LOS GATOS, CA – Cambrian Works announces it has been selected by SpaceWERX for a SBIR Phase II in the amount of $1,249,906.00 focused on Tactical Space Payload for Inertial […]
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Washington, D.C. — May 6, 2025 — SpaceNews, the trusted source for space industry news and analysis for more than 35 years, is proud to announce the appointment of Adam […]
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Starlink’s growth signals a strategic shift as SpaceX evolves from a launch provider to a diversified operator reshaping the commercial space landscape Paris, France– May 5, 2025 – According to […]
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The Canadian firm General Fusion is to lay off about 25% of its 140-strong workforce and reduce the operation of its fusion device dubbed Lawson Machine 26 (LM26). The announcement was made in an open letter published on 5 May by the company’s chief executive Greg Twinney. The moves follows what the firm says is an “unexpected and urgent financing constraint”.
Founded in 2002 by the Canadian plasma physicist Michel Laberge, General Fusion is based in Richmond, British Columbia. It is one of the first private fusion companies and has attracted more than $325m of funding from both private investors, including Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and the Canadian government.
The firm is pursuing commercial fusion energy via Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology, based on the concept of an enclosed, liquid-metal vortex. Plasma is injected into the centre of the vortex before numerous pistons hammer on the outside of the enclosure, compressing the plasma and sparking a fusion reaction, with the resulting heat being absorbed by the liquid metal.
LM26 switched on in 2023 and is designed to achieve fusion conditions of over 100 million kelvin. Over the past couple of years, the machine has claimed a number of milestones, including generating a magnetised plasma in the machine’s target chamber in March. Last week, General Fusion also said that LM26 had successfully compressed a large-scale magnetized plasma with lithium.
The firm was hoping to achieve “scientific breakeven equivalent” in the coming years with the aim of potentially building a commercial-scale machine with the technology in the 2030s. But that timescale now looks unlikely as General Fusion announces plans to downscales its efforts due to funding issues. In his letter, Twinney said the firm has “proven a lot with a lean budget”.
Challenging environment
“Today’s funding landscape is more challenging than ever as investors and governments navigate a rapidly shifting and uncertain political and market climate,” says Twinney. “We are ready to execute our plan but are caught in an economic and geopolitical environment that is forcing us to wait.” But he insists that General Fusion, whic his seeking new investors, remains an “attractive opportunity”.
Andrew Holland, chief executive of the non-profit Fusion Industry Association, told Physics World that the “nature of private enterprise is that business cycles go up and go down” and claims that excitement about fusion is growing around the world. “I hope that business cycles and geopolitics don’t interrupt the good work of scientific advancement,” he says. “I’m hopeful investors see the value being created with every experiment.”
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Since 2011, NASA and the International Space Station (ISS) National Laboratory have engaged in public-private partnerships with entrepreneurial United States companies to bootstrap a commercial business ecosystem in low Earth […]
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In a sunny office, Ji-Seon Kim holds up a sheet of stripy plastic. In the middle of dark blue and transparent bands, a small red glow catches the eye, clearly visible even against the bright daylight. There are no sockets or chargers, but that little light is no magic trick.
“It’s a printed solar cell from my industrial collaborator,” Kim explains. “This blue material is the organic semiconductor printed in the plastic. It absorbs indoor light and generates electricity to power the LED.”
Kim is a professor in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, and was director of the university’s EPSRC Plastic Electronics Centre for Doctoral Training, which closed in 2023. She researches carbon-based semiconductors, sometimes called organic, molecular or plastic semiconductors. In 2023 the Institute of Physics (IOP) awarded her the Nevill Mott Medal and Prize in recognition of her “outstanding contributions to the materials physics” of this area.
Yet she came to the field almost by accident. After completing her master’s degree in theoretical physics in Seoul in 1994, Kim was about to embark on a theory-focused PhD studying nonlinear optics at Imperial, when her master’s supervisor told her about some exciting work happening at the University of Cambridge.
A team there had just created the first organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) based on conjugated polymers, successfully stimulating carbon-based molecules to glow under an applied voltage. Intrigued by the nascent field, Kim contacted Richard Friend, who led the research and, following an interview, he offered her a PhD position. Friend himself won the IOP’s Isaac Newton Medal and Prize in 2024.
