Table of contents

Fancy adding a suite of solo electric-guitar tracks inspired by images from CERN's Large Hadron Collider to your record collection? Then make sure you get hold of Well Lit Shadow by the US jazz-rock guitarist Jake Hertzog. For only £7.90 on iTunes, the album contains tracks that apparently depict the chaos and beauty of subatomic-particle collisions.

Researchers are adept at searching for planets outside our solar system by measuring the dip in starlight as a planet passes in front of its host star. But what if an aggressive alien civilization used the same technique to look for Earth? Thankfully, David Kipping and Alex Teachey from Columbia University in the US have come up with a way to thwart such advances.

The conventional wisdom is that planetary systems outside our solar system were first discovered in the early 1990s, but could they have been spotted earlier?

Last month's Masters golf tournament at Augusta National featured a physics graduate playing alongside the sport's elite.

Gravitational-wave background noise created by merging back holes could be 10 times louder than had been expected, according to astrophysicists working on the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors.

A new simpler, cheaper and potentially more effective way to prevent radio antennas from picking up unwanted signals has been created by researchers in the US.

If the bright pink folds you see above remind you of the art of origami or paper-folding, you would not be far off the mark. The picture shows a topological origami material created by an international team of researchers. This is the first time that topological origami and kirigami (paper-cutting) techniques have been applied experimentally to metamaterials – artificial materials with tunable, well-defined properties.

A new physical mechanism that causes particles of different sizes to separate as paint dries has been identified by physicists in the UK and France.

A tiny device that can make very precise measurements of the Earth's gravity has been unveiled by physicists in the UK.

An extremely bright free-electron laser at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is designed to keep the US on a par with Europe in X-ray science, as Edwin Cartlidge reports.

India is on track to build an Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (aLIGO), with discussions under way to select a site from a shortlist of two options in western and north-western India.

The largest optical telescope in India has turned on, opening up a new era for astronomy in the country. The 3.6 m Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT) – part of an Indo-Belgian collaboration – was activated remotely on 30 March from Belgium by visiting Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and his Belgian counterpart Charles Michel.

Charges will not be refiled against Temple University physicist Xiaoxing Xi for sharing sensitive technical information with Chinese physicists.

Canadian physicists have welcomed the first budget announced by Bill Morneau, the finance minister in the new Liberal government.

Europe has published its first ever roadmap for astrobiology, which notes the need for greater co-ordination of research within the continent.

A $35m field test in North Dakota, US, to assess the feasibility of disposing of nuclear waste in deep boreholes has been abandoned following opposition from local residents.

A group of 35 Nobel laureates, including 16 physicists, has called on world leaders to reduce the use of highly enriched uranium (HEU) in naval nuclear propulsion and research reactors.

Stockholm's city planning committee has approved plans for a new Nobel Center that will be built on the Blasieholmen peninsula.

Engineers at the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, are racing to save the Hitomi X-ray observatory that was launched on 17 February following a failure to communicate with the craft after launch.

A third of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) members of the physics community have considered quitting their workplace or university in the last year, according to a report by the American Physical Society (APS).

An upgrade to the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP) telescope at the South Pole that aims to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has begun taking data.

A group of entrepreneurs and scientists has announced Breakthrough Starshot – a new initiative that would involve a fleet of laser-powered spacecraft travelling to Alpha Centauri – our closest star system lying around 4 light-years away.

The Republic of Cyprus has become an associate member of CERN following the ratification of an agreement signed in October 2012.

The European Strategic Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) has revealed its wishlist of facilities to be built or upgraded in the coming decades.

The continued operation and management of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory buried beneath the ice at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is secure for another five years, thanks to $35m in funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF).

With China launching a batch of probes this year in the first part of its space priority programme, Cindy Hao discovers that funding issues may hit future missions.

Scientific advances can often come from curious sources.

Celebrate nanotechnology in our new infographic and the latest Physics World focus.

