Toulouse, France — MECANO ID, a leading provider of advanced mechanical and thermal solutions for the space industry, has reached a major milestone. On August 26, its EOS-8’’ satellite ejection […]
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NASA is delaying the arrival of a Cygnus spacecraft at the International Space Station to investigate a thruster problem with the cargo vehicle.
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Amazon is preparing to double the size of its Project Kuiper constellation to over 200 satellites this year with three more launches, supporting broadband services in the U.S. and four other countries by the end of March.
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The demonstration, targeted for 2026, will attempt to showcase a spacecraft’s ability to approach, image and maneuver around other objects in orbit without direct human control
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PARIS, France – Axiom Space and Spacebilt announced plans Sept. 16 to deliver a data center node with optical communications links to the International Space Station in 2027. The Axiom Orbital Data Center Node on ISS, called AxODC Node ISS, being developed in collaboration with Spacebilt, will feature an optical communications terminal from Skyloom plus […]
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PARIS – GHGSat plans to expand its greenhouse gas monitoring constellation and analytic services with $47 million Canadian dollars ($34 million) in equity and debt financing announced Sept. 16 . […]
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When researchers at Microsoft released a list of the 40 jobs most likely to be affected by generative artificial intelligence (gen AI), few outsiders would have expected to see “mathematician” among them. Yet according to speakers at this year’s Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF), which connects early-career researchers with distinguished figures in mathematics and computer science, computers are already taking over many tasks formerly performed by human mathematicians – and the humans have mixed feelings about it.
One of those expressing disquiet is Yang-Hui He, a mathematical physicist at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences. In general, He is extremely keen on AI. He’s written a textbook about the use of AI in mathematics, and he told the audience at an HLF panel discussion that he’s been peddling machine-learning techniques to his mathematical physics colleagues since 2017.
More recently, though, He has developed concerns about gen AI specifically. “It is doing mathematics so well without any understanding of mathematics,” he said, a note of wonder creeping into his voice. Then, more plaintively, he added, “Where is our place?”
Some of the things that make today’s gen AI so good at mathematics are the same as the ones that made Google’s DeepMind so good at the game of Go. As the theoretical computer scientist Sanjeev Arora pointed out in his HLF talk, “The reason it’s better than humans is that it’s basically tireless.” Put another way, if the 20th-century mathematician Alfréd Rényi once described his colleagues as “machines for turning coffee into theorems”, one advantage of 21st-century AI is that it does away with the coffee.
Arora, however, sees even greater benefits. In his view, AI’s ability to use feedback to improve its own performance – a technique known as reinforcement learning – is particularly well-suited to mathematics.
In the standard version of reinforcement learning, Arora explains, the AI model is given a large bank of questions, asked to generate many solutions and told to use the most correct ones (as labelled by humans) to refine its model. But because mathematics is so formalized, with answers that are so verifiably true or false, Arora thinks it will soon be possible to replace human correctness checkers with AI “proof assistants”. Indeed, he’s developing one such assistant himself, called Lean, with his colleagues at Princeton University in the US.
But why stop there? Why not use AI to generate mathematical questions as well as producing and checking their solutions? Indeed, why not get it to write a paper, peer review it and publish it for its fellow AI mathematicians – which are, presumably, busy combing the literature for information to help them define new questions?
Arora clearly thinks that’s where things are heading, and many of his colleagues seem to agree, at least in part. His fellow HLF panellist Javier Gómez-Serrano, a mathematician at Brown University in the US, noted that AI is already generating results in a day or two that would previously have taken a human mathematician months. “Progress has been quite quick,” he said.
The panel’s final member, Maia Fraser of the University of Ottawa, Canada, likewise paid tribute to the “incredible things that are possible with AI now”. But Fraser, who works on mathematical problems related to neuroscience, also sounded a note of caution. “My concern is the speed of the changes,” she told the HLF audience.
The risk, Fraser continued, is that some of these changes may end up happening by default, without first considering whether humans want or need them. While we can’t un-invent AI, “we do have agency” over what we want, she said.
So, do we want a world in which AI mathematicians take humans “out of the loop” entirely? For He, the benefits may outweigh the disadvantages. “I really want to see a proof of the Riemann hypothesis,” he said, to ripples of laughter. If that means that human mathematicians “become priests to oracles”, He added, so be it.
The post Are we heading for a future of superintelligent AI mathematicians? appeared first on Physics World.
In this week’s special CEO Series edition of Space Minds, we're at the World Space Business Week in Paris. In today's episode, SpaceNews editor Mike Gruss talks with Mina Mitry, CEO of Kepler Communications.
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SpaceX expects to begin testing direct-to-device services using newly acquired spectrum from EchoStar as soon as the end of next year.
