Canada’s MDA Space announced plans April 1 to buy Israeli satellite chipmaker SatixFy in a $269 million deal to further vertically integrate its constellation manufacturing capabilities.
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The first results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) are a cosmological bombshell, suggesting that the strength of dark energy has not remained constant throughout history. Instead, it appears to be weakening at the moment, and in the past it seems to have existed in an extreme form known as “phantom” dark energy.
The new findings have the potential to change everything we thought we knew about dark energy, a hypothetical entity that is used to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe.
“The subject needed a bit of a shake-up, and we’re now right on the boundary of seeing a whole new paradigm,” says Ofer Lahav, a cosmologist from University College London and a member of the DESI team.
DESI is mounted on the Nicholas U Mayall four-metre telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, and has the primary goal of shedding light on the “dark universe”. The term dark universe reflects our ignorance of the nature of about 95% of the mass–energy of the cosmos.
Today’s favoured Standard Model of cosmology is the lambda–cold dark matter (CDM) model. Lambda refers to a cosmological constant, which was first introduced by Albert Einstein in 1917 to keep the universe in a steady state by counteracting the effect of gravity. We now know that universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, so lambda is used to quantify this acceleration. It can be interpreted as an intrinsic energy density that is driving expansion. Now, DESI’s findings imply that this energy density is erratic and even more mysterious than previously thought.
DESI is creating a humungous 3D map of the universe. Its first full data release comprise 270 terabytes of data and was made public in March. The data include distance and spectral information about 18.7 million objects including 12.1 million galaxies and 1.6 million quasars. The spectral details of about four million nearby stars nearby are also included.
This is the largest 3D map of the universe ever made, bigger even than all the previous spectroscopic surveys combined. DESI scientists are already working with even more data that will be part of a second public release.
DESI can observe patterns in the cosmos called baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAOs). These were created after the Big Bang, when the universe was filled with a hot plasma of atomic nuclei and electrons. Density waves associated with quantum fluctuations in the Big Bang rippled through this plasma, until about 379,000 years after the Big Bang. Then, the temperature dropped sufficiently to allow the atomic nuclei to sweep up all the electrons. This froze the plasma density waves into regions of high mass density (where galaxies formed) and low density (intergalactic space). These density fluctuations are the BAOs; and they can be mapped by doing statistical analyses of the separation between pairs of galaxies and quasars.
The BAOs grow as the universe expands, and therefore they provide a “standard ruler” that allows cosmologists to study the expansion of the universe. DESI has observed galaxies and quasars going back 11 billion years in cosmic history.
“What DESI has measured is that the distance [between pairs of galaxies] is smaller than what is predicted,” says team member Willem Elbers of the UK’s University of Durham. “We’re finding that dark energy is weakening, so the acceleration of the expansion of the universe is decreasing.”
As co-chair of DESI’s Cosmological Parameter Estimation Working Group, it is Elbers’ job to test different models of cosmology against the data. The results point to a bizarre form of “phantom” dark energy that boosted the expansion acceleration in the past, but is not present today.
The puzzle is related to dark energy’s equation of state, which describes the ratio of pressure of the universe to its energy density. In a universe with an accelerating expansion, the equation of state will have value that is less than about –1/3. A value of –1 characterizes the lambda–CDM model.
However, some alternative cosmological models allow the equation of state to be lower than –1. This means that the universe would expand faster than the cosmological constant would have it do. This points to a “phantom” dark energy that grew in strength as the universe expanded, but then petered out.
“It’s seems that dark energy was ‘phantom’ in the past, but it’s no longer phantom today,” says Elbers. “And that’s interesting because the simplest theories about what dark energy could be do not allow for that kind of behaviour.”
The universe began expanding because of the energy of the Big Bang. We already know that for the first few billion years of cosmic history this expansion was slowing because the universe was smaller, meaning that the gravity of all the matter it contains was strong enough to put the brakes on the expansion. As the density decreased as the universe expanded, gravity’s influence waned and dark energy was able to take over. What DESI is telling us is that at the point that dark energy became more influential than matter, it was in its phantom guise.
“This is really weird,” says Lahav; and it gets weirder. The energy density of dark energy reached a peak at a redshift of 0.4, which equates to about 4.5 billion years ago. At that point, dark energy ceased its phantom behaviour and since then the strength of dark energy has been decreasing. The expansion of the universe is still accelerating, but not as rapidly. “Creating a universe that does that, which gets to a peak density and then declines, well, someone’s going to have to work out that model,” says Lahav.
Unlike the unchanging dark-energy density described by the cosmological constant, a alternative concept called quintessence describes dark energy as a scalar quantum field that can have different values at different times and locations.
