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There is a particular kind of dread faced by soccer fans flying long-haul on the day of a big game. You take your seat and try to make peace with the fact that for the next nine hours, you will exist in an information vacuum before landing to a barrage of notifications telling you everything you spent the flight trying not to think about. So it felt like biting from forbidden fruit when, somewhere over the Atlantic and a few miles up, I was watching World Cup goals fly in — and they were live. I was flying Virgin Atlantic's 'Fearless Lady', one of several newly-configured Airbus A350 aircraft connected to Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink Wi-Fi. The flight from Orlando to London Heathrow clashed with both Uruguay vs Cape Verde and Egypt vs New Zealand. Games for the purists, you might think? Well, both would turn out to be among the best games of the tournament so far, so could the new satellite internet service combat my usual FOMO? A frozen frame during a film is an annoyance, but a frozen frame as a ball comes into the box is a tragedy, so I wanted to see if the airline’s new service could handle the one test that actually matters to most people: handling live sport in real time.Starlink in numbers(Image credit: Virgin Atlantic)Starlink is SpaceX's low-Earth orbit satellite network, and distinctly different from the in-flight Wi-Fi we’ve all suffered over the years. Traditional aircraft connectivity bounces your signal off geostationary satellites parked some 22,000 miles above the equator, which is why it has always felt like sending a postcard and waiting for the reply. Starlink's satellites sit a few hundred miles up. The round trip is dramatically shorter, and the latency is dramatically lower.I'd have loved the option to throw the stream onto the big, seat-back screen or mirror my iPad to it.Virgin Atlantic was the first UK airline to announce Starlink being rolled out across the A350 fleet first, with the Boeing 787 and A330neo to follow, and full fleet coverage touted for 2027. For now, it's on select A350 services only, and so new that experienced cabin crew leaders told me they hadn't connected to it themselves yet.The airline has already given the system a very public dry run, however. In May, it livestreamed an entire Sugababes performance from the Upper Class, beaming to fans on the ground via Starlink, complete with an audience Q&A. If the network could carry a full music gig without dropping a beat, a football match should be small change — in theory.The one trick worth knowingA top tip: If the network appears on your device’s list but won’t let you connect, toggle your Wi-Fi off and on a few times.The Virgin Atlantic network showed up immediately in Aeroplane Mode on my iPad Pro and iPhone, but the sign-in prompt took an age to appear. My first assumption was that we were still over protected US airspace, or the turbulence we encountered on departure was to blame. Neither, as it turned out. A few flicks of the Wi-Fi toggle and the portal prompting screen sprang into life. A teething problem rather than a fault, but not something the onboard signage prepares you for.(Image credit: Future)It is, in essence, a polite request not to be that person everyone on the plane quietly hates.From there, it's a series of friendly tap-through screens. A Virgin x Starlink welcome note states "You're connected. Fast, free and all yours." Then there's the etiquette rules: short voice calls only, headphones always ("Yes, always"), and a firm reminder that lights-down means calls off. It is, in essence, a polite request not to be that person everyone on the plane quietly hates.A word on "free." It is free, genuinely, across every cabin from Economy to Upper Class, with one condition: you must be a Virgin Flying Club member to log in. Membership is free to join, so the asterisk is small, but it's there, and you're paying with your email address rather than your credit card.120Mbps at 35,000ft(Image credit: Future / Virgin Atlantic)Sat next to a guy named Sam, a Chelsea fan from west London (yes, I was shocked too), we got online at the same time, once we'd cracked the toggle trick. Both of us connected via VPN to ITVX and BBC iPlayer and settled in.The one odd part of the experience you’re not prepared for is the social contortion of trying to watch live sport in a quiet cabin full of sleeping strangers.I ran speed checks throughout the flight, and the best I clocked was 120Mbps, which on the face of it looks a long way short of the "up to 1 Gbps" figure quoted around Starlink's aviation product. But that gigabit figure is the total capacity for the whole aircraft, with two antennas delivering up to 500Mbps each, shared across everyone on board, not a per-passenger promise. Seen properly, 120Mbps to a single iPad, somewhere over the ocean, with a full cabin also online, is not a shortfall, and is roughly double the speed of my rural broadband at home. That’s very impressive, with the best part being that the stream held with no buffering, pixelation, or drops in resolution at crucial moments.