When you board a plane, the pilot already knows the weather on the flight path and can steer clear, or at least warn you it’s coming. The same can’t be said of “space weather” from solar events, which can seriously affect satellites and even passenger planes.

Mission Space is about to launch a constellation provide near-real-time monitoring of this increasingly important phenomenon.

Space weather is a general term for the radiation in the near-Earth environment; outside the planet’s protective aura, satellites and spacecraft feel the full brunt of the sun’s rays, and a solar storm can interfere with or disable them. The type and intensity of this radiation shifts and flows just like atmospheric weather, but being invisible and moving at the speed of light, it’s considerably more difficult to observe and predict.

There are numerous satellites and deep-space missions that monitor solar radiation, but they are necessarily limited; imagine trying to predict the path of a storm using only a handful of wind and rain sensors scattered across the ocean. And while historically this has been sufficient, the growth of the new space economy has transformed space weather from an occasional inconvenience to a constant and quantifiable threat.

“More and more companies are putting space weather on their agenda,” said Alex Po, CEO and founder of Mission Space. “We have 7,000 satellites in space, but in ten years it’ll be 50,000; that means space weather events will be the same as now, but they will have ten times the impact.”

A serious solar storm is not dangerous not only to electronics, but also to unprepared astronauts. If someone happens to be doing a spacewalk, they could get a face full of radiation — and if we want to establish a permanent presence on the Moon, where there’s similarly little protection, we’ll want to know exactly when it’s safe to go outside.

Nearer the surface, airlines are concerned about passengers getting large doses of radiation during a long flight over the poles, and some have even canceled flights because of it. And there are numerous secondary effects on services that rely on satellites, including precision agriculture.

Po’s startup, originally founded in Europe but now based in Israel and the U.S., is about to launch the first two of a planned 24-satellite constellation that will monitor space weather and provide reports and predictions in near real time.

It’s not intended to replace the scientific instruments currently in space, but augment their data (much of which is public) with a voluminous, proprietary stream that enables more precise, timely monitoring.

Po explained that while many companies and governments are increasingly aware of the need for better space weather prediction, the satellites are aging and the data is difficult to share.

“The infrastructure for space weather monitoring was developed in the late 90s, and many of the scientific models were developed 50 years ago,” Po said. Information sharing agreements between organizations like NASA, NOAA, and ESA are complex, and the data itself is not trivial to integrate and harmonize.

“There are no people in the companies who need this data who can understand it. What’s needed is, say, alerts for different alert levels for launch, or for airlines. Everyone uses weather data but no one thinks about how it is generated: you just want to know if it’s going to rain or not. It’s the same here,” he continued.

Mission Space currently uses public sources, doing the work of normalizing it to create something of a unified data stream. But they are launching the first two of their own satellites in the first quarter of 2025, with more planned for later that year. Po said they could probably launch faster, but that it’s more beneficial to learn from the first set and improve as they go. “Engineers…” he said, “There are always more changes.”

The satellites themselves (named Zohar) are specialized but not exotic, he noted, leading to a lower cost for a constellation of 24 than you might expect. The important part is that they still collect 15 parameters a thousand times a second.

“Space weather is a data monopoly game: the first to launch the constellation and build the infrastructure will win,” he predicted. “Even with half a constellation, in two years we will generate a thousand times more space weather data than humans have generated in the last 60. And the real-time data will let us develop machine learning models based on it.”

They are not in competition with governments and scientific organizations, he claimed, or really even startups looking to serve those customers — collaboration is a necessity for a number of reasons.

Their customers are “aerospace in general; satellite operators and space tourism companies; anyone doing private space stations. They’re all very aware of the problem,” said Po. “It was common knowledge in the aviation industry but now the companies are actually paying attention to solutions. And of course for defense, they’ve been developing the domain, and you must be sure you will not have issues in critical space operations. With the current level of precision, that’s hard for them.”

While the real-time readings and predictions will have to wait for the full constellation, the pair going up in a few months should offer a marked improvement over the existing offerings. No exact date is set for launch.

