Beijing (AFP) June 11, 2025
China is counting on one crucial advantage as it seeks to grind out a deal to ease its high-stakes trade war with the United States - dominance in rare earths. Used in electric vehicles, hard drives, wind turbines and missiles, rare earth elements are essential to the modern economy and national defence. AFP takes a look at how rare earths have become a key sticking point in talks betwe

Brussels, Belgium (AFP) June 10, 2025
The EU on Tuesday cleared European satellite group SES's $3.1 billion acquisition of US rival Intelsat, a move the company hopes will help it compete in a race for space-based internet services, currently led by Elon Musk's Starlink. The European Commission said it approved "unconditionally" the purchase after a probe "concluded that the transaction would not raise competition concerns" in t

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jun 11, 2025
Aethero, a defense-focused startup building space-grade computers and autonomous satellite platforms, has announced $8.4M in seed funding. The company's seed round is led by Kindred Ventures with participation from Neo, Giant Step, O'Shaughnessy Ventures, and Alumni Ventures. Aethero's computing technology is unlocking a new era of on-orbit autonomy and connectivity, empowering the US and

East Lansing MI (SPX) Jun 11, 2025
Star and planet formation has largely been considered separate, sequential processes. But in a new study, scientists at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have modeled a different scenario where planets start developing early - during the final stages of stellar formation - rather than after this phase ends, as previously assumed. Among the many thousands of known exoplanets there is a la

London, UK (SPX) Jun 11, 2025
Star TOI-6894 is just like many in our galaxy, a small red dwarf, and only ~20% of the mass of our Sun. Like many small stars, it is not expected to provide suitable conditions for the formation and hosting of a large planet. However, as published in Nature Astronomy, an international team of astronomers have found the unmistakable signature of a giant planet, called TOI-6894b, orbiting th

Paris, France (SPX) Jun 11, 2025
String theory has long been touted as physicists' best candidate for describing the fundamental nature of the universe, with elementary particles and forces described as vibrations of tiny threads of energy. But in the early 21st century, it was realized that most of the versions of reality described by string theory's equations cannot match up with observations of our own universe. In particula

Madrid, Spain (SPX) Jun 11, 2025
An international team of scientists has published a new report that moves towards a better understanding of the behaviour of some of the heaviest particles in the universe under extreme conditions, which are similar to those just after the big bang. The paper, published in the journal Physics Reports, is signed by physicists Juan M. Torres-Rincon, from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences at the Uni

Dublin, Ireland (SPX) Jun 11, 2025
Astrophysicists have gained precious new insights into how distant "exoplanets" form and what their atmospheres can look like, after using the James Webb Telescope to image two young exoplanets in extraordinary detail. Among the headline findings were the presence of silicate clouds in one of the planet's atmospheres, and a circumplanetary disk thought to feed material that can form moons around

Boston MA (SPX) Jun 11, 2025
MIT physicists have demonstrated a new form of magnetism that could one day be harnessed to build faster, denser, and less power-hungry "spintronic" memory chips. The new magnetic state is a mash-up of two main forms of magnetism: the ferromagnetism of everyday fridge magnets and compass needles, and antiferromagnetism, in which materials have magnetic properties at the microscale yet are

Pasadena CA (JPL) Jun 11, 2025
The 2001 Odyssey spacecraft captured a first-of-its-kind look at Arsia Mons, which dwarfs Earth's tallest volcanoes. A new panorama from NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter shows one of the Red Planet's biggest volcanoes, Arsia Mons, poking through a canopy of clouds just before dawn. Arsia Mons and two other volcanoes form what is known as the Tharsis Montes, or Tharsis Mountains, which are