Fortnight ending Saturday 23 May 2026. Read time: about 7 minutes.

Very best wishes to everyone teaching, supporting, cajoling, calming and occasionally bribing students with revision snacks through exam season.

With some exams underway already, and the rest firmly on the horizon, I hope your students get the questions they deserve, read the command words properly, and don’t have their calculators set to radians!

This fortnight: Antarctic ice is keeping records for dead stars, cosmologists are poking at the standard cosmological model, nuclear physicists have found a strong-force-only bound state, and exam security is once again providing unwanted enrichment. Also: a genuinely useful Vernier calliper sim, a dark-matter video worth watching, and a ripple tank refresher for anyone whose wave demonstrations currently rely more on hope than optics.

A new study highlighted by SciTechDaily found iron-60 in Antarctic ice laid down roughly 40,000 to 80,000 years ago. Iron-60 is a radioactive isotope associated with stellar explosions, and the team argues that the material points to the Solar System currently moving through the Local Interstellar Cloud, which appears to contain lingering supernova debris.

For teaching, this is a lovely bridge between isotopes, half-life, mass spectrometry, stellar evolution and the slightly underappreciated fact that “space” is not empty so much as untidy.

Source: SciTechDaily

A recent Live Science write-up points readers to a short but interesting arXiv paper on tests of whether the usual Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker picture really describes the large-scale Universe.

The paper itself is cautious: it is about how to distinguish classes of cosmological models if these consistency tests keep looking awkward. That is exactly why it is worth attention. Modern cosmology is not a neat pile of facts but an argument between data, geometry and interpretation, which is much more educational anyway.

Source: Live Science, arXiv

The Popular Mechanics summary is worth a read, but the cleaner institutional explanation comes from Justus Liebig University Giessen and EurekAlert. The result is evidence for an exotic state involving a carbon-11 nucleus and an eta-prime meson, bound exclusively by the strong interaction.

That matters because the eta-prime’s mass is bound up with how mass emerges from strong-interaction physics, so this is not just “new weird particle thing” but a route into deeper questions about where the mass of ordinary matter actually comes from. This is firmly sixth-form enrichment rather than a Year 8 plenary, but it is excellent for stretching students who think the four forces chart in the textbook means the story is finished.

Source: Popular Mechanics, Justus Liebig University Giessen

The Hookean Physics vernier caliper page is exactly the kind of modest resource that ends up saving a department an unreasonable amount of time. It gives students a way to practise reading vernier scales before they ever get their hands on actual kit, which is useful both for GCSE and A Level practical work.

Source: Hookean Physics

Cambridge International issued an official update on AS Level Mathematics Paper 12 on 12 May, including advice on fake exam papers and online scams. On the same day, The Express Tribune reported another alleged Cambridge maths paper leak in Pakistan’s May–June session, after an earlier cancellation and retake announcement.

This is obviously not a domestic AQA/OCR/Edexcel story, but it is very relevant for any UK school running Cambridge International routes, and it is another reminder to point students towards official statements rather than whatever appears in a WhatsApp group with all the credibility of a perpetual-motion machine.

Source: Cambridge International, The Express Tribune

Experienced A-level physics teachers in English state schools should have a look at EinsteinPlus UK, a free three-day professional development programme from The Ogden Trust, run biennially and built around cutting-edge physics and resources from The Perimeter Institute.

The programme is designed to reinvigorate A-level teaching with fresh subject knowledge, ready-made classroom resources, purposeful hands-on activities, and talks from leading researchers. There is also time built in for reflection on teaching and pedagogy, which is always preferable to CPD that simply fires 400 slides at you and wishes you luck.

Places are limited, with priority given to teachers working in schools with high FSM percentages and to those who have not previously taken part in an Ogden EinsteinPlus event, a Culham fusion conference, or an Ogden teacher trip to CERN.

Applications close on 31 May.

Source: The Ogden Trust

The Ogden Trust is also offering a free two-year coaching programme for early-career physics teachers. Participating teachers receive half-termly individual coaching and termly peer-group sessions, with a focus on developing physics subject knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge.

The programme is aimed at teachers in their first or second year of physics teaching.

Applications are open until 31 May.

Source: The Ogden Trust

The IOP’s Eurekas competition for students aged 11–16 is now open, with entries closing on 8 June. This year’s question is: How can physics help make your home ready for the future?

It is broad enough to invite proper creativity, and specific enough to stop students disappearing into a vague cloud of “technology is cool”. Good end-of-term club material, good homework for the keen ones, and good for students who do not yet see themselves as “physics people”.

Source: Institute of Physics

Booking is open for the free Birmingham Physics Education Conference, run by the IOP, Physics Partners and the University of Birmingham. There is a specialist day on 1 July and a trainee/ECT/non-specialist day on 2 July, both in person, with lunch included and no fee.

Which is about as close as physics CPD gets to being handed to you with a bow on it.

Source: IOP Birmingham Physics Day 2026

The free online Day in the Life of a Physics Teacher event on 27 May runs from 6 pm to 7 pm and is aimed at prospective physics teachers. It covers the usual real questions, including practical lessons, classroom challenges and career progression, and points people towards the £31,000 IOP Teacher Training Scholarship.

Source: Get Into Teaching / IOP

Sixty Symbols has a recent Talking About Dark Matter video featuring Ed Copeland, and it is exactly the kind of calm, concept-first explanation that works well for sixth-form enrichment.

Lord Kelvin invented Dark Matter!?

Source: Sixty Symbols

If you are newer to physics teaching, the ripple tank is one of those bits of apparatus that can either make wave behaviour beautifully visible, or quietly turn into a tray of shimmering disappointment.

A good ripple tank setup lets students see reflection, refraction, diffraction and interference directly, rather than just accepting another neat textbook diagram with suspiciously obedient wavefronts. The key practical details are worth knowing before the lesson: the water needs to be shallow, the lighting needs to project clear shadows, and the dipper should only just touch the surface. For refraction, the shallow region over the glass plate needs to be shallow enough to change the wave speed, but not so shallow that the ripples vanish through viscous drag. Naturally, the margin between these two states is just large enough to be annoying.

The linked guide is useful because it gives a clear overview of what the tank can show and flags some of the practical pitfalls, especially when trying to demonstrate refraction.

Source: Ripple tank

Misconception: If something has been exposed to radiation, it becomes radioactive.

Better framing: Irradiation means something has been exposed to radiation. Contamination means radioactive material has got onto or into it. Only contamination leaves radioactive atoms behind.

Why students get stuck: The words sound similar, everyday language treats “radiation” like a substance rather than energy transfer, and popular culture has not exactly been a calming influence here.

Source: IOPSpark

“Aristotle said a bunch of stuff that was wrong. Galileo and Newton fixed things up. Then Einstein broke everything again. Now, we’ve basically got it all worked out, except for small stuff, big stuff, hot stuff, cold stuff, fast stuff, heavy stuff, dark stuff, turbulence, and the concept of time.”

— Zach Weinersmith, Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness

Source: SMBC / Zach Weinersmith

The Physics Staffroom is a human–AI collaboration. AI helps gather and format material, but each issue’s selection, verification, editing, design, and regular features are all done by a humble, human physics teacher! 🤓

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