THE TOP PHYSICS STORIES FOR 1999, as recorded in the pages of Physics News Update: Making tentative landfall on the nuclear island of stability with the discovery of elements 114, 116, 118 (Updates 412, 432); the dramatic slowing of light to automobile speeds in Bose Einstein condensates and in gases (415); the achievement of a Fermi-degenerate gas, a cloud of fermion atoms chilled so much that the exclusion principle inflates the size of the cloud relative to a cloud of otherwise-comparable boson atoms (447); tabletop fusion carried out with powerful lasers (421); the observation of direct CP violation in the decay of K mesons at Fermilab and CERN (420, 435); non-destructive photon observations (439); extrasolar planet transits and other observations (458, 462); three-photon entanglement (414); measuring the frequency of visible light to a precision of 120 parts per billion (434); and gravitational self-energy obeys the equivalence principle (454).