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Members of the American Physical Society are gathering from around the globe for one of the world's biggest annual physics meetings. As 2005 is the Year of Physics, celebrating the centenary of Einstein's most famous papers, this get-together promises to be a special one. Sarah Tomlin reports from Los Angeles.

An economist believes that a five-year aid effort in a dozen villages across Africa can teach the world how to defeat poverty. Sarah Tomlin reports on the project's progress in Rwanda.

Can mathematicians learn from the narrative approaches of the writers who popularize and dramatize their work? Sarah Tomlin is on the story.

A new superconductor had physicists burning the midnight oil at their get together last week. Sarah Tomlin joined in the fun.

The focus of activity in high-energy physics is about to switch from CERN, near Geneva, to Fermilab in Illinois. Sarah Tomlin sampled the atmosphere, as excited physicists prepared their Tevatron accelerator for action.

Piers Coleman is a theoretical physicist, his brother Jaz a musician with an unusual pedigree. Together, they want to break down boundaries between science and the arts. Sarah Tomlin attends their latest concert.

Will we ever be able to tell cat litter from uranium?

How do you search for something when you don't know what you're looking for?

powerful new technique, called aperture masking, has been used at the Keck telescope in Hawaii to produce unprecedented images of a spiral structure in the hot dust around a Wolf-Rayet star. The images show that the dust is rotating — seemingly as a consequence of the interacting stellar winds caused by a companion star.

Ever since the creation of the first Bose-Einstein condensate in 1995, physicists have been dreaming up ways to explore their macroscopic quantum properties — now they want to make them spin. New calculations of a rotating Bose gas predict what these spinning condensates would look like.

Results close in on Einstein's prediction.

Images from ground-based telescopes can be improved with adaptive optics. With this technique the images can even rival those produced by the Hubble space telescope.

The first near-infrared image of a dust ring around a young nearby star has been taken by an instrument aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. The image was made possible by blocking out the star's glare, and the narrowness of the revealed ring implies that it is being gravitationally confined by companion bodies.

In both the United States and Europe the law requires new cars to be fitted with a three-way catalytic converter to reduce pollution. Under some circumstances (urban ‘stop-go’ driving, for example) it seems that such converters result in a shift in the sulphur species emitted, with a rise in concentration of hydrogen sulphide. As yet, however, the implications remain unclear.

By coating micrometre-sized glass spheres with thin layers of metallic compounds, the spheres can be made responsive to electric or magnetic fields and so packed into different configurations. Such tunable crystal structures might offer new ways to make photonic materials.

Nobel split three ways for quantum leaps.

The first image produced by the Faint Object Camera and Spectrograph instrument on the Subaru Telescope is of the irregular galaxy M82, which is notable for its extended hydrogen emission.

Using an electrochemical fabrication technique, engineers claim to have created the world's thinnest chain. The chain, and other three-dimensional devices, can be built from metal layers only micrometres thick, in a simple, automated process.

Simulations of what happens when two black holes collide predict they will release their energy mostly as gravity waves. Such predictions are a bonus to researchers seeking to observe gravity waves.

Auroras are spectacular light shows rarely seen outside the polar regions. Users of the world's largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, have created their own artificial aurora by stimulating the lower ionosphere with intense radio waves.

Protons have an intrinsic spin that becomes useful when they interact with other polarized particles or with an electromagnetic field. Previous methods to polarize large numbers of protons have used high magnetic fields and extremely low temperatures. A new experiment reports high proton polarization in modest magnetic fields and at liquid-nitrogen temperatures.

The first images of the X-ray sky have been returned by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, showing that the recently launched instrument is functioning correctly. Once it has been calibrated, Chandra is expected to deliver huge scientific dividends, in particular in detecting faint X-ray sources.

New and old satellite data are helping glaciologists understand some of the curious features on the Antarctic continent. Comparison of declassified data from the 1960s with modern satellite images has revealed great expanses of snow dunes that have apparently not moved in the past 30 years. Other high-resolution images have exposed the source of giant streams of ice that flow into the sea.

Measuring distances to cosmic objects is a tricky business. Observations of a variable X-ray source provide a new way to determine distances to galactic objects, and perhaps even other galaxies.

Researchers are for ever looking for ways to increase the resolution achieved by electron microscopes. Tricks used in imaging a silicon crystal by transmission electron microscopy avoid the worst effects of lens aberrations, a limiting factor in achieving better results, and take resolution to the subångström level.

Watching a dripping tap might not be the most productive way of passing the time. But a snapshot of a fluid droplet just before it breaks off reveals much about the shape of the drop. The mathematics behind this problem may turn out to be similar to theories describing the gravitational collapse that leads to a black hole.

Knowledge of how a disease spreads can lead to useful predictions to help manage and contain it. Here, Maher et al.model white-nose syndrome spreading in North American bats, and show that concentrated habitat distribution and longer winters can mediate pathogen dispersal, matching the ecological traits of bats.

This citizen science, lab-in-the-field study embedded a classic economic task, the Ultimatum Game, in a museum, capturing >18,672 decisions about fairness from volunteer members of the public, revealing that information sampling shapes responses to unfairness.

Setbacks at CERN offer Tevatron a chance to snatch the prize.