Table of contents

ArtNauka, or "Art Science" is a five-person team of Russian popular-science enthusiasts known for daring "Cryoeffect" science shows.

Yuriy Goryunov from the Kazan E K Zavoisky Physical-Technical Institute is using physics to dispute his speeding fine.

A new piece of software called "Quantizer" that lets you experience high-energy physics through real-time audio is the latest in a long line of collaborations between physics and music.

Solar astrophysicist Manfred Cuntz together with graduate student Levent Gurdemir have worked out what date in 570 BC a poem by the Greek poet Sappho could have been referring to.

Hot on the heels of its revolutionary, first ever direct observation of gravitational waves announced in February this year, a second gravitational-wave event has been identified in the data from the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (aLIGO) in the US.

The amino acid glycine has been discovered in the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, suggesting that the ingredients for early life may have been delivered to Earth by comets, rather than being created on our planet.

The first ever planar, ultrathin metasurface lens has been developed by Federico Capasso and colleagues at Harvard University.

Scientists in the US have discovered that a jelly-like material found in the skin of sharks and some other fish has the highest proton conductivity ever measured in a biological material.

Bright pulses of coherent terahertz radiation have been created by firing a laser at special targets.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) says that America should remain a partner in the €14bn ITER fusion reactor until at least 2018 – at which point it will reassess its involvement.

The periodic table could soon be graced by four new symbols – Nh, Mc, Ts and Og – after the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) unveiled its proposed names for the four most recently discovered elements.

Researchers working on the LISA Pathfinder space mission have successfully managed to isolate from the environment two 2 kg test masses at a special "Lagrangian point" between the Earth and the Sun.

The Iranian physicist Omid Kokabee has been released from prison following treatment for kidney cancer.

French president François Hollande has agreed to cancel more than half of the planned €256m cuts to the country's research and higher education budget.

The European Union (EU) has agreed to make all papers that it funds open access by 2020.

Maria Zuber, a planetary geophysicist who is vice-president for research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, has been elected chair of the country's National Science Board (NSB) – the body that oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF).

A study by two Princeton University physicists suggests that a major fire in the spent nuclear fuel stored on the sites of US nuclear reactors could "dwarf the horrific consequences of the Fukushima accident".

The renowned British physicist Tom Kibble has died at the age of 83.

The US National Solar Observatory (NSO) has opened its new headquarters at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

The University of Bologna in Italy has been chosen to host the headquarters of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) – a huge gamma-ray observatory 10 times more sensitive than existing instruments that will study supernova explosions, binary star systems and active galactic nuclei.

Nathan Myhrvold, chief executive of the company Intellectual Ventures and a former chief technology officer of Microsoft, is at loggerheads with a group of NASA astrophysicists over the latter's ability to accurately measure the properties of tens of thousands of asteroids in the solar system.

Edwin Cartlidge looks at the latest salvo in attempts to understand the physics of black holes

Richard Blaustein looks at how the Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East will boost science in the region once complete later this year

In reply to the news story "Bumble-bees use their fuzz to detect electric fields", about recent research showing that the bumble-bee's hairs move in response to electrostatic fields.

In reply to Ralph Kenna and Pádraig Mac Carron's feature article "Maths meets myths" in which they describe how they are using techniques from statistical physics to characterize the societies depicted in ancient Icelandic sagas.

In reply to the feature article "Zombie physics", which described how physicists and mathematicians are developing mathematical models of zombie outbreaks.

In reply to the news story on the death of Harry Kroto, who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his co-discovery of the carbon-60 molecule.

Explore the latest in planetary science in this special issue

Marc Delcroix says that amateur astronomers can play a key role when it comes to future planetary missions

Robert P Crease discusses what the science of the solar system teaches us about perception

Beam waveguide antennas, each 34 m in diameter, lit up against the early-dawn sky at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in the Mojave Desert in California, US.

With NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter arriving this month, researchers look to our local, ancient behemoth to figure out how planets form – including our own – as Stephen Ornes reports

Konstantin Batygin explains what led him and astronomer Mike Brown to propose the existence of a ninth planet in our solar system

Marc Rayman, mission director of NASA's Dawn mission, talks to Laura Faye Tenenbaum about what we are learning about Vesta and Ceres – the two largest objects in the main asteroid belt

If you want to see an aurora, you could go to the Arctic. Or you could go to Saturn. Sarah Badman explains how observations of auroras on other planets are revealing new facts about these fascinating and beautiful phenomena

NASA's New Horizons mission has transformed our pixelated view of Pluto – the tiny object lying on the fringes of the solar system. As Cathy Olkin explains, we can now see ancient craters, young glacial plains and layers of haze stretching up to 200 km from the surface

In Rise of the Rocket Girls, Nathalia Holt foregrounds the contributions of a cohort of women working in the American space industry

The Universe Awareness project (UNAWE) aims to bring the beauty and grandeur of the universe into the classroom, as a means of inspiring children aged four to ten.

The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State by Fang Lizhi is a revealing portrait of a courageous scholar.

As an astronomer, educator and science advocate at Columbia University in the US, David Helfand has spent his career knocking down faulty arguments and misleading "facts" that cling on despite the huge amount of information available to modern audiences. In his book A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age, Helfand explains how the same "habits of mind" that make someone a good scientist can also give non-scientists "an antidote to the misinformation glut".

Since writing is such an important part of a scientist's working life, it's important to do it well, and Stephen Heard's book The Scientist's Guide to Writing: How to Write More Easily and Effectively Throughout Your Scientific Career promises to help you do just that.

After completing undergraduate degrees in physics, Henry Drysdale, Ioan Milosevic and Eirion Slade decided their futures lay in medicine

Medical physicist Alla Reznik's work on next-generation positron emission tomography (PET) devices – which recently won her a Leadership Award from the Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network (ORION) – developed out of more than a decade of research into the fundamental properties of wide band-gap semiconductors.

Karl Young is a musician who specializes in the Japanese flute, or shakuhachi

John Evans completes his triathlon, in sport and in physics, with a look at swimming