Table of contents

Entrepreneur Richard Dinan – a former star of the UK reality-TV programme Made in Chelsea – founded the firm Applied Fusion Systems in 2014. The company has now released its first blueprint for a spherical fusion tokamak.

NASA had a bit of a "facepalm" moment in March when a school student spotted errors in the agency's data.

Liane Gabora of the University of British Columbia in Canada and Kirsty Kitto of Queensland University of Technology in Australia have created a new model for humour based on the mathematical framework of quantum theory (Frontiers in Physics 10.3389/fphy.2016.00053).

A world-record-breaking gathering of people dressed as Albert Einstein invaded Toronto in Canada at the end of March.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spotted a supermassive black hole that has been propelled out of the centre of the galaxy where it formed.

When two droplets coalesce on some water-repellent materials, the resulting droplet will jump away from the surface – a process that removes dirt from some biological surfaces such as cicada wings.

The magnetic field of the Earth's crust has been revealed like never before in a new high-resolution map.

Researchers from Simon Fraser University in Canada believe that the honey bee uses a magnetic structure in its abdomen to navigate.

Scientists in the US have developed a $10 device that can quickly detect virus-related RNA and DNA in blood with only one preparation step.

The European Commission is looking to create its own open-access publishing platform for papers that emerge from its €80bn Horizon 2020 programme.

The Brazilian filmmaker João Moreira Salles – whose family owns one of the largest banks in Brazil – has established a new institute in Rio de Janeiro that will support basic research across all sciences.

The future of the nuclear industry has been cast into doubt after Westinghouse Electric, a major player in building civilian nuclear power plants around the world, filed for bankruptcy in a US court.

A new, three-storey €3.5m facility that can produce light that is about 10,000 times more intense than natural sunlight on Earth has been opened by the German Aerospace Centre (DLR).

The Nobel laureate Alexei Abrikosov died on 29 March at the age of 88.

Hans Dehmelt, the German-born US physicist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize for Physics for the development of ion traps, died on 7 March at the age of 94.

NASA has given the green light to the balloon-borne GUSTO terahertz observatory that will map and measure emissions from the interstellar medium.

A number of "big-science" projects in Brazil could be hit if the government pushes through a 44% cut to the R$5bn (£1.28bn) budget of the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovations and Communications (MCTIC).

US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order reversing a commitment by the former administration of Barack Obama to cut America's emissions of carbon dioxide.

Canadian science requires a billion-dollar increase to avoid falling behind other nations in basic science.

A previously used Falcon 9 first stage has been successfully relaunched as part of a recent SpaceX mission.

NASA will fund four US research teams as part of the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, which was set up to bring US researchers together with international teams.

A study by psychologists in the US has found that high-school girls rate their competence in mathematics lower than boys, even for those with similar abilities (Front. Psychol. 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00386).

The University of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR) has unveiled plans to produce molybdenum-99, which is used to make the medical-imaging isotope technetium-99m.

The Belle II particle detector has been moved 13 m from where it was assembled to a collision point on SuperKEKB – an electron–positron collider in Japan that is designed to create large numbers of B-mesons.

The $232m India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) has suffered a fresh setback that will "significantly" delay the project, according to scientists behind the facility.

Physicist John Holdren, who served as presidential science adviser and head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy during Barack Obama's presidency, talks to Peter Gwynne about his expectations for the Trump administration's approach to science and technology

With China about to send the first ever craft to the far side of the Moon, the country is quickly becoming a global leader in lunar exploration, as Ling Xin reports

A US experiment to search for neutrinoless double-beta decay has got the green light to start operations.

Scientists who go on protest marches ought to be clearer about their aims

Allison Barrett says that more physicists need to pass on their passion for physics by going into teaching

Robert P Crease reports on a recent episode at the US border

Powerful computers are now allowing cosmologists to solve Einstein's frighteningly complex equations of general relativity in a cosmological setting for the first time. Tom Giblin, James Mertens and Glenn Starkman describe how this new era of simulations could transform our understanding of the universe

Kirsten von Bergmann and André Kubetzka explain the nature of a type of quasiparticle known as a magnetic skyrmion, which looks promising as a "bit" for future data-storage technology

Sidney Perkowitz explores the good and the bad of nanoparticles, from their positive medical applications such as photo-activated drug delivery, to their negative health and environmental effects

The term "theory of everything" was a common turn of phrase among high-energy particle theorists during the 1980s, used with varying degrees of irony. In his new book Theories of Everything: Ideas in Profile, author Frank Close uses the term unapologetically

Errant Science is a blog about being a scientist and working in academia today.

There are very real constraints on how large a complex organism can grow. This is the essence of all modern-day scaling laws, and the subject of Geoffrey West's provocative new book Scale: the Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies

Caroline Herschel has enjoyed fluctuating fame since the day in 1786 when she discovered her first comet. In The Comet Sweeper: Caroline Herschel's Astronomical Ambition, author Claire Brock examines the reasons for that

Apart from our home planet of Earth, the red planet is the most visited planet in our solar system. In 4th Rock from the Sun: the Story of Mars, author Nicky Jenner explores aspects of one of our nearest neighbours

Setting up shop as a science communicator after getting your degree in physics is a tempting offer, especially for those who are interested in creating educational outreach materials, as Alaina G Levine finds out

Yves Meyer, who pioneered the wavelet transform that plays a central role in technologies as diverse as digital cinema and the LIGO gravitationalwave detectors, has won the 2017 Abel Prize.

Libby Heaney is an artist, researcher and lecturer. She works at the intersection of art, science and technology

It all started with a small tree in our conservatory. The sapling grew rapidly and eventually demanded almost constant watering, so I decided to design and build an automated watering system.