The media coverage of this year’s Nobel prize underlined the excitement that cosmology generates, but passions can run just as deep in more down-to-earth subjects too. This is perfectly illustrated by our cover story this month about the strange sounds created by “singing sand dunes”, a phenomenon that was first reported by Marco Polo and other travellers some 700 years ago. Several groups of physicists are now vying to explain how these strange, low-frequency drones are produced by nothing more than piles of sand.

It sounds like a fun question to tackle, but the scientific battle over what causes sand dunes to sing has become so intense that the two physicists at the heart of the dispute can no longer bear to work in the same laboratory. The full story (see “The troubled song of the sand dunes”) dramatically illustrates how emotion and tension are central to science. And while it is absurd to argue that the laws of physics are only human inventions that do no reflect an underlying truth, as some sociologists of science like to argue, the sand-dune story shows that scientific progress has a very human side.