However, Elbers explains that a single field such as quintessence is incompatible with phantom dark energy. Instead, he says that “there might be multiple fields interacting, which on their own are not phantom but together produce this phantom equation of state,” adding that “the data seem to suggest that it is something more complicated.”
Before cosmology is overturned, however, more data are needed. On its own, the DESI data’s departure from the Standard Model of cosmology has a statistical significance 1.7σ. This is well below 5σ, which is considered a discovery in cosmology. However, when combined with independent observations of the cosmic microwave background and type Ia supernovae the significance jumps 4.2σ.
Confirmation of a phantom era and a current weakening would be mean that dark energy is far more complex than previously thought – deepening the mystery surrounding the expansion of the universe. Indeed, had dark energy continued on its phantom course, it would have caused a “big rip” in which cosmic expansion is so extreme that space itself is torn apart.
“Even if dark energy is weakening, the universe will probably keep expanding, but not at an accelerated rate,” says Elbers. “Or it could settle down in a quiescent state, or if it continues to weaken in the future we could get a collapse,” into a big crunch. With a form of dark energy that seems to do what it wants as its equation of state changes with time, it’s impossible to say what it will do in the future until cosmologists have more data.
Lahav, however, will wait until 5σ before changing his views on dark energy. “Some of my colleagues have already sold their shares in lambda,” he says. “But I’m not selling them just yet. I’m too cautious.”
The observations are reported in a series of papers on the arXiv server. Links to the papers can be found here.
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At a conference in 2014, bioengineer Jeffrey Fredberg of Harvard University presented pictures of asthma cells. To most people, the images would have been indistinguishable – they all showed tightly packed layers of cells from the airways of people with asthma. But as a physicist, Lisa Manning saw something no one else had spotted; she could tell, just by looking, that some of the model tissues were solid and some were fluid.
Animal tissues must be able to rearrange and flow but also switch to a state where they can withstand mechanical stress. However, whereas solid-liquid transitions are generally associated with a density change, many cellular systems, including asthma cells, can change from rigid to fluid-like at a constant packing density.
Many of a tissue’s properties depend on biochemical processes in its constituent cells, but some collective behaviours can be captured by mathematical models, which is the focus of Manning’s research. At the time, she was working with postdoctoral associate Dapeng Bi on a theory that a tissue’s rigidity depends on the shape of the cells, with cells in a rigid state touching more neighbouring cells than those in a fluid-like one. When she saw the pictures of the asthma cells she knew she was right. “That was a very cool moment,” she says.
Manning – now the William R Kenan, Jr Professor of Physics at Syracuse University in the US – began her research career in theoretical condensed-matter physics, completing a PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2008. The thesis was on the mechanical properties of amorphous solids – materials that don’t have long-ranged order like a crystal but are nevertheless rigid. Amorphous solids include many plastics, soils and foods, but towards the end of her graduate studies, Manning started thinking about where else she could apply her work.
I was looking for a project where I could use some of the skills that I had been developing as a graduate student in an orthogonal way
“I was looking for a project where I could use some of the skills that I had been developing as a graduate student in an orthogonal way,” Manning recalls. Inspiration came from of a series of talks on tissue dynamics at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, where she recognized that the theories she had worked on could also apply to biological systems. “I thought it was amazing that you could apply physical principles to those systems,” she says.
Manning has been at Syracuse since completing a postdoc at Princeton University, and although she has many experimental collaborators, she is happy to still be a theorist. Whereas experimentalists in the biological sciences generally specialize in just one or two experimental models, she looks for “commonalities across a wide range of developmental systems”. That principle has led Manning to study everything from cancer to congenital disease and the development of embryos.
“In animal development, pretty universally one of the things that you must do is change from something that’s the shape of a ball of cells into something that is elongated,” says Manning, who working to understand how this happens. With collaborator Karen Kasza at Columbia University, she has demonstrated that rather than stretching as a solid, it’s energy efficient for embryos to change shape by undergoing a phase transition to a fluid, and many of their predictions have been confirmed in fruit fly embryo models.
More recently, Manning has been looking at how ideas from AI and machine learning can be applied to embryogenesis. Unlike most condensed-matter systems, tissues continuously tune individual interactions between cells, and it’s these localized forces that drive complex shape changes during embryonic development. Together with Andrea Liu of the University of Pennsylvania, Manning is now developing a framework that treats cell–cell interactions like weights in a neural network that can be adjusted to produce a desired outcome.
