In this issue we have items from two of the winners of the 2018 AOS Awards. Rob Scholten, 2018 recipient of the John Love award for technical optics gives us an overview of the work in his group using laser-cooled atoms for nanoscale imaging and fabrication. Mohsen Rahmani, winner of the Geoff Opat early career researcher prize in 2018 provides details about tunable metasurfaces. There is also a look at topology in nonlinear photonics, and our ‘Optics in Everyday Life’ section explores tidal disruption.