Congratulations to Giorgos Petrou, Jeffrey Ede, Arif Ali and Rajesh Patel, a team of second year physicists who were runners up in the final of the nPower 'Energy Challenge' which was held at Warwick University last week. Over forty teams from universities throughout the UK initially entered the competition and entrants were asked to submit their business proposal to address the challenge of 'How RWE nPower could revolutionise the energy industry'.

The physics students innovative idea was to encourage nPower customers to buy into the provision of renewable energy by investing in 'myTurbine', an initiative where turbines would be crowd funded which would potentially appeal to both investors attracted by the annual dividend they would receive and customers who wanted nPower to commit to a low carbon emission energy supply. The panel of judges were clearly impressed with this imaginative proposal that was well researched and excellently presented. Giorgos, Jeffrey, Arif and Rajesh have all be offered an internship with nPower as a result of their success in the energy challenge.

Congratulations to Dr Nick D'Ambrumenil being selected among the 142 Outstanding Referees of the Physical Review and Physical Review Letters journals, as chosen by the journal editors for 2015.

Initiated in 2008, the Outstanding Referee program expresses appreciation for the essential work that anonymous peer reviewers do for our journals. Each year a small percentage of our 65,000 active referees are selected and honored with the Outstanding Referee designation. Selections are made based on the number, quality, and timeliness of referee reports as collected in a database over the last 30 years. The program will recognize about 150 referees each year, although larger groups were selected in 2008 and 2009. A full listing and further details on the program are available here:http://publish.aps.org/OutstandingReferees.

Ersilia Leonardis, who succesfully defended her PhD in the CFSA, supervised by Sandra Chapman, has been awarded the Vincenzo Ferraro Thesis Prize for her PhD work. The prize was awarded following the careful evaluation of a qualified and esteemed commission. It is in honor of Prof Vincenzo Ferraro, an eminent Italian Astrophysicist who discovered the “Ferraro-Rosenbluth” sheath amongst many other discoveries. The prize supports and promotes studies of magneto hydrodynamics applied to astrophysics by giving an award every year to the best MSc or PhD thesis within the area of magneto hydrodynamics of space or laboratory plasma.