“I think you really need almost a new type of statistical physics that we don’t have yet to describe systems where you have these individually tunable degrees of freedom,” she says, “as opposed to systems where you have maybe one control parameter, like a temperature or a pressure.”
Manning’s transition to biophysics was spurred by an unexpected encounter with scientists outside her field. Between 2019 and 2023, she was director of the Bio-inspired Institute at Syracuse University, which supported similar opportunities for other researchers, including PhD students and postdocs. “As a graduate student, it’s a little easy to get focused on the one project that you know about, in the corner of the universe that your PhD is in,” she says.
As well as supporting science, one of the first things Manning spearheaded at the institute was a professional development programme for early-career researchers. “During our graduate schools, we’re typically mostly trained on how to do the academic stuff,” she says, “and then later in our careers, we’re expected to do a lot of other types of things like manage groups and manage funding.” To support their wider careers, participants in the programme build non-technical skills in areas such as project management, intellectual property and graphic design.
What I realized is that I did have implicit expectations that were based on my culture and background, and that they were distinct from those of some of my students
Manning’s senior role has also brought opportunities to build her own skills, with the COVID-19 pandemic in particular making her reflect and reevaluate how she approached mentorship. One of the appeals of academia is the freedom to explore independent research, but Manning began to see that her fear of micromanaging her students was sometimes creating confusion.
“What I realized is that I did have implicit expectations that were based on my culture and background, and that they were distinct from those of some of my students,” she says. “Because I didn’t name them, I was actually doing my students a disservice.” If she could give advice to her younger self, it would be that the best way to support early-career researchers as equals is to set clear expectations as soon as possible.
When Manning started at Syracuse, most of her students wanted to pursue research in academia, and she would often encourage them to think about other career options, such as working in industry. However, now she thinks academia is pereceived as the poorer choice. “Some students have really started to get this idea that academia is too challenging and it’s really hard and not at all great and not rewarding.”
Manning doesn’t want anyone to be put off pursuing their interests, and she feels a responsibility to be outspoken about why she loves her job. For her, the best thing about being a scientist is encapsulated by the moment with the asthma cells: “The thrill of discovering something is a joy,” she says, “being for just a moment, the only person in the world that understands something new.”
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China conducted a new launch for a nebulous series of internet technology test satellites early Tuesday.
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Physicists in the UK have drawn up plans for an International Year of Classical Physics (IYC) in 2027 – exactly three centuries after the death of Isaac Newton. Following successful international years devoted to astronomy (2009), light (2015) and quantum science (2025), they want more recognition for a branch of physics that underpins much of everyday life.
A bright green Flower of Kent apple has now been picked as the official IYC logo in tribute to Newton, who is seen as the “father of classical physics”. Newton, who died in 1727, famously developed our understanding of gravity – one of the fundamental forces of nature – after watching an apple fall from a tree of that variety in his home town of Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, in 1666.
“Gravity is central to classical physics and contributes an estimated $270bn to the global economy,” says Crispin McIntosh-Smith, chief classical physicist at the University of Lincoln. “Whether it’s rockets escaping Earth’s pull or skiing down a mountain slope, gravity is loads more important than quantum physics.”
McIntosh-Smith, who also works in cosmology having developed the Cosmic Crisp theory of the universe during his PhD, will now be leading attempts to get endorsement for IYC from the United Nations. He is set to take a 10-strong delegation from Bramley, Surrey, to Paris later this month.
An official gala launch ceremony is being pencilled in for the Travelodge in Grantham, which is the closest hotel to Newton’s birthplace. A parallel scientific workshop will take place in the grounds of Woolsthorpe Manor, with a plenary lecture from TV physicist Brian Cox. Evening entertainment will feature a jazz band.
Numerous outreach events are planned for the year, including the world’s largest demonstration of a wooden block on a ramp balanced by a crate on a pulley. It will involve schoolchildren pouring Golden Delicious apples into the crate to illustrate Newton’s laws of motion. Physicists will also be attempting to break the record for the tallest tower of stacked Braeburn apples.
But there is envy from those behind the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. “Of course, classical physics is important but we fear this year will peel attention away from the game-changing impact of quantum physics,” says Anne Oyd from the start-up firm Qrunch, who insists she will only play a cameo role in events. “I believe the impact of classical physics is over-hyped.”
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SpaceX launched a Crew Dragon spacecraft March 31 on a private astronaut mission that is the first crewed spaceflight to pass over the poles.
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Blue Origin says its next New Glenn launch will be as soon as late spring after completing an investigation into the failed booster landing on the vehicle’s first flight.
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Space robotics specialist GITAI has completed a concept study for a mechanical arm that would be ready to support Japan’s crewed lunar rover early next decade.
