John Aston, Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, has been appointed as the Home Office's new Chief Scientific Adviser.

Our colleague Becky Warren, who runs the Hands On Maths Roadshow, has been distracting us with the wonderful puzzles she has been making, both virtually for the Millennium Mathematics Project and also as beautiful hand-made versions to play with in real life.

Many problems in life are harder than the sum of their parts. If you have ever tried to control a group of toddlers you'll know this: two can make good company, three are a crowd and five a riot.

Creating polariton condensates in the vertices of an arbitrary graph and reading out the quantum phases that represent the absolute minimum of an XY Model. Image: Kirill Kalinin