Table of contents

When a marten met its doom in November 2016 by chewing on an 18 kV transformer at CERN, the animal was kept for posterity.

How would you like to explore a giant neutrino detector in 3D from the comfort of your mobile phone? Well, now you can thanks to a new, free smartphone app that allows you to explore the physics underlying the MicroBooNE neutrino detector at Fermilab in the US.

Engineering students at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) have announced an audacious plan to brew the first beer on the Moon.

Graphene has now been used to create a dress that contains light-emitting diodes.

An excited atom decaying in a vacuum experiences a force very similar to friction, according to calculations done by physicists in the UK.

A Bell test of quantum entanglement that claims to use starlight to close the "freedom of choice" loophole has been performed by an international team of physicists.

Frogs capture prey at astonishing speeds using shear-thinning saliva, according to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

A drone used for conservation research has been enhanced with techniques usually used to analyse objects in space.

A new metamaterial film that uses passive radiative cooling to dissipate heat from an object and provides cooling without a power input has been developed by a team at the University of Colorado Boulder in the US.

President Donald Trump's executive order banning visitors from seven countries from entering the US has scientists concerned about what might come next, as Peter Gwynne reports

Quantum physicist Michelle Simmons from the University of New South Wales has criticized the Australian school physics curriculum for reducing maths-based teaching and over-emphasizing essay-based questions – a move she says has left students "ill-equipped" on reaching university.

Teenagers with parents who conveyed the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) had higher scores in mathematics and science college preparatory examinations, a long-term US study has found.

The UK's nuclear industry and research community has been hit by uncertainty following the UK's decision to leave the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom).

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has given the green light for construction to start on the LUX-ZEPLIN dark-matter detector.

Israel put 4.3% of its gross domestic product (GDP) into R&D in 2015, making it the biggest spender – in terms of the percentage of its economic output – of the 35 countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The SESAME synchrotron in Amman, Jordan has issued its first call for proposals.

A survey of 20 journals belonging to the American Geophysical Union (AGU) has found that women are less likely to contribute to peer review than men.

Construction can begin on a major upgrade to the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the US after the tunnel that will house the facility was cleared of equipment.

A physicist from CERN has become Montenegro's science minister, raising hopes that scientists will have an improved status in the small Balkan country.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has announced an ambitious plan to create a human settlement on Mars within the next 100 years.

The European X-ray Free Electron Laser (E-XFEL) in Hamburg, Germany, has issued its first call for proposals for beam time on the 3.4 km-long facility.

India has set a new record for the number of satellites sent into space with a single rocket.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, US, are leading a collaboration to build a prototype total-body positron emission tomography (PET) scanner.

The UK physicist and Nobel laureate Peter Mansfield has died at the age of 83.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its famous Doomsday Clock 30 seconds closer to midnight.

Hysitron, which supplies equipment for making mechanical measurements at the nanometre scale, has been bought by the Bruker Corporation.

The University of St Andrews physics department has been named as a Juno Champion by the Institute of Physics (IOP), which publishes Physics World.

Princeton University astrophysicist David Spergel, founding director of the Center for Computational Astrophsyics at the Flatiron Institute, talks to Michael Banks about plans to make New York a major centre for computational science

In reply to Robert P Crease's Critical Point article "This time it's different" (January pp19–20) in which he says that the election of Donald Trump as president of the US suggests that scientific authority is defunct.

In reply to Peter Barham's feature "Penguin physics" (December 2016 pp24–27), in which he talks about being a polymer physicist and a penguin researcher.

In response to Brian Clegg's feature article "Speaking a different language" (February pp34–37), in which he suggests that a good science communicator anticipates the kind of questions the audience will want to have answered.

In response to Colin Pykett's Lateral Thoughts article "My metronomes won't synchronize" (January p56).

Explore the latest in coding and computing in this special issue of Physics World.

Software creates an indeterminate legal zone blurring the line between patentable inventions and unpatentable ideas, as Robert P Crease explains.

Maria Schuld describes how researchers are enhancing machine learning – an approach that enables computers to learn and make predictions – by combining it with quantum computation.

Although today's computers can perform superhuman feats, even the best are no match for human brains at tasks like processing speech. But as Jessamyn Fairfield explains, a new generation of computational devices is being developed to mimic the networks of neurons inside our heads.

With software development becoming ever more important in physics research, Arfon Smith argues that we need to adopt better ways of recognizing those who contribute to this largely unrewarded activity.

Despite oodles of data and plenty of theories, we still don't know what dark matter is. Martin White and Pat Scott describe how a new software tool called GAMBIT – run on supercomputers such as Prometheus – will test how novel theories stack up when confronted with real data.

As an African-American woman, a physicist and a current employee of NASA, Margot Lee Shetterly's book Hidden Figures: the Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race both excited and moved me.

Quantum-based technologies have undergone something of a revolution in the past decade or so.

Author James Gleick's latest book, Time Travel: a History, looks into the formation and evolution of the concept that is time travel.

Written by physicist Timothy Clifton, Gravity: a Very Short Introduction will make an excellent primer for students, teachers and anyone who is interested in the concept of gravity.

Founded in 1874, the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge is one of the most famous physics labs in the world. Maxwell's Enduring Legacy: a Scientific History of the Cavendish Laboratory by Malcolm Longair details the lab's main scientific achievements.

In The Dark Side of Technology, author Peter Townsend runs through various types of technology and different reasons for our modern reliance on technology.

Most physics graduates have an idea of what it's like to be a physics teacher, having been taught by one in the recent past. Indeed, some may even be in physics today thanks to a particularly inspiring teacher. But not enough graduates consider teaching as a potential career option, Find out how you can become a physics teacher in the UK and hear from classroom teachers Cara Hutton and Dave Gash on how and why they made the choice to become educators and what the job involves.

Skills learnt as part of a research team translate well to a career as a leader in education, says physicist and headteacher Mark Whalley.

Jess Wade recently started illustrating scientific lectures to place what's inside her head on the page. She created this doodle especially for Physics World based on "smarter machines" research.