I was really lucky to be in the right place at the right time, just after this new discovery
Ji-Seon Kim
“I spent almost six months learning how to use certain equipment in the lab,” Kim recalls of the tricky transition from theory to experimental work. “For example, there’s a big glove box you have to put your hands in to make the devices inside it, and I wasn’t sure whether I was even able to open the chamber.”
But as she found her feet, she became increasingly passionate about the work. “I was really lucky to be in the right place at the right time, just after this new discovery.”
You could hardly find a clearer example of fundamental research moving into consumer applications in recent years than OLEDs – now a familiar term in the world of TVs and smartphones. But when Kim joined the field, the first OLEDs were inefficient and degraded quickly due to high electric fields, heat and oxygen exposure. So, during her PhD, Kim focused on making the devices more efficient and last for longer.
She also helped to develop a better understanding of the physics underlying the phenomenon. At the time, researchers disagreed about the fundamental limit of device efficiency determined by excited state (singlet vs triplet) formation under charge injection. Drawing on her theoretical background, Kim developed innovative simulation work on display device outcoupling, which provided a new way of determining the orientation of emitting molecules and the device efficiency, which is now commonly used in the OLED community.
Kim completed her PhD in 2000 and continued studying organic semiconductors, moving to Imperial in 2007. Besides display screens, she is interested in numerous other potential applications of the materials, including sustainable energy. After all, just as the molecules can emit light in response to injected charges, so too can they absorb photons and generate electricity.
Organic semiconductors have several advantages over traditional silicon-based photovoltaic materials. As well as being lightweight, carbon molecules can be tuned to absorb different wavelengths. Whereas silicon solar cells only work with sunlight, and must be installed as heavy panels on roofs or in fields, organic semiconductors offer more options. They could be inconspicuously integrated into buildings, capturing indoor office light that is normally wasted and using it to power appliances. They could even be made into a transparent film and incorporated into windows to convert sunlight into electricity.
Plastic fabrication methods offer a further benefit. Unlike silicon, carbon-based semiconductors can be dissolved in common organic solvents to create a kind of ink, opening the door to low-cost, flexible printing techniques.
And it doesn’t stop there. “A future direction I am particularly interested in is using organic semiconductors for neuromorphic applications,” says Kim. “You can make synaptic transistors – which mimic biological neurons – using molecular semiconductors.”
With all the promise of these materials, the field has flourished. Kim’s group is currently tackling the challenge of the high binding energy between the electron–hole pair in organic semiconductors, which resists separation into free charges, increasing the intrinsic energy cost of using them. Kim and her team are exploring new small molecules, which create an energy level offset by simply changing their packing and orientations, providing an extra driving force to separate the charges.
Alongside her work at Imperial, Kim was also a visiting professor at KAIST in Korea, and is actively involved in strengthening UK–Korea research ties. In 2016 she co-established the GIST-ICL Research and Development Centre for Plastic Electronics, a collaboration between the Gwangju Institute for Science and Technology and Imperial.
“International interactions are critical not only for scientific development but also for future technology,” Kim says. “The UK is really strong in fundamental science, but we don’t have many manufacturing sites compared to Asian countries like Korea. For a fundamental discovery to be applied in a commercial device, there’s a transition from the lab to the manufacturing scale. For that we need a partner, and those partners are overseas.”
Kim is also seeking to build bridges across disciplines. She will soon be moving to the University of Oxford to work on physical chemistry as part of a research initiative focused on sustainable materials and chemistry. She will draw on her expertise in spectroscopic techniques to study and engineer molecules for sustainable applications.
“These days physics is multidisciplinary,” she notes. “For future technology and science, you have to be able to integrate different disciplines. I hope I can contribute as a physicist to bridge different disciplines in molecular semiconductors.”
But one constant is how Kim mentors undergraduate students. Her advice is to engage them with innovations from the lab, which is why she likes to get out the plastic sheet powering the LED. The emphasis on tangible experience is inspired by the excitement and motivation she remembers feeling when she saw organic semiconductors glowing at the start of her PhD.
