In the first issue of AOS News for 2018 we have a number of articles ranging from details of conferences that took place at the end of 2017 to an item about the inventor of popular science. There is also a report on smartphone image sensors and an article about how fractals can be used in photonics and energy storage. Our ‘Optics in Everyday Life’ section looks at mirages and Tony Klein has come up with a brief quiz as something new.