Table of contents

A LEGO set featuring minifigures of five women who played a crucial role in the history of the US space effort took only a month to soar to 10,000 votes on the LEGO Ideas website, after being created in July by US science writer Maia Weinstock.

A cocktail bar owner in East Sussex in the UK has installed a Faraday cage to make sure that people attending his establishment actually talk to each other rather than just stare at their smart phones.

An international team, led by Stefan Karpitschka from Stanford University, has noticed an "inverted Cheerio effect", created by dropping a liquid onto a solid.

How much would you pay for a smelly leather jacket worn by Albert Einstein? Levi Strauss and Co bid £110,500 for the jacket at a Christie's auction in London in July.

A five-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer that is programmable and reconfigurable has been demonstrated by researchers from the Joint Quantum Institute in the US.

The ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the CERN particle-physics lab in Geneva have confirmed that a small excess of diphoton events at 750 GeV – detected in their preliminary data last year – was a mere statistical fluctuation that disappeared in the light of more data.

When drops of water strike a very cold surface, they first freeze and then crack.

Why is the temperature of Jupiter's upper atmosphere comparable to that on Earth despite the giant planet being five times further away from the Sun?

A tiny laser that emits "twisted light" has been unveiled by researchers in the US and Italy.

China has launched a probe to test the feasibility of quantum communication between ground and space, as Ling Xin reports

The UK government has announced it will underwrite funding awarded to UK researchers from the EU's Horizon2020 programme even after the country leaves the EU.

The American Physical Society (APS) has relocated the 2018 annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (DAMOP) over concerns about a new state law that discriminates against members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

Concerns have been raised by US watchdogs over NASA's ambitious plans to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s.

A US firm has announced plans for what it describes as "the world's first commercial interplanetary mining mission".

Physicists gathered in Jenin, Palestine, in late July for the first ever Palestinian Advanced Physics School.

Australia has backtracked on plans for large cuts to the number of climate researchers in the country following a directive from the new science minister, Greg Hunt.

The UK fusion scientist Ian Chapman has been named the next chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).

More than 100 scientists in Russia have signed an open letter to the country's president, Vladimir Putin, protesting over a lack of funding for research and reforms that they say have left Russian science mired in a chronic state of crisis.

The UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL) – the country's standards lab – is consulting on making up to 50 compulsory redundancies as it prepares to shift its research priorities towards quantum technologies and big data.

The fastest supercomputer in Latin America returned to full usage last month following two months of minimal operations after Gilberto Kassab, Brazil's new science minister, agreed to plug a R$4.6m ($1.5m) funding gap.

Construction has begun on what will be one of the world's largest and most sensitive cosmic-ray facilities.

A European pension fund for researchers – dubbed the Retirement Savings Vehicle for European Research Institutions (RESAVER) – has come into force in July under Belgian law as a Brussels-based organization.

The Egyptian-US scientist Ahmed Zewail died on 2 August at the age of 70.

Romania has become the 22nd member state of the CERN particle-physics laboratory near Geneva.

A failed coup by a faction of the Turkish military in July has resulted in the government imposing restrictions on researchers, as Michael Banks reports

International collaboration is the life-blood of science.

If there's one country that appreciates international collaboration, it's China.

Ansh Bhatnagar says that online videos about physics could play an important part in inspiring the next generation of scientists

Ahead of this autumn's US presidential election, Robert P Crease proposes five ways to encourage a responsible discussion of scientific issues

In reply to coverage of the referendum on UK membership in the EU.

In reply to an article by Robert P Crease, which itself responded to criticisms of philosopher Descartes made by Steven Weinberg.

In reply to Matin Durrani' article "So you think you're not biased?" and subsequent correspondence about the role of unconscious bias in deterring girls and women from studying physics.

In reply to the feature article "Pathway to Planet Nine", about evidence for an additional massive planet lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system.

Readers might be interested in these Kelvin–Helmholtz clouds, which I noticed below us while climbing Hrútsfjallstindar (1857 m) in Iceland in June.

In reply to the Physics World focus issue on vacuum technology.

In reply to John Evans' essay in which he analysed the physics of swimming in a somewhat under-heated pool.

In reply to Sidney Perkowitz's essay on the artistic uses of super-black and super-white paints based on nanomaterials.

The feature article "Neutrons for new drugs" (August pp26–29) stated that neutron crystallography was used to determine the structures of "wellknown complex biological molecules such as lysine, insulin and trypsin".

The Gaia spacecraft is conducting the most ambitious and thorough census of our galaxy ever attempted, gathering data on 100,000 stars every hour. With the mission's first major data release due this month, Gerry Gilmore and Floor van Leeuwen explain how the spacecraft works and assess its likely impact on the field of astrophysics

Research from a cinema in Germany shows how the breath of a crowd can reflect how they're feeling, as Stephen Ornes reports

A new implementation of X-ray diffraction using free-electron lasers can take snapshots of biological molecules that are inaccessible via X-ray crystallography. As Philip Ball reports, the technique can even be used to create stop-motion films of dynamic molecular processes

In her book Aurora: In Search of the Northern Lights, Melanie Windridge describes travelling around the Arctic Circle on a quest to see the biggest and best auroral displays and to understand the physics that drives them.

Azimuth is an interesting hybrid. In part, it's the personal blog of John Carlos Baez, a mathematical physicist at the University of California, Riverside, whose current research focuses mainly on network theory.

Timothy Jorgensen's Strange Glow relates a brief history of our dealings with radiation, tracking the most important events and profiling the most pioneering researchers in the field.

The devastating eruption of Mount St Helens on 18 May 1980, which laid waste to hundreds of square kilometres around the once-picturesque peak, scattered ash across 11 US states, and killed almost 60 people, is the subject of Steve Olson's book Eruption.

The Science of the Perfect Swing by Peter Dewhurst goes into an impressive amount of detail on nearly every aspect of golf.

Rachel Ignotofsky's richly illustrated book Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World profiles admirably diverse women.

Setting up a brand-new studentrun conference isn't easy, but for Adam O'Connell and Reaal Khalil, it was an opportunity to develop skills that a standard physics degree course just doesn't provide

The Aspen Center for Physics has been a gathering point for physicists since its founding in 1962, and now has a new director in Hirosi Ooguri.

Ruth Itzhaki is professor emerita of molecular neurobiology at the University of Manchester, UK

What can be done to increase the number of women in physics? I did my bit.