• Earlier this week, researchers discover a 9.2 flaw affecting multiple NAS models
• D-Link says it won’t patch them since they reached end-of-life status
• Crooks are now targeting them with available exploit code

Cybercriminals have begun targeting D-Link NAS devices, recently found to have a critical vulnerability, but which will not be patched due to being at their end of life.

Threat monitoring service Shadowserver recently sounded the alarm in a brief thread posted on X.

Light normally makes other objects cast shadows – but with a little help from a ruby, a beam of laser light can cast a shadow of its own.

When two laser beams interact, they don’t clash together like lightsabers in Star Wars, says Raphael Abrahao at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. In real life, they will simply pass through each other. Abrahao and his colleagues, however, found a way for one laser beam to block another – and make its shadow appear.

The crucial ingredient was a ruby cube. The researchers hit this cube with a beam of green laser light while illuminating it with a blue laser from the side. As the green light passed through the ruby atoms, it changed their properties in a peculiar way that then affected how they reacted to the blue light.

Instead of letting the blue laser pass through them, the atoms affected by the green light now blocked the blue light, which created a shadow shaped exactly like the green laser beam. Remarkably, the researchers could project the blue light on a screen and see this “shadow of a laser” with the naked eye.

Abrahao says he and his colleagues had a long discussion of whether what they created really qualified as a shadow. Because it moved when they moved the green laser beam, they could see it without any special equipment and they managed to project it onto commonplace objects, like a marker, they ultimately decided in the affirmative.

Historically, understanding shadows has been crucial for understanding what light can do and how we can use it, he says, and this experiment adds an unexpected technique into scientists’ light-manipulation toolbox.

Tomás Chlouba at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in Germany says the experiment uses known processes to create a striking visual demonstration of how materials can help control light. The ruby’s interactions with the laser, for instance, are similar to those of materials used in laser eye surgeries, which must be able to respond to laser light by blocking it if it gets dangerously intense.

Meta has been fined €798m (£664m) for breaking competition law by embedding Facebook Marketplace within its social network.

The European Commission said this meant alternative classified ads services had faced “unfair trading conditions”, making it harder for them to compete.

In addition to the fine, it has ordered Meta to stop imposing these conditions on other services.

Meta said it rejected the Commission’s findings and would appeal.

EU antitrust head Margrethe Vestager said Facebook had impeded other online classified ads service providers.

“It did so to benefit its own service Facebook Marketplace, thereby giving it advantages that other online classified ads service providers could not match,” she added,

She said Meta “must stop this behaviour”, with the EU asking the firm to “refrain from repeating” the infringement.

Meta said the Commission had provided “no evidence” of harm either to competitors or consumers.

“This decision ignores the market realities, and will only serve to protect incumbent marketplaces from competition.”

The ruling is the result of an investigation which the Commission opened in 2021, after Meta’s rivals complained that Facebook Marketplace gave it an unfair advantage.

Meta has not previously faced a fine from the EU over competition rules – though it was told to pay €110m in 2017 for not handing over correct information when it purchased WhatsApp.

The Irish Data Protection Commissioner has also previously fined Meta more than €1bn over mishandling people’s data when transferring it between Europe and the United States.

And it also had to pay a comparatively tiny £50m in 2021, when the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) accused it of deliberately breaking rules over its attempt to acquire Gif-maker Giphy – and ultimately demanded it sell the company altogether.

The decision comes as regulators are taking a firmer stance with big tech companies worldwide, with the US government considering a breakup of Google.

Netflix is great, but you as you peruse it and all the other American streaming options out there, you might find that there’s still something missing from your streaming diet. If you feel that way, you might consider checking out the many shows available on BritBox. The streaming service imports all of the best of what British TV has to offer.

If you’re looking through BritBox and wondering what to watch this month, we’ve got you covered. We’ve pulled together three of the best shows available on BritBox that you can check out in the month of November.

We also have guides to the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+.

Wagatha: A Courtroom Drama (2022)

Starring Good Omens actor Michael Sheen, the series is hugely compelling in part because it feels a little bit stranger than any fictional tale could be. It’s social media drama brought to life, and it’s more riveting than that description sounds.

You can watch Wagatha: A Courtroom Drama on BritBox.

River (2015)

You can watch River on BritBox.

REG (2016)

You can watch REG on BritBox.