(Image credit: Future / FAST)I watched an entire match in full, second-screening throughout, messaging friends to dissect a goal while the live feed carried on uninterrupted beside it. The picture stayed sharp from kick-off to full-time, turbulence and all. Sam, who I suspect boarded as a sceptic, was won over. "Once I got it working, I couldn't believe how stable it was," he told me after. "Being able to message my girlfriend back in Florida is good enough, but I never expected to watch a game. I'm impressed it's free even if you're sitting in economy, and who would have thought Egypt vs New Zealand would turn out to be a bit of a cracker.”He also made the obvious but useful point that you're not limited to the in-flight entertainment library. So if nothing in the seat-back selection appeals, you can simply log into whatever streaming service you already pay for and watch that instead. Perhaps useful for any House of the Dragon fans flying over the coming weeks. The strange etiquette of celebrating at altitudeThe one odd part of the experience you’re not prepared for is the social contortion of trying to watch live sport in a quiet cabin full of sleeping strangers. When a goal went in I had to contain myself, like an away fan stuck in the home end.The stream held with no buffering, pixelation, or drops in resolution at crucial moments.Further forward, I got chatting to Andy from Hampshire, traveling in Upper Class with his family, who flies often enough to have opinions about who he gives his money to. "I fly back and forth from the States fairly regularly on business and was interested to see that even a low-cost carrier like JetBlue is fitting Amazon's satellite broadband," he said. "Not everyone is going to like this, but it means I can get a full day's work done and that tips the needle for which airline I'd choose. Virgin Atlantic and British Airways have little choice but to keep pace or lose customers." The wider map bears this out. Starlink is gradually being rolled out with United, Hawaiian, Qatar Airways, Air France, SAS, WestJet, Alaska, JAL, Zipair and more, and IAG (British Airways' parent) has signed a deal to fit more than 500 aircraft from 2026.(Image credit: Future)Qatar Airways has been clocking download speeds north of 200Mbps, while Amazon's Project Leo, the rival low-Earth orbit network Andy mentioned, is due to go live on JetBlue services next year. Amazon has so far launched over 350 of a planned 3,200-plus satellites. To put that into perspective, Starlink already has over 10,000 in orbit with an eventual “megaconstellation” target of 42,000. Airbus's HBCplus platform is designed to let carriers swap between providers without ripping out hardware, which means this contest could play out over your head for years to come. The connected cabin, in other words, is fast becoming a competitive weapon rather than a luxury when the Wi-Fi is good enough to work a full day or watch a match without compromise.Behind the broadcast(Image credit: FIFA)It's worth a thought, too, for the machinery putting the match on your screen in the first place. The pictures I was watching had travelled an extraordinary distance before they reached 35,000ft, with this summer's tournament leaning heavily on Lenovo infrastructure. This includes ThinkSystem servers at the International Broadcast Centre in Dallas, processing and pushing live feeds across more than a thousand screens at venues in near real time. Broadcast delays are driven below five seconds, with AI handling multi-angle views and the vast data pipelines behind all 104 matches. It needn't be soccer, of course. The same connection should carry matches from Wimbledon, a full Grand Prix, or the final round of a golf major, although a full day’s play at the cricket might be pushing it, for you and the service.Virgin Atlantic x Starlink: The verdict(Image credit: Future)What didn't work? Very little, and nothing fatal. The connection hiccup at the start would have flummoxed a less stubborn passenger, and Virgin could do worse than print "try toggling your Wi-Fi" on the welcome card. I'd also have loved the option to throw the stream onto the big seat-back screen or mirror my iPad to it. Virgin confirmed this isn't currently possible, but is something it would like to offer in future. Watching a match on a tablet propped against a meal tray is fine, but the hardware to do it properly is right there in front of you.Those are quibbles, but the substance is that I watched live football, in full, in real time, from a plane over the Atlantic, and it was indistinguishable from watching at home. The technology delivered it, and it did so for free in every cabin, and for that, Virgin should be congratulated. Those of you looking for a few hours' respite from work and some escapism from the real world may feel otherwise.

