In this issue of AOS News we have a couple of articles relating to AOS prizes - there is the winning entry of the Warsash Science Communication Prize in Optics for 2018 by Sarah Scholten entitled ‘Sniffing out disease’ as well as an article by a group containing two of our 2017 prize winners. Sergey Kruk won the 2017 Geoff Opat Early Career Researcher Prize and Yuri Kivshar won the 2017 WH (Beattie) Steel Medal. There is also an item considering the relationship between optometry and optics and a look at how lighting affects paintings over time. Our ‘Optics in Everyday Life’ section explores the eye as a photon detector.