Physicists may not have been smiled on by the advisers who drew up US President George W. Bush's first budget request, but their discipline is going through exciting times, nevertheless.

Last week, for example, Nature published the report of the discovery of a surprising new superconductor, magnesium diboride (see Nature 410, 63–64; 2001). This is thought to work by a conventional mechanism, but has an unprecedentedly high transition temperature for this type of superconductor, and seems not to suffer from the limitations that have afflicted the high-Tc copper oxide materials (see page 186). Next week's meeting of the American Physical Society in Seattle is already attracting a buzz of excitement not dissimilar to the tumult that followed the discovery of the copper oxides. Thanks to the unpredictable character of condensed matter, the rule in this area of physics seems to be that delightful surprises can be confidently expected — leaving new technologies flowing in their wake.

Other areas of physics are also flourishing. Device physics is feeding the revolution in communications and computing, with spintronics, single-electron devices and photonics all making rapid headway. Computational physics is helping to bridge the gap between micro- and macroscopic behaviours of simple and complex systems. At the fundamental level, Bose–Einstein condensates are opening up new territory for exploring quantum mechanics. And that is just to focus on 'small' physics — the big-science disciplines of high-energy physics and astrophysics are similarly thriving.

Nature has enjoyed its own resurgence in physics content in recent years, following a dearth dating back to the Second World War. Now we are going a step further. On 12 March we launch the Nature Physics Portal (http://physics.nature.com), intended to ease access not only to original research published in Nature, but also to that appearing elsewhere.

There are other features too — including some high-level fun. We hope the 'problem page', which offers real-world problems for physicists (and anyone else interested) to solve, will prove an amusing diversion. The principle here is one imbued in the training of all physicists: that they should be able to answer almost any question on the way the world works, armed with a few basic principles, the skill to combine them with order-of-magnitude numbers, and the ability to think. Maybe this is what makes physicists so valuable to the society that supports them. Perhaps Bush's advisers should take note.