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The name Beyond Gravity sounds like a startup. Can you explain who your company is? André Wall: We have more than 50 years of experience supplying key components for the world’s […]
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Multi-year experiments aim to validate commercial solutions for space-based logistics
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A new artificial intelligence/machine learning method rapidly and accurately characterizes binary neutron star mergers based on the gravitational wave signature they produce. Though the method has not yet been tested on new mergers happening “live”, it could enable astronomers to make quicker estimates of properties such as the location of mergers and the masses of the neutron stars. This information, in turn, could make it possible for telescopes to target and observe the electromagnetic signals that accompany such mergers.
When massive objects such as black holes and neutron stars collide and merge, they emit ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves (GWs). In 2015 scientists on Earth began observing these ripples using kilometre-scale interferometers that measure the minuscule expansion and contraction of space–time that occurs when a gravitational wave passes through our planet. These interferometers are located in the US, Italy and Japan and are known collectively as the LVK observatories after their initials: the Laser Interferometer GW Observatory (LIGO), the Virgo GW Interferometer (Virgo) and the Kamioka GW Detector (KAGRA).
When two neutron stars in a binary pair merge, they emit electromagnetic waves as well as GWs. While both types of wave travel at the speed of light, certain poorly understood processes that occur within and around the merging pair cause the electromagnetic signal to be slightly delayed. This means that the LVK observatories can detect the GW signal coming from a binary neutron star (BNS) merger seconds, or even minutes, before its electromagnetic counterpart arrives. Being able to identify GWs quickly and accurately therefore increases the chances of detecting other signals from the same event.
This is no easy task, however. GW signals are long and complex, and the main technique currently used to interpret them, Bayesian inference, is slow. While faster alternatives exist, they often make algorithmic approximations that negatively affect their accuracy.
Physicists led by Maximilian Dax of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany have now developed a machine learning (ML) framework that accurately characterizes and localizes BNS mergers within a second of a GW being detected, without resorting to such approximations. To do this, they trained a deep neural network model with millions of GW simulations.
Once trained, the neural network can take fresh GW data as input and predict corresponding properties of the merging BNSs – for example, their masses, locations and spins – based on its training dataset. Crucially, this neural network output includes a sky map. This map, Dax explains, provides a fast and accurate estimate for where the BNS is located.
The new work built on the group’s previous studies, which used ML systems to analyse GWs from binary black hole (BBH) mergers. “Fast inference is more important for BNS mergers, however,” Dax says, “to allow for quick searches for the aforementioned electromagnetic counterparts, which are not emitted by BBH mergers.”
The researchers, who report their work in Nature, hope their method will help astronomers to observe electromagnetic counterparts for BNS mergers more often and detect them earlier – that is, closer to when the merger occurs. Being able to do this could reveal important information on the underlying processes that occur during these events. “It could also serve as a blueprint for dealing with the increased GW signal duration that we will encounter in the next generation of GW detectors,” Dax says. “This could help address a critical challenge in future GW data analysis.”
So far, the team has focused on data from current GW detectors (LIGO and Virgo) and has only briefly explored next-generation ones. They now plan to apply their method to these new GW detectors in more depth.
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Waseem completed his DPhil in physics at the University of Oxford in the UK, where he worked on applied process-relational philosophy and employed string diagrams to study interpretations of quantum theory, constructor theory, wave-based logic, quantum computing and natural language processing. At Oxford, Waseem continues to teach mathematics and physics at Magdalen College, the Mathematical Institute, and the Department of Computer Science.
Waseem has played a key role in organizing the Lahore Science Mela, the largest annual science festival in Pakistan. He also co-founded Spectra, an online magazine dedicated to training popular-science writers in Pakistan. For his work popularizing science he received the 2021 Diana Award, was highly commended at the 2021 SEPnet Public Engagement Awards, and won an impact award in 2024 from Oxford’s Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences (MPLS) division.
I’m a theoretical physicist, so if you’re thinking about what I do every day, I use chalk and a blackboard, and maybe a pen and paper. However, for theoretical physics, I believe the most important skill is creativity, and the ability to dream and imagine.
That’s a difficult one because I’ve only been in this job for a few weeks. What I like about my job is the academic freedom and the opportunity to work on both education and research. My role is divided 50/50, so 50% of the time I’m thinking about the structure of natural languages like English and Urdu, and how to use quantum computers for natural language processing. The other half is spent using our diagrammatic formalism called “quantum picturalism” to make quantum physics accessible to everyone in the world. So, I think that’s the best part. On the other hand, when you have a lot of smart people together in the same room or building, there can be interpersonal issues. So, the worst part of my job is dealing with those conflicts
It’s a cynical view, but I think scientists are not always very rational or fair in their dealings with other people and their work. If I could go back and give myself one piece of advice, it would be that sometimes even rational and smart people make naive mistakes. It’s good to recognize that, at the end of the day, we are all human.