“Even though the efficiency was so poor that we had to turn the overhead light off and use a really high voltage to see the faint light, that exposure to the real physics was really important,” she says. “That was for me a Eureka moment.”
The post Organic magic: Ji-Seon Kim on how carbon-based semiconductors are shaping our present and future appeared first on Physics World.
The White House’s proposal to cut NASA’s budget by nearly 25% and cancel several major programs has drawn criticism from industry and members of Congress, while raising concerns among international partners.
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Launched from Roc, Stratolaunch’s massive carrier aircraft boasting a record-breaking 385-foot wingspan, the Talon-A2 drone was released over the Pacific Ocean.
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Eutelsat shares closed up nearly 13% May 5 after the French operator said it would replace its CEO with Jean-François Fallacher, a telecoms veteran joining from a key partner in Europe’s planned sovereign broadband constellation.
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Officials are unconvinced of strategic benefit, even as industry eyes long-term contracts
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Novaspace’s Space Economy Report, 11th Edition, highlights downstream solutions driving significant industry growth. Paris, 2025 – Novaspace, the leading space consulting and market intelligence firm, has released the 11th Edition […]
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Global government space investments rocketed to $135 billion in 2024, marking a 10% increase from 2023, with defense expenditures driving growth and continuing to outpace civil spending. Novaspace, the leading […]
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Novaspace report highlights evolving pricing models amid growing supply and cost-efficient capacity Paris, February 19, 2025 – Novaspace, the leading space consulting and market intelligence firm, has released the 7th […]
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Novaspace, the leading space consulting and market intelligence firm, has unveiled a new offering: the Major Space Programs Tracker. This report debuts with a spotlight on a defining trend across […]
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LATSAT will gather Latin American and global space leaders for groundbreaking discussions and networking, focusing on the future of the region’s space sector and pathways to industry growth. Paris, Bogotá […]
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Situational awareness emerges as essential infrastructure for orbital sustainability Paris, April, 2025 – Novaspace, the leading space consulting and market intelligence firm, has unveiled a new offering: the Space Situational […]
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Malicious interference with the United States Global Positioning System (GPS) is a potentially fatal safety hazard that demands immediate attention and unified action. As the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency […]
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What does the word “overselling” mean to you? At one level, it can just mean selling more of something than already exists or can be delivered. It’s what happens when airlines overbook flights by selling more seats than physically exist on their planes. They assume a small fraction of passengers won’t turn up, which is fine – until you can’t fly because everyone else has rocked up ahead of you.
Overselling can also involve selling more of something than is strictly required. Also known as “upselling”, you might have experienced it when buying a car or taking out a new broadband contract. You end up paying for extras and add-ons that were offered but you didn’t really need or even want, which explains why you’ve got all those useless WiFi boosters lying around the house.
There’s also a third meaning of “overselling”, which is to exaggerate the merits of something. You see it when a pharmaceutical company claims its amazing anti-ageing product “will make you live 20 years longer”, which it won’t. Overselling in this instance means overstating a product’s capability or functionality. It’s pretending something is more mature than it is, or claiming a technology is real when it’s still at proof-of-concept-stage.
From my experience in science and technology, this form of overselling often happens when companies and their staff want to grab attention or to keep customers or consumers on board. Sometimes firms do it because they are genuinely enthusiastic (possibly too much so) about the future possibilities of their product. I’m not saying overselling is necessarily a bad thing but just that there are reservations.
Before I go any further, let’s learn the lingo of overselling. First off, there’s “vapourware”, which refers to a product that either doesn’t exist or doesn’t fulfil the stated technical capability. Often, it’s something a firm wants to include in its product portfolio because they’re sure people would like to own it. Deep down, though, the company knows the product simply isn’t possible, at least not right now. Like a vapour, it’s there but can’t be touched.
Sometimes vapourware is just a case of waiting for product development to catch up with a genuine product plan. Sales staff know they haven’t got the product at the right specification yet, and while the firm will definitely get there one day, they’re pretending the hurdles have already been crossed. But genuine over-enthusiasm can sometimes cross over into wishful thinking – the idea that a certain functionality can be achieved with an existing technical approach.
