stunning new map from the Planck Collaboration.

Antique Chinese porcelain can fetch thousands of dollars on the art market. Stephen C Wallace and Geraldine Kenney-Wallace explain how their physics-based technique could help collectors and connoisseurs to tell a real antique object from a fake.

In 1950 US president Harry S Truman was asked about the possible use of an atomic weapon in the Korean War. "It is a terrible weapon, and it should not be used on innocent men, women and children who have nothing whatever to do with this military aggression," he replied, adding "That happens when it is used." In Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, Susan Southard tells the stories of five people who were in the city when it was bombed on 9 August 1945 and who survived into old age.

In The Weather Experiment author Peter Moore takes us on a compelling journey through the early history of weather forecasting, bringing to life the personalities, lives and achievements of the men who put in place the building blocks required for forecasts to be possible.

For a book with the word "hope" in the title, the latest work from the Australian climate scientist Tim Flannery certainly gets off to a depressing start. Atmosphere of Hope was written in the run-up to the climate summit in December 2015, when world leaders met in Paris to hash out a plan for reducing carbon emissions enough to limit global warming.

Between the early spring of 2008, when he began working on Landau damping and the Boltzmann equation, and the summer of 2010, when he won a coveted Fields Medal for that work, the mathematician Cédric Villani was a very busy man. That much is clear from Birth of a Theorem, Villani's personal and highly idiosyncratic account of this crucial period in his career.

Space, as Douglas Adams once wrote, is big. Really big. But just how big is it? And what else, aside from our own planet Earth, is out there in it? Cosmos: the Infographic Book of Space answers these questions in a stunning fashion, but to describe it as a beautiful book full of interesting facts does not do it justice.

Iris Dillmann describes her journey through a profession that requires people to be both "flexible like a rubber band" and also "hard as steel".

Daniel Rothman is used to working across disciplines.

Alok Sharma is the member of parliament for the Reading West constituency in Berkshire, UK.

What do theoretical particle physicists do all day long? Dream up equations? Drink coffee until we have a good idea? Just make things up? All of these are partially true, but far from the whole story.