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Disabled people in science must be recognized and given better support to help reverse the numbers of such people dropping out of science. That is the conclusion of a new report released today by the National Association of Disabled Staff Networks (NADSN). It also calls for funders to stop supporting institutions that have toxic research cultures and for a change in equality law to recognize the impact of discrimination on disabled people including neurodivergent people.
About 22% of working-age adults in the UK are disabled. Yet it is estimated that only 6.4% of people in science have a disability, falling to just 4% for senior academic positions. What’s more, barely 1% of research grant applications to UK Research and Innovation – the umbrella organization for the UK’s main funding councils – are from researchers who disclose being disabled. Disabled researchers who do win grants receive less than half the amount compared to non-disabled researchers.
NADSN is an umbrella organization for disabled staff networks, with a focus on higher education. It includes the STEMM Action Group, which was founded in 2020 and consists of nine people at universities across the UK who work in science and have lived experience of disability, chronic illness or neurodivergence. The group develops recommendations to funding bodies, learned societies and higher-education institutions to address barriers faced by those who are marginalised due to disability.
In 2021 the group published a “problem statement” that identified issues facing disabled people in science. They range from digital problems, such as the need for accessible fonts in reports and presentations, to physical concerns such as needing access ramps for people in wheelchairs or automatic doors to open heavy fire doors. Other issues include the need for adjustable desks in offices and wheelchair accessible labs.
“Many of these physical issues tend to be afterthoughts in the planning process,” says Francesca Doddato, a physicist from Lancaster University, who co-wrote the latest report. “But at that point they are much harder, and more costly, to implement.”
We need to have this big paradigm shift in terms of how we see disability inclusion
Francesca Doddato
Workplace attitudes and cultures can also be a big problem for disabled people in science, some 62% of whom report having been bullied and harassed compared to 43% of all scientists. “Unfortunately, in research and academia there is generally a toxic culture in which you are expected to be hyper productive, move all over the world, and have a focus on quantity over quality in terms of research output,” says Doddato. “This, coupled with society-wide attitudes towards disabilities, means that many disabled people struggle to get promoted and drop out of science.”
The action group spent the past four years compiling their latest report – Towards a fully inclusive environment for disabled people in STEMM – to present solutions to these issues. They hope it will raise awareness of the inequity and discrimination experienced by disabled people in science and to highlight the benefits of having an inclusive environment.
The report identifies three main areas that will have to be reformed to make science fully inclusive for disabled scientists: enabling inclusive cultures and practices; enhancing accessible physical and digital environments; and accessible and proactive funding.
In the short term, it calls on people to recognize the challenges and barriers facing disabled researchers and to improve work-based training for managers. “One of the best things is just being willing to listen and ask what can I do to help?” notes Doddato. “Being an ally is vitally important.”
Doddato says that sharing meeting agendas and documents ahead of time, ensuring that documents are presented in accessible formats, or acknowledging that tasks such as getting around campus can take longer are some aspects that can be useful.“All of these little things can really go a long way in shifting those attitudes and being an ally, and those things they don’t need policies that people need to be willing to listen and be willing to change.”
Medium- and long-term goals in the report involve holding organisations responsible for their working practice polices and to stop promoting and funding toxic research cultures. “We hope that report encourages funding bodies to put pressure on institutions if they are demonstrating toxicity and being discriminatory,” adds Doddato. The report also calls for a change to equality law to recognize the impact of intersectional discrimination, although it admits that this will be a “large undertaking” and will be the subject of a further NADSN report.
Doddato adds that disabled people’s voices need to be hear “loud and clear” as part of any changes. “What we are trying to address with the report is to push universities, research institutions and societies to stop only talking about doing something and actually implement change,” says Doddato. “We need to have a big paradigm shift in terms of how we see disability inclusion. It’s time for change.”
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Former NASA Administrator Bill Nelson says he is concerned about some of the recent changes at the agency, such as the firing of its chief scientist.
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NASA has added SpaceX’s Starship to a contract used for launching agency missions, but the vehicle still has significant work ahead before it can start launching major missions.
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HELSINKI — Chinese startup Bluelink Satcom has raised early-stage funding to build a satellite network capable of detecting Bluetooth signals from space. Bluelink Satcom announced an angel+ funding round March […]
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