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Viasat and Space42 have agreed to pool their Mobile Satellite Services spectrum, aiming to provide direct-to-device services from the world’s largest coordinated block of D2D frequencies within three years.
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The deal underscores NGA’s push to fold commercial satellite data and artificial intelligence into U.S. national security workflows.
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SES announced plans Sept. 16 to deploy a satellite co-developed with manufacturing startup K2 Space early next year, marking the start of a more iterative approach to upgrading its MEO broadband constellation.
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The company delivered 84 terminals to York Space and Northrop Grumman for the military constellation known as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture
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PARIS – Astro Digital announced plans Sept. 16 to purchase and distribute power from Florida startup Star Catcher’s future space-based energy grid. The goal is to enable ESPA-class satellites like Astro Digital’s Corvus XL to obtain more power than they could generate on their own. “Demand is growing exponentially for small satellites that can do […]
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The first-ever “space–time crystal” has been created in the US by Hanqing Zhao and Ivan Smalyukh at the University of Colorado Boulder. The system is patterned in both space and time and comprises a rigid lattice of topological solitons that are sustained by steady oscillations in the orientations of liquid crystal molecules.
In an ordinary crystal atomic or molecular structures repeat at periodic intervals in space. In 2012, however, Frank Wilczek suggested that systems might also exist with quantum states that repeat at perfectly periodic intervals in time – even as they remain in their lowest-energy state.
First observed experimentally in 2017, these time crystals are puzzling to physicists because they spontaneously break time–translation symmetry, which states that the laws of physics are the same no matter when you observe them. In contrast, a time crystal continuously oscillates over time, without consuming energy.
A space–time crystal is even more bizarre. In addition to breaking time–translation symmetry, such a system would also break spatial symmetry, just like the repeating molecular patterns of an ordinary crystal. Until now, however, a space–time crystal had not been observed directly.
In their study, Zhao and Smalyukh created a space–time crystal in the nematic phase of a liquid crystal. In this phase the crystal’s rod-like molecules align parallel to each other and also flow like a liquid. Building on computer simulations, they confined the liquid crystal between two glass plates coated with a light-sensitive dye.
“We exploited strong light–matter interactions between dye-coated, light-reconfigurable surfaces, and the optical properties of the liquid crystal,” Smalyukh explains.
When the researchers illuminated the top plate with linearly polarized light at constant intensity, the dye molecules rotate to align perpendicular to the direction of polarization. This reorients nearby liquid crystal molecules, and the effect propagates deeper into the bulk. However, the influence weakens with depth, so that molecules farther from the top plate are progressively less aligned.
As light travels through this gradually twisting structure, its linear polarization is transformed, becoming elliptically polarized by the time it reaches the bottom plate. The dye molecules there become aligned with this new polarization, altering the liquid crystal alignment near the bottom plate. These changes propagate back upward, influencing molecules near the top plate again.
This is a feedback loop, with the top and bottom plates continuously influencing each other via the polarized light passing through the liquid crystal.
“These light-powered dynamics in confined liquid crystals leads to the emergence of particle-like topological solitons and the space–time crystallinity,” Smalyukh says.
In this environment, particle-like topological solitons emerge as stable, localized twists in the liquid crystal’s orientation that do not decay over time. Like particles, the solitons move and interact with each other while remaining intact.
Once the feedback loop is established, these solitons emerge in a repeating lattice-like pattern. This arrangement not only persisted as the feedback loop continued, but is sustained by it. This is a clear sign that the system exhibits crystalline order in time and space simultaneously.
Having confirmed their conclusions with simulations, Zhao and Smalyukh are confident this is the first experimental demonstration of a space–time crystal. The discovery that such an exotic state can exist in a classical, room-temperature system may have important implications.
“This is the first time that such a phenomenon is observed emerging in a liquid crystalline soft matter system,” says Smalyukh. “Our study calls for a re-examining of various time-periodic phenomena to check if they meet the criteria of time-crystalline behaviour.”
Building on these results, the duo hope to broaden the scope of time crystal research beyond a purely theoretical and experimental curiosity. “This may help expand technological utility of liquid crystals, as well as expand the currently mostly fundamental focus of studies of time crystals to more applied aspects,” Smalyukh adds.
The research is described in Nature Materials.
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PARIS – Josef Aschbacher, the head of the European Space Agency, said member states are quickly changing how they view space, from its role in geopolitics, to the need for sovereign capabilities to working more closely with their national security counterparts. During a Sept. 15 interview here at World Space Business Week, Aschbacher, the agency’s […]
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EDITOR’S NOTE: Starbase is SpaceX’s massive rocket development site and the home of Starship — the vehicle Elon Musk envisions as humanity’s path to Mars and that many in the U.S. civil space program see as a way back to the moon. But Starbase started as little more than an impossible stretch of empty land […]
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