Last night saw the glitz and glam of the Oscars in Los Angeles, but for physicists, the City of Angels has a more interesting event starting today – the American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting. And with over 10,000 attendees and thousands of papers being presented, the conference will be as full of ground-breaking science as ever.

The hot topics this year, according to the APS’s helpful online conference scheduler, are qubits and quantum computing, which not only take the top five spots of the most scheduled list but also the majority of the top 20. Other popular subjects include topology, machine learning and – naturally — the physics of Hollywood. The press room is also having some interesting talks, from microscopic robots and games for quantum computers, to the physics of terrorism and superconducting black holes.

If you’re here at the meeting, do drop by the IOP Publishing booth in the exhibitor’s hall. You can pick up the latest issue of Physics World, find out about our journals and tell us what you think about our new-look website. Susan Curtis and I will be keeping you up to date with conference highlights here on the Physics World blog and you can follow us on Twitter: @teshsarah and @PhysicsWorld. We’ll also be visiting Caltech’s robotics lab on Wednesday and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on Friday, so get ready for some overexcited tweets and a lot of photos.