We're happy to announce a competition for short popular maths articles open to Plus readers of all ages and backgrounds. The winning article will be published in a forthcoming book provisionally named fifty, which will be published by Oxford University Press to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in 2014.

We love the Math/Maths podcast! It's a conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. Peter Rowlett in Nottingham calls Samuel Hansen in Las Vegas to chat about the math and maths that has been in the news, that they've noticed and that has happened to them.

Plus jetted across the Atlantic in February to attend the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver. Not only did we feast with (not on) jellyfish at the Vancouver Aquarium, we also found out how to lose weight, how to play Big Brother on the internet, and more...

We love Science in School, the European journal for science teachers, featuring news about the latest scientific discoveries, teaching materials and many other useful resources for science teachers. The journal is freely available online, with articles translated into many European languages. The print version (in English) is free within Europe. Here are some of our favourite recent articles.

Maths is now an integral part in the study of evolution, describing how mutation and natural selection affect a reproducing population. And now maths has shown that it if you want to get ahead in the evolutionary race, it really does pay to be nice. We were lucky enough to visit the other Cambridge earlier this year to interview Professor Martin Nowak about the mathematics of altruism.

As we are having a little cake of our own today, we thought we'd look back on another great birthday celebration... Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday!