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 Brian O'Toole, CEO of BlackSky.
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Stratospheric pseudo-satellites are shedding their reputation as fringe experiments as governments and industry step up demand, according to executives closing in on commercial services for their high-altitude platform stations (HAPS).
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In 1970, the crew aboard Apollo 13 called back to Earth to report the catastrophic failure of its oxygen supply. Their famous phrase “Houston, we have a problem” and the subsequent solution piqued the national imagination, representing the indomitable resolve and ingenuity of America’s space program. Since then, the public appetite for space has declined. […]
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A Cygnus cargo spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station Sept. 19 after a one-day delay caused by a thruster issue.
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A new optically addressable quantum bit (qubit) encoded in a fluorescent protein could be used as a sensor that can be directly produced inside living cells. The device opens up a new era for fluorescence microscopy to monitor biological processes, say the researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering who designed the novel qubit.
Quantum technologies use qubits to store and process information. Unlike classical bits, which can exist in only two states, qubits can exist in a superposition of both these states. This means that computers employing these qubits can simultaneously process multiple streams of information, allowing them to solve problems that would take classical computers years to process.
Qubits can be manipulated and measured with high precision, and in quantum sensing applications they act as nanoscale probes whose quantum state can be initialized, coherently controlled and read out. This allows them to detect minute changes in their environment with exquisite sensitivity.
Optically addressable qubit sensors – that is, those that are read out using light pulses from a laser or other light source – are able to measure nanoscale magnetic fields, electric fields and temperature. Such devices are now routinely employed by researchers working in the physical sciences. However, their use in the life sciences is lagging behind, with most applications still at the proof-of-concept stage.
Many of today’s quantum sensors are based on nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centres, which are crystallographic defects in diamond. These centres occur when two neighbouring carbon atoms in diamond are replaced by a nitrogen atom and an empty lattice site and they act like tiny quantum magnets with different spins. When excited with laser pulses, the fluorescent signal that they emit can be used to monitor slight changes in the magnetic properties of a nearby sample of material. This is because the intensity of the emitted NV centre signal changes with the local magnetic field.
“The problem is that such sensors are difficult to position at well-defined sites inside living cells,” explains Peter Maurer, who co-led this new study together with David Awschalom. “And the fact that they are typically ten times larger than most proteins further restricts their applicability,” he adds.
“So, rather than taking a conventional quantum sensor and trying to camouflage it to enter a biological system, we therefore wanted to explore the idea of using a biological system itself and developing it into a qubit,” says Awschalom.
Fluorescent proteins, which are just 3 nm in diameter, could come into their own here as they can be genetically encoded, allowing cells to produce these sensors directly at the desired location with atomic precision. Indeed, fluorescent proteins have become the “gold standard” in cell biology thanks to this unique ability, says Maurer. And decades of biochemistry research has allowed researchers to generate a vast library of such fluorescent proteins that can be tagged to thousands of different types of biological targets.
“We recognized that these proteins possess optical and spin properties that are strikingly similar to those of qubits formed by crystallographic defects in diamond – namely that they have a metastable triplet state,” explain Awschalom and Maurer. “Building on this insight, we combined techniques from fluorescence microscopy with methods of quantum control to encode and manipulate protein-based qubits.”
In their work, which is detailed in Nature, the researchers used a near-infrared laser pulse to optically address a yellow fluorescent protein known as EYFP and read out its triplet spin state with up to 20% “spin contrast” – measured using optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) spectroscopy.
To test the technique, the team genetically modified the protein so that it was expressed in human embryonic kidney cells and Escherichia coli (E. coli) cells. The measured OMDR signals exhibited a contrast of up to 8%. While this performance is not as good as that of NV quantum sensors, the fluorescent proteins open the door to magnetic resonance measurements directly inside living cells – something that NV centres cannot do, says Maurer. “They could thus transform medical and biochemical studies by probing protein folding, monitoring redox states or detecting drug binding at the molecular scale,” he tells Physics World.
Beyond sensing, the unique quantum resonance “signatures” offer a new dimension for fluorescence microscopy, paving the way for highly multiplexed imaging far beyond today’s colour palette, Awschalom adds. Looking further ahead, using arrays of such protein qubits could even allow researchers to explore many-body quantum effects within biologically assembled structures.
Maurer, Awschalom and colleagues say they are now busy trying to improve the stability and sensitivity of their protein-based qubits through protein engineering via “directed evolution” – similar to the way that fluorescent proteins were optimized for microscopy.
“Another goal is to achieve single-molecule detection, enabling readout of the quantum state of individual protein qubits inside cells,” they reveal. “We also aim to expand the palette of available qubits by exploring new fluorescent proteins with improved spin properties and to develop sensing protocols capable of detecting nuclear magnetic resonance signals from nearby biomolecules, potentially revealing structural changes and biochemical modifications at the nanoscale.”
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It is Peer Review Week and the theme for 2025 is “Rethinking Peer Review in the AI Era”. This is not surprising given the rapid rise in the use and capabilities of artificial intelligence. However, views on AI are deeply polarized for reasons that span its legality, efficacy and even its morality.
A recent survey done by IOP Publishing – the scientific publisher that brings you Physics World – reveals that physicists who do peer review are polarized regarding whether AI should be used in the process.
IOPP’s Laura Feetham-Walker is lead author of AI and Peer Review 2025, which describes the survey and analyses its results. She joins me in this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast in a conversation that explores reviewers’ perceptions of AI and their views of how it should, or shouldn’t, be used in peer review.
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PARIS – Defense and security applications provided almost half of the revenue generated by Earth-observation satellites in 2024, Novaspace principal Annekatrien Debien said at the Summit on Earth Observation Business. While commercial and civil demand for satellite data continues to expand, “the main catalyst remains rising geopolitical tension, which has revealed the strategic importance of […]
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Astra is targeting next summer for the first flight of its Rocket 4 vehicle as the company prepares to reenter the launch market.
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“Imagine the day the aliens arrive.” So begins Do Aliens Speak Physics? by the US particle physicist Daniel Whiteson and the cartoonist and author Andy Warner. From that starting point, if you believe the plots of many works of science fiction, it wouldn’t be long before we’re communicating with emissaries of an extraterrestrial civilization. Quickly, we’d be marvelling at their advanced science and technology.
But is this a reasonable assumption? Would we really be able to communicate with aliens? Even if we could, would their way of doing science have any meaning to us? What if an advanced alien civilization had no science at all? These are some of the questions tackled by Whiteson and Warner in their entertaining and thought-provoking book.
While Do Aliens Speak Physics? focuses on the possible differences between human and alien science, it made me think about what science means to humans – and the role of science in our civilization. Indeed, when I spoke to Whiteson for the Physics World Weekly podcast (to be published 23 October), he told me that his original plan for the book was to examine if physics is universal or shaped by human perspective.
But when he pitched the idea to his teenage son, Whiteson realized that approach was a bit boring and decided to spice things up using an alien landing. At the heart of the book is a new equation for estimating the number of alien civilizations that scientists could potentially communicate with – ideally, when the aliens arrive on Earth.
The authors aren’t the first people to do such a calculation. In 1961 the US astrophysicist Frank Drake famously did so by estimating how many habitable planets might exist and whether they could harbour life that’s evolved so far that it could communicate with us. Whiteson and Warner’s “extended Drake equation” adds four extra terms related to alien science.
The first is the probability that a civilization has developed science. The second is the likelihood that we would be able to communicate with the civilization, with the third being the probability that an alien civilization would ask scientific questions that are meaningful to us. The final term is whether human science would benefit from the answers to those questions.
One of Whiteson and Warner’s more interesting ideas is that aliens could perceive science and technology in very different ways to us. After all, an alien civilization could be completely focused on developing technology and not be at all interested in the underlying science. Technology without science might seem deeply foreign to us today, but for most of history humans have focused on how things work – not why.
Blacksmiths of the past, for example, developed impressive swords and other metal implements without any understanding of how the materials they worked with behaved at a microscopic level. So perhaps our alien visitors will come from a planet of blacksmiths rather than materials scientists.
Mind you, communicating with alien scientists could be a massive challenge given that we do so mainly using sound and visual symbols, whereas an alien might use smells or subatomic particles to get their point across. As the authors point out, it’s difficult even translating the Danish/Norwegian word hygge into English, despite the concept’s apparent popularity in the English-speaking world. Imagine how much harder things would be if we used a different form of communication altogether.
But could physics function as a kind of Rosetta Stone, offering a universal way of translating one language into another? We could then get the aliens to explain various physical processes – such as how a mass falls under the influence of gravity – and compare their reasoning to our understanding of the same phenomena.
Of course, an alien scientist’s questions might depend on how they perceive the universe. In a chapter titled “Can aliens taste electrons?”, the authors explore what might happen if aliens were so small that they experience quantum effects such as entanglement in their daily lives. What if an organism were so big that it feels the gravitational tug of dark matter? Or what if an intelligent alien could exist in an ultracold environment where everything moves so slowly that their perception of physics is completely different to ours?
The final term in the authors’ extended Drake equation looks at whether the answers to the questions of alien physics would be meaningful to humans. We naturally assume there are deep truths about nature that can be explored using experimental and mathematical tools. But what if there are no deep truths out there – and what if our alien friends are already aware of that fact?
When Drake proposed his equation, humans did not know of any planets beyond the solar system. Today, however, we have discovered nearly 6000 such exoplanets, and it is possible that there are billions of habitable, Earth-like exoplanets in the Milky Way. So it does not seem at all fanciful that we could soon be communicating with an alien civilization.
But when I asked Whiteson if he’s worried that visiting aliens could be hostile towards humans, he said he hoped for a “peaceful” visit. In fact, Whiteson is unable to think of a good reason why an advanced civilization would be hostile to Earth – pointing out that there is probably nothing of material value here for them. Fingers crossed, any visit will be driven by curiosity, peace and goodwill.
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The Hartree Centre gives industry fast-track access to next-generation supercomputing, AI and digital capabilities. We are a “connector” when it comes to quantum computing, helping UK businesses and public-sector organizations to de-risk the early-stage adoption of a technology that is not yet ready to buy off-the-shelf. Our remit spans quantum software, theoretical studies and, ultimately, the integration of quantum computing into existing high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure and workflows.
It’s evident that industry wants to understand the commercial upsides of quantum computing, but doesn’t yet have the necessary domain knowledge and skill sets to take full advantage of the opportunities. By working with the STFC Hartree Centre, businesses can help their computing and R&D teams to bridge that quantum knowledge gap.
The Hartree Centre’s quantum computing effort is built around a cross-disciplinary team of scientists and a mix of expertise spanning physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science and quantum information science. We offer specialist quantum consultancy to clients across industries as diverse as energy, pharmaceuticals and food manufacturing.
We begin by doing the due diligence on the client’s computing challenge, understanding the computational bottlenecks and, where appropriate, translating the research problem so that it can be executed, in whole or in part, on a quantum computer or a mixture of hybrid and quantum computing resources.
Integrating classical HPC and quantum computing is a complex challenge along three main pathways: infrastructure – bridging fundamentally different hardware architectures; software – workflow management, resource scheduling and organization; and finally applications – adapting and optimizing computing workflows across quantum and classical domains. All of these competencies are mandatory for successful exploitation of quantum computing systems.
Correct. Ultimately, the task is how do we distribute a workload to run on an HPC platform, also on a quantum computer, when many of the algorithms and data streams must loop back and forth between the two systems.