Do you remember Google Glass? This was wearable tech, integrated into spectacle frames, that was going to become the ubiquitous portable computer. Information would be requested via voice commands, with the user receiving back the results, visible on a small heads-up display. Whilst the computing technology worked, the product didn’t succeed. Not only did it look clunky, there were also deployment constraints and concerns about privacy and safety.
Google Glass simply didn’t capture the public’s imagination or meet the needs of enough consumers.
Google Glass failed on multiple levels and was discontinued in 2015, barely a year after it hit the market. Subsequent relaunches didn’t succeed either and the product was pulled for a final time in 2023. Despite Google’s best efforts, the product simply didn’t capture the public’s imagination or meet the needs of enough consumers.
Next up in our dictionary of vapourware is “unobtanium”, which is a material or material specification that we would like to exist, but simply doesn’t. In the aerospace sector, where I work, we often dream of unobtanium. We’re always looking for materials that can repeatedly withstand the operational extremes encountered during a flight, whilst also being sustainable without cutting corners on safety.
Like other engine manufacturers, my company – GE Aerospace – is pioneering multiple approaches to help develop such materials. We know that engines become more efficient when they burn at higher temperatures and pressures. We also know that nitrous-oxide (NOx) emissions fall when an engine burns more leanly. Unfortunately, there are no metals we know of that can survive to such high temperatures.
But the quest for unobtainium can drive innovative technical solutions. At GE, for example, we’re making progress by looking instead at composite materials, such as carbon fibre and composite matrix ceramics. Stronger and more tolerant to heat and pressure than metals, they’ve already been included on the turbofan engines in planes such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
We’re also using “additive manufacturing” to build components layer by layer. This approach lets us make highly intricate components with far less waste than conventional techniques, in which a block of material is machined away. We’re also developing innovative lean-burn combustion technologies, such as novel cooling and flow strategies, to reduce NOx emissions.
While unobtainium can never be reached, it’s worth trying to get there to drive technology forward.
A further example is the single crystal turbine blade developed by Rolls-Royce in 2012. Each blade is cast to form a single crystal of super alloy, making it extremely strong and able to resist the intense heat inside a jet engine. According to the company, the single crystal turbine blades operate up to 200 degrees above the melting point of their alloy. So while unobtainium can never be reached, it’s worth trying to get there to drive technology forward.
Now, here’s the caveat. There’s an unwelcome side to overselling, which is that it can easily morph into downright mis-selling. This was amply demonstrated by the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal, which saw the German carmaker install “defeat devices” in its diesel engines. The software changed how the engine performed when it was undergoing emissions tests to make its NOx emissions levels appear much lower than they really were.
VW was essentially falsifying its diesel engine emissions to conform with international standards. After regulators worldwide began investigating the company, VW took a huge reputational and financial hit, ultimately costing it more than $33bn in fines, penalties and financial settlements. Senior chiefs at the company got the sack and the company’s reputation took a serious hit.
It’s tempting – and sometimes even fun – to oversell. Stretching the truth draws interest from customers and consumers. But when your product no longer does “what it says on the tin”, your brand can suffer, probably more so than having something slightly less functional.
On the upside, the quest for unobtanium and, to some extent, the selling of vapourware can drive technical progress and lead to better technical solutions. I suspect this was the case for Google Glass. The underlying technology has had some success in certain niche applications such as medical surgery and manufacturing. So even though Google Glass didn’t succeed, it did create a gap for other vendors to fill.
Google Glass was essentially a portable technology with similar functionality to smartphones, such as wireless Internet access and GPS connectivity. Customers, however, proved to be happier carrying this kind of technology in their hands than wearing it on their heads. The smartphone took off; Google Glass didn’t. But the underlying tech – touchpads, cameras, displays, processors and so on – got diverted into other products.
Vapourware, in other words, can give a firm a competitive edge while it waits for its product to mature. Who knows, maybe one day even Google Glass will make a comeback?
The post Vapourware and unobtanium: why overselling is not (always) a good idea appeared first on Physics World.
Startup Inversion Space says its first flight of a reentry vehicle was “profoundly valuable” even though the vehicle did not reenter.
