Gravitational waves from neutron stars: recent developments

The gravitational waves that bathe the Earth presumably do not vary wildly in strength from year to year. However, our very imperfect understanding of their strengths occasionally does change abruptly, prompted either by new astrophysical observations or by new theoretical predictions and discoveries. Such has been the case in the last year for our expectations for periodic gravitational waves from neutron stars, in two different scenarios: (i) accreting neutron stars in low mass X ray binaries (LMXBs), and (ii) hot, young neutron stars in the first year or so after their formation.