We have been addressing this problem with our quantum technology partners – IBM and Pasqal – and a team at Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York. Together, we have introduced a Quantum Resource Management Interface – an open-source tool that supports unified job submission for quantum and classical computing tasks and that’s scalable to cloud computing environments. It’s the “black-box” solution industry has been looking for to bridge the established HPC and emerging quantum domains.
The Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation (HNCDI) is a £210m public–private partnership with IBM to create innovative digital technologies spanning HPC, AI, data analytics and quantum computing. HNCDI is the cornerstone of IBM’s quantum technology strategy in the UK and, over the past four years, the collaboration has clocked up more than 30 joint projects with industry. In each of these projects, HNCDI is using quantum computers to tackle problems that are out of reach for classical computers.
One is streamlining drug discovery and development. As part of a joint effort with the pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca and quantum-software developer Algorithmiq, we have improved the accuracy of molecular modelling with the help of quantum computing and, by extension, developed a better understanding of the molecular interactions and processes involved in drug synthesis. Another eye-catching development is Qiskit Machine Learning (ML), an open-source library for quantum machine-learning tasks on quantum hardware and classical simulators. While Qiskit ML started as a proof-of-concept library from IBM, our team at the Hartree Centre has, over the past couple of years, developed it into a modular tool for non-specialist users as well as quantum computational scientists and developers.
Healthcare has yielded productive lines of enquiry, including a proof-of-concept study to demonstrate the potential of quantum machine-learning in cancer diagnostics. Working with Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospitals and Imperial College London, we have evaluated histopathology datasets to categorize different types of breast-cancer cells through AI workflows. It’s research that could eventually lead to better predictions regarding the onset and progression of disease.
We have been collaborating with the German power utility E.ON to study the complex challenges that quantum computing may be able to address in the energy sector – such as strategic infrastructure development, effective energy demand management and streamlined integration of renewable energy sources.
Longer term, the goal is to enable our industry partners to become at-scale end-users of quantum computing, delivering economic and societal impact along the way. As for our own development roadmap at the Hartree Centre, we are evaluating options for the implementation of a large-scale quantum computing platform to further diversify our existing portfolio of HPC, AI, data science and visual computing technologies.
The Hartree Centre is part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), one of the main UK research councils supporting fundamental and applied initiatives in astronomy, physics, computational science and space science.
Based at the Daresbury Laboratory, part of the Sci-Tech Daresbury research and innovation campus in north-west England, the Hartree Centre has more than 160 scientists and technologists specializing in supercomputing, applied scientific computing, data science, AI, cloud and quantum computing.
“Our goal is to help UK industry generate economic growth and societal impact by exploiting advanced HPC capabilities and digital technologies,” explains Vassil Alexandrov, chief science officer at STFC Hartree Centre.
One of the core priorities for Alexandrov and his team is the interface between “exascale” computing and scalable AI. It’s a combination of technologies that’s being lined up to tackle “grand challenges” like the climate crisis and the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.
A case in point is the Climate Resilience Demonstrator, which uses “digital twins” to simulate how essential infrastructure like electricity grids and telecoms networks might respond to extreme weather events. “These kinds of insights are critical to protect communities, maintain service delivery and build more resilient public infrastructure,” says Alexandrov.
Elsewhere, as part of the Fusion Computing Lab, the Hartree Centre is collaborating with the UK Atomic Energy Authority on sustainable energy generation from nuclear fusion. “We have a joint team of around 60 scientists and engineers working on this initiative to iterate and optimize the building blocks for a fusion power plant,” notes Alexandrov. “The end-game is to deliver net power safely and affordably to the grid from magnetically confined fusion.”
Exascale computing and AI also underpin the Research Computing and Innovation Centre, a collaboration with AWE, the organization that runs research, development and support for the UK’s nuclear-weapons stockpile.
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Arianespace is weighing options to increase the launch rate of the Ariane 6 rocket beyond 10 per year if government and commercial demand supports it.
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Speaking at the AMOS Conference, Saltzman calls for industry partnerships to accelerate capabilities in space domain awareness
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