Can you quantify the benefits of building large physics facilities? Despite the uncertainties, Stefano Forte has done just that for CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

Robert P Crease meets Kenneth Brecher, who loves tops.

In reply to Louise Mayor's feature article "Where people and particles collide", about the experiences of researchers at CERN who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT), efforts to make LGBT CERN an officially recognized club, and incidents where posters advertising the club have been torn down or defaced (March pp31–36, http://ow.ly/YVP2Z).

In reply to the March issue of Physics World, on "Physics For All: Building a more inclusive discipline" (http://ow.ly/10ElUz).

In reply to Robert P Crease's article "Diversifying utopia" (March p29, http://ow.ly/104lZw), which discussed the near-absence of women in the novel New Atlantis, which was written in the 17th century by the natural philosopher Francis Bacon.

In reply to Aaron Iftikhar's article "Is physics just for the rich?" (Forum, March p27), which discussed disparities in the numbers of physics students from some geographic areas and socioeconomic groups.

In reply to Margaret Harris's feature article "A thousand tiny cuts" about the role of so-called "microaggressions" – small actions that make people feel unwelcome or uncomfortable because of who they are, not what they are doing – in creating a chilly climate for women and other underrepresented groups in physics (March pp45–48, http://ow.ly/ZtpZl).

In reply to Matin Durrani's feature article "Surely you're not biased?" about unconscious bias and its effects (March pp39–42, http://ow.ly/Zfts8).

What makes for a fun student project that provides useful results, a journal publication and a high-profile conference talk? Stephen Ornes describes how Alex Alemi and Matt Bierbaum spiced up their learning by mixing statistical physics with their love of zombie tales.

Graphene might be the most famous example, but there are other 2D materials and compounds too. Louise Mayor explains how these atomically thin sheets can be layered together to create flexible "van der Waals heterostructures", which could lead to a range of novel applications.

Do hydrogen and antihydrogen behave differently from each other? As Edwin Cartlidge reports, four groups of physicists housed inside a single building are vying to find out.

If you try to do an experiment or a calculation and it doesn't work out, should you tell other researchers about it? Or just move on to something more promising as quickly as you can? Philip Ball explores the pros and cons of publicizing "null results" in science.

Music and physics might seem like polar opposites, one having great emotional potency and the other being a cerebral subject of equations, theories and deductions. Both, however, benefit from improvisers – people who stand on the shoulders of giants, taking earlier triumphs and building on them to create something new. For me, analogies like these, which draw parallels between physicists and jazz musicians, are the most fascinating revelations in Stephon Alexander's book The Jazz of Physics.

Professionally speaking, biologist Stuart Firestein is a fan of failure. In Failure: Why Science is So Successful, Firestein explores the complex role that failure plays (or should play) in how science is done, taught, perceived and funded, focusing on problems that transcend disciplinary boundaries.

In 132 AD the Chinese court mathematician and astronomer Zhang Heng ordered the construction of a curious instrument. The device (now sadly lost) incorporated eight dragon heads, eight squatting toads and a set of heavy brass balls. Its purpose was earthquake detection. The story of Heng's seismometer is one of many gems in Andrew Robinson's book Earth-Shattering Events: Earthquakes, Nations and Civilization.

Cloudships that seed clouds with salt to make them more reflective are just one of the geoengineering ideas discussed in Oliver Morton's new book, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World.

dy/dan is a blog about mathematics education.

The range of opportunities for physicists at science companies is wider than one might expect, as Alyssa Armstrong discovered when she joined a laser research and manufacturing company.

Rush Holt Jr is the chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was a member of the US House of Representatives from 1999 to 2015, representing New Jersey's 12th Congressional District.

The geophysicist Walter Arabasz made his name in professional circles as the driving force behind the US Advanced National Seismic System, an organization set up in 2000 to collect data about seismic events across the country, unifying the work of several regional seismic networks.

In Greek times, things were simple, with just four elements: fire, water, air and earth. Since then, the number of known elements has risen to 118.