Table of contents

Before setting off to the International Space station (ISS) for six months, UK astronaut Tim Peake revealed that one of the meals he would miss most is the classic British roast dinner.

This month sees the premiere of the first orchestral piece inspired by the discovery of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitationalwave Observatory in Washington and Louisiana, US.

"Cats seem to grasp the laws of physics," claimed a press release from Springer in late June.

Engineer Bharat Bhushan from Ohio State University and colleagues have produced a coating that makes soap pour cleanly out of plastic bottles.

Imagine a world where three "suns" set one after another on some evenings, but at other times of the year there is always daylight.

The latest version of the watt balance at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has made its first measurement of Planck's constant (h) with an uncertainty of 34 parts per billion, demonstrating that the device is accurate enough to be used to redefine the kilogram, which is planned for next year.

A new study looks at how light causes diatomic molecules to break apart.

The human heart is so complex that researchers keen on improving our understanding of how it functions have been trying to create a simplified model.

A new method for 3D-printing micro-sized, high-quality compound lenses directly onto image sensors or optical fibres has been developed by researchers in Germany.

Physicists raise concerns after the UK votes to leave the European Union, as Michael Banks reports

Officials behind the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) are considering new locations for the $1.4bn facility, and expect to decide whether to opt for a new site early next year.

Nine of NASA's current planetary exploration missions will each continue for at least another two years – provided that the US federal budget allocates the financial resources.

The $3.5bn National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is no nearer to igniting a sustainable nuclear fusion burn – four years after its initial target date – according to a report by the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

The Dutch government has agreed to carry out a novel funding experiment that will see researchers directly fund each other's projects.

The arXiv preprint repository is celebrating its 25th anniversary this month as administrators look at ways to freshen the site.

Germany's federal and state governments have agreed to fund a third round of the so-called Excellence Initiative programme, which was inaugurated 10 years ago to promote world-class research at German universities.

China's latest supercomputer – Sunway TaihuLight – has claimed the crown as the world's fastest computer according to the latest TOP500 list, released at the International Supercomputer Conference in Frankfurt in late June.

A team of UK geologists from Durham and Oxford universities has discovered one of the world's largest helium gas fields using a new exploration technique.

China has completed the 1.15 billion yuan ($180m) Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in the south-western province of Guizho.

The largest donation to the physics department at the University of California, Los Angles (UCLA), is to be used to create a new centre for theoretical physics.

First light on the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) is to be brought forward by two years to 2024.

After a five-year journey to Jupiter, travelling some 3.2 billion kilometres, NASA's Juno craft has finally arrived at the largest planet in our solar system.

Yang Wei – president of the National Natural Science Foundation of China – talks to Matin Durrani about how the agency supports basic research and what it's doing to boost the quality of physics in China

With the dust settling on the UK's narrow vote to leave the European Union (EU) in June's referendum, physicists in the country and beyond are coming to terms with the enormity and liable consequences of an impending Brexit.

Robert P Crease responds to criticisms of René Descartes made by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg and others

With asteroid mining set to begin in the coming decades, Tony Milligan warns that ethical questions still need to be answered

In reply to Physics World's coverage of the referendum on the UK's membership of the EU.

In reply to the article "From physicists to physicians", in which three trainee medical doctors explained why they switched to medicine after doing undergraduate degrees in physics.

In reply to correspondence from George Scott and Adam Costley about the Physics World focus issue on nuclear energy, and to news of construction delays at ITER, the fusion reactor being built in France.

A news article on renewed funding for the IceCube neutrino detector stated that the detector has "5160 light sensors suspended on 86 strings within 1 km³ of ice".

Physicists have joined the battle to stop daguerreotypes – a prized, early form of photograph – from degrading any further, as Stephen Ornes reports

Crystallography with neutrons, rather than X-rays, takes a lot of the chance out of drug discovery, as Jon Cartwright reports

The humble household light bulb – once a simple source of illumination – could soon be transformed into the backbone of a revolutionary new wireless communications network based on visible light. Harald Haas explains how this "LiFi" system works and how it could shape our increasingly data-driven world

The short synopsis of The Big Picture by Sean Carroll is that it explores the question of whether science can explain everything in the world, and analyses the emerging reality that such an explanation entails.

LA Math by James D Stein is an ingenious attempt to blend detective fiction with mathematical instruction.

Science But Not As We Know It by Ben Gilliland is a series of short, graphics-heavy summaries of scientific ideas, heavily skewed towards space, physics and astronomy.

In The Fall and Rise of Nuclear Power in Britain Simon Taylor concentrates on the reasons for the ambivalent attitude to nuclear power in the UK.

With its penchant for using centrifuges, water baths and other laboratory tools to whip up novel tastes and textures, modernist cuisine – also known as "molecular gastronomy" – has a reputation for complexity. In his book Molecular Gastronomy at Home, chef Jozef Youssef aims to change that.

Working at the UK's defence laboratory gives Gareth Brown the ability to apply his physics and mathematics knowledge to real-world applications – and not necessarily in the ways you might expect. This article is Crown copyright © 2016 Dstl.

Alan Pierson is artistic director and conductor of the New York-based contemporary-music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, and a professor of conducting at Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music in Illinois

A team of scientists led by defence physicist Dennis Baum has won the International Ballistics Society's Neill Griffiths Award for developing a new method of severing the connection between an offshore drilling rig and the seabed.

Ever since our ancestors painted images on the walls of caves, artists have sought pigments to represent the 10 million tints that humans can differentiate. Now they have a new ally: researchers who are using optical design principles, nanotechnology and inspiration from nature to create deeper blacks and purer whites.