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By adapting their quantum twisting microscope to operate at cryogenic temperatures, researchers have made the first observations of a type of phonon that occurs in twisted bilayer graphene. These “phasons” could have implications for the electron dynamics in these materials.
Graphene is a layer of carbon just one atom thick and it has range of fascinating and useful properties – as do bilayer and multilayer versions of graphene. Since 2018, condensed-matter physicists have been captivated by the intriguing electron behaviour in two layers of graphene that are rotated with respect to each other.
As the twist angle deviates from zero, the bilayer becomes a moiré superlattice. The emergence of this structure influences electronic properties of the material, which can transform from a semiconductor to a superconductor.
In 2023, researchers led by Shahal Ilani at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel developed a quantum twisting microscope to study these effects. Based on a scanning probe microscope with graphene on the substrate and folded over the tip such as to give it a flat end, the instrument allows precise control over the relative orientation between two graphene surfaces – in particular, the twist angle.
Now Ilani and an international team have operated the microscope at cryogenic temperatures for the first time. So far, their measurements support the current understanding of how electrons couple to phasons, which are specific modes of phonons (quantized lattice vibrations). Characterizing this coupling could help us understand “strange metals”, whose electrical resistance increases at lower temperatures – which is the opposite of normal metals.
There are different types of phonons, such as acoustic phonons where atoms within the same unit cell oscillate in phase with each other, and optical phonons where they oscillate out of phase. Phasons are phonons involving lattice oscillations in one layer that are out of phase or antisymmetric with oscillations in the layer above.
“This is the one that turns out to be very important for how the electrons behave between the layers because even a small relative displacement between the two layers affects how the electrons go from one layer to the other,” explains Weizmann’s John Birkbeck as he describes the role of phasons in twisted bilayer graphene materials.
For most phonons the coupling to electrons is weaker the lower the energy of the phonon mode. However for twisted bilayer materials, theory suggests that phason coupling to electrons increases as the twist between the two layers approaches alignment due to the antisymmetric motion of the two layers and the heightened sensitivity of interlayer tunnelling to small relative displacements.
“There are not that many tools to see phonons, particularly in moiré systems” adds Birkbeck. This is where the quantum twisting microscope offers a unique perspective. Thanks to the atomically flat end of the tip, electrons can tunnel between the layer on the substrate and the layer on the tip whenever there is a matching state in terms of not just energy but also momentum too.
Where there is a momentum mismatch, tunnelling between tip and substrate is still possible by balancing the mismatch with the emission or absorption of a phonon. By operating at cryogenic temperatures, the researchers were able to get a measure of these momentum transactions and probe the electron phonon coupling too.
“What was interesting from this work is not only that we could image the phonon dispersion, but also we can quantify it,” says Birkbeck stressing the absolute nature of these quantified electron phonon coupling-strength measurements.
The measurements are the first observations of phasons in twisted bilayer graphene and reveal a strong increase in coupling as the layers approach alignment, as predicted by theory. However, the researchers were not able to study angles smaller than 6°. Below this angle the tunnelling resistance is so low that the contact resistance starts to warp readings, among other limiting factors.
A certain amount of technical adjustment was needed to operate the tool at cryogenic temperatures, not least to “to navigate without eyes” because the team was not able to incorporate their usual optics with the cryogenic set up. The researchers hope that with further technical adjustments they will be able to use the quantum twisting microscope in cryogenic conditions at the magic angle of 1.1°, where superconductivity occurs.
Pablo Jarillo Herrero, who led the team at MIT that first reported superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene in 2018 but was not involved in this research describes it as an “interesting study” adding, “I’m looking forward to seeing more interesting results from low temperature QTM research!”
Hector Ochoa De Eguileor Romillo at Columbia University in the US, who proposed a role for phason–electron interactions in these materials in 2019, but was also not involved in this research describes it as “a beautiful experiment”. He adds, “I think it is fair to say that this is the most exciting experimental technique of the last 15 years or so in condensed matter physics; new interesting data are surely coming.”
The research is described in Nature.
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"These specialists will become the experts we turn to during the next conflict," said Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey.
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