Table of contents

You may remember a campaign to create a monument dedicated to those who peer review research papers. The monument has finally been unveiled.

Still on fundraising campaigns, the Marie Curie Alumni Association is planning an illustrated book series for kids aged between five and nine called My Super Science Heroes.

How about getting your hands on the world's first 3D-printed book? Well, soon you can thanks to a project started last year by the Israeli-born designer Ron Arad.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but a new study suggests that people do judge scientists by their looks (Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. 114 5970).

A third gravitational wave has been detected at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US.

The potential of using satellites for secure quantum communication has been demonstrated in a proof-of-concept study by researchers in Canada, who successfully sent quantum key distribution (QKD) transmissions from the ground to a moving aircraft for the first time.

With its Great Red Spot and turbulent bands of orange, brown and white, Jupiter is one of the most recognizable planets in the solar system.

Look closely at an octopus and you'll see that its eight waving limbs are covered with suction cups that allow these sea creatures to catch prey and stick to surfaces. Inspired by the octopus, researchers in South Korea have now developed a clever adhesive surface that works in wet and dry conditions.

A new and faster way of tracking eye movements has been unveiled by researchers in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Thousands of people are forced to flee war-torn regions every year, but the struggles of scientists who have to leave their homeland often goes under the radar. Andy Extance reports on initiatives to help

Officials at the planned $1.4bn Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) are playing down the scientific impact should the huge telescope be built in the Canary Islands rather than its preferred site in Hawaii.

UK physics received £55m in 2014/2015 from the European Union (EU) according to a report by Technopolis Group – an independent policy research organization.

Work has begun on a huge telescope that will capture 15 times more light than any other optical telescope currently in existence.

NASA has launched the first ever mission devoted to studying neutron stars.

The US scientific community is uniting in its opposition to the Trump administration's 2018 proposals for the budget, which starts on 1 October.

China has launched the country's first dedicated X-ray telescope to study the radiation produced by black holes and neutron stars as well as to detect gamma-ray bursts.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has given its support to an annual International Day of Light.

South Korean president Moon Jae-in has announced that the country will begin to phase out its nuclear-energy programme.

Physics World features editor Louise Mayor has come second in the David Swit Award for Best Investigative Reporting in the 2017 awards from the Specialized Information Publishers Association.

Women are more likely to continue with degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) if they have a female mentor, according to a US study of engineering undergraduates.

A major four-year initiative to increase the number of women studying physics at undergraduate level in the US begins this month thanks to $3m in funding from the National Science Foundation.

An Australian-born geologist is suing the United States National Parks Service over its refusal to allow him to remove about 60 rocks – each weighing around 250 g – from the banks of the Colorado River, which flows through the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

The CERN particle-physics lab has hosted 22 high-school students from Hungary in a pilot programme designed to show teenagers how science, technology, engineering and mathematics is used at the particle-physics lab.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) has the ability to make significant contributions to energy research but must be allowed time to do so, according to a report by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

Universities in Spain have seen a rise in scientific productivity and impact despite a decrease in resources and researchers.

India has become the 22nd country to be a partner in the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France.

Michael Banks travels to Shanghai to hear how the physics department at the first Sino–US joint-venture university is looking to expand

This special issue shows how physicists are tackling the Earth's own dangers

The latest Physics World special report on physics in China is now out

Robert P Crease reads Plato, and wishes physicists would do so as well

Ling-An Wu describes a Chinese Physical Society programme to inspire students in remote areas to pursue a career in physics

In response to Philip Ball's feature "The power of the blackboard" (June pp32–36), which looks into the enduring love that physicists have for blackboards, despite the existence of smartboards and PowerPoint.

In response to Robert P Crease's Critical Point article "Of minds and marches" (June p16), where he reveals why he went on a science march, despite his initial ambivalence.

In response to C J Kim's feature "Smooth sailing" (Physics World Focus on Nanotechnology 2017 pp25–27), which looks into the use of superhydrophobic nanosurfaces to reduce friction on marine vessels.

In response to John Allen's letter "Plasma pinch" (Feedback, June p20) in which he posited problems with our understanding of the behaviour of plasmas.

In response to John Powell's Lateral Thoughts article "Hail to the new, popular units" (April p52) in which the author suggests some populist units in light of the UK's EU membership referendum.

Despite living in a technologically advanced world, we remain almost entirely at the mercy of our planet's colossal power.

Common in the Himalaya, supraglacial ponds are small bodies of water that sit in cavities on top of glaciers.

Despite humans having seemingly "tamed" fire many millennia ago, there are still lots of open questions when it comes to the physics of wildfires, as Stephen Ornes discovers

Spurred by some trigger, landslides occur when an already unstable slope collapses, resulting in huge volumes of soil and rocks tumbling downhill.

"Slow earthquakes" are tiny, indiscernible tremors that last for weeks, but could these strange events precede or even cause the more familiar "fast" earthquakes? Sophia Chen investigates

In October 2015 the Antarctic ozone hole expanded to a record 28.2 million km² – larger than North America.

Across the wide open plains of the central US and inside air-conditioned computer laboratories, scientists of different stripes are probing one of nature's most devastating phenomena: tornadoes. Stephen Ornes offers a snapshot of their work

Up to 70 times a year, huge slabs of granite detach from cliff faces in America's Yosemite National Park before thundering downhill at high speed, destroying trees and whatever else lies in their path.

Active volcanoes can be incredibly dangerous, especially to those who live nearby, but how do you get close enough to observe one in action? Matthew Watson explains how artificial drones are providing volcanologists with insights that could one day save human lives

The 14 pairs of short story and essay in Thought X: Fictions and Hypotheticals have at their root the concept that thought experiments in science and philosophy tell stories as they build a scenario to prove a point.

Everything You Know About Science is Wrong – this is the bold claim made by science writer Matt Brown, and it's also the title of his latest book.

Mike Massimino – a US engineer who served as a NASA astronaut from 1996 to 2014 – tells the story of his long and illustrious career in his new book Spaceman: an Astronaut's Unikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe.

In Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story, author Angela Saini puts forward the idea that bad science has been used to endorse the cultural prejudice that women are both biologically and psychologically second rate to men.

Eclipse America is a one-stop shop for everything concerning next month's total solar eclipse in the US, as its 70-mile-wide shadow tracks it way from Oregon in the west to South Carolina in the east on Monday 21 August 2017.

New research institutes and departments encounter unique challenges for attracting and recruiting talent from across the globe, reports Alaina G Levine

Elina Berglund is the chief technology officer and co-founder of Natural Cycles – a fertility app that helps women to prevent, plan and monitor pregnancies. As a physicist, she was part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012

Sandra Faber has won the 2017 Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize for her significant contributions to the modern understanding of galaxies and dark matter.

I am a biochemist, a vocation that has little to do with physics. Despite this, I currently work in a physics engineering group