Quick factsWhat it is: RAD-Bow-And-Arrow Radio GalaxyWhere it is: 2 billion light-years from EarthWhen it was shared: June 22, 2026The universe is full of structures that remind us of Earthly objects, such as the Cat's Eye Nebula, a "cosmic hamburger," and the famous Crab Nebula. Now, one more has been added to the list: a radio galaxy shaped like a bow and arrow. The newly discovered galaxy, dubbed the RAD-Bow-And-Arrow Radio Galaxy (RAD-BAARG), sits roughly 2 billion light-years from Earth.Radio galaxies are powered by actively feeding supermassive black holes that launch powerful jets of charged particles in opposite directions. As these high-speed jets crash into the surrounding medium, they form huge lobes of magnetized plasma that can stretch for thousands to millions of light-years. Inside both the jets and the lobes, electrons spiral around magnetic-field lines and emit radiation that is detected at radio wavelengths. As a result, most radio galaxies look roughly symmetrical, like two matching balloon-like radio lobes inflated on each side of the central galaxy. RAD-BAARG, with its lopsided structure, appears to be an oddball.RAD-BAARG was first spotted by citizen scientist Pranim Limbo while inspecting ultrasensitive radio images from the LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey. Limbo made the discovery through India's RAD@home Astronomy Collaboratory, a citizen-science research initiative in India, in collaboration with an international team of researchers. The new image shows RAD-BAARG in stunning detail, with red tracing the radio emission captured by the LOFAR telescope, combined with an optical image from the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey.Researchers think the strange shape may have been influenced by the galaxy's environment. RAD-BAARG appears to be falling toward a nearby cluster of galaxies, plunging through the intracluster medium, ‪the hot, thin gas that fills the space between galaxies, the researchers explained in a paper published June 22 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society."The structure of this source is unlike that of any radio galaxy I have seen in the last 25 years," Ananda Hota, principal investigator of the RAD@home Astronomy Collaboratory and first author of the paper, said in a statement. When a galaxy moves through this gas faster than the speed of sound within it, it creates a shock front, similar to how a fighter jet generates a sonic boom. This compressed wall of gas piles up ahead of the galaxy as the gas falls inward.One of RAD-BAARG's jets appears to be running straight into this shock front, causing it to bend and compress into the shape of a drawn bow. The enormous bow-like structure extends nearly 1.8 million light-years across. On the opposite side, the other jet doesn't face the same resistance. Instead, it twists into a distorted S shape before fading into a faint tail forming the "arrow." According to the study, RAD-BAARG has a length of about 2.3 million light-years. That places it in the category of "Giant Radio Galaxies," which are some of the largest standalone single structures in the universe.Astronomers have long predicted that infalling galaxies should generate bow shocks as they plunge through the hot gas of a galaxy cluster. But actually catching one has been extremely difficult, since the surrounding gas is too diffuse and faint to detect easily. Sitting in a complex, chaotic environment, RAD-BAARG is rare not only for its unique shape but also for providing a direct, detailed view of this elusive phenomenon. In other words: That’s a bullseye.See more space photos of the week: 'Human minds should not go through this' The Artemis II crew recalls the unreal moment when Earth disappeared Hidden structure in 1st Vera Rubin image First-light images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory reveal a 163,000-light-year stream of stars emanating from a nearby galaxy. JWST peeps the 'Eye of God' A spectacular James Webb telescope image reveals intricate structures inside the Helix Nebula.

If you push two metal plates together on Earth, nothing happens. But if you take those same plates into the vacuum of space, they can fuse into a single piece of metal. This phenomenon, called cold welding, has been a known hazard for spacecraft engineers for a long time. So what's actually happening at the atomic level, and why does space make it so much easier?The answer comes down to a lack of oxygen in space, experts told Live Science.Sign up for our newsletter(Image credit: Marilyn Perkins / Future)Sign up for our weekly Life's Little Mysteries newsletter to get the latest mysteries before they appear online.Metals are made of lattices — structures where atoms are bonded to one another. But atoms near the surface of a metal aren't bonded to anything on the outward-facing side. If given the chance, they'll "reach out" and share electrons with the surface of another piece of metal. But on Earth, nearly every metal surface is coated in an oxide layer. The layer is just a few atoms thick and forms when metal meets oxygen. "Once the oxide is formed, it's over," Julia Greer, a materials scientist at Caltech, told Live Science. "Then it can't cold weld anymore, because the oxygen basically passivates these bonds."That thin oxide acts like an insulating wrapper. Without it, the free electrons at the surface of one metal piece stop recognizing which atom they belong to. "Those electrons don't know if it's in this piece or if it's in that piece, so they begin sharing the electrons, and essentially that cold welds things together," Sven Bilén, a professor of engineering design and aerospace engineering at Penn State, told Live Science.In space, there's no oxygen to rebuild that layer once it's gone. The cold and the radiation make things worse. Bombardment from solar and ionic radiation in orbit can scour metal surfaces clean, Greer said, leaving freshly exposed atoms primed to bond. "Everything in space is conducive to cold welding," she said.Metal surfaces are never perfectly smooth, either. At a microscopic level, they're jagged ‪—‬ more like tiny mountain ranges than flat plains, said Zachary Cordero, an aerospace engineer at MIT. Pressing two surfaces together, especially with any sliding or vibration, can shear off the oxide layer that formed while the metal was on Earth and flatten those peaks into metal-to-metal contact. "You're breaking up the surface oxide, and you're forming metallurgical bonds," Cordero said.Why cold welding worried early spacecraft engineersCold welding in space has long been a problem. "If there is cold welding, things can become stuck in place," Cordero told Live Science. "If you have a deployable structure and there's cold welding, you might freeze the mechanism, or a door might become locked, or something might become immobilized, which you don't want." For example, say you were to add a metal screw to a metal door. After a while, you would not be able to unscrew it because it would have become part of the door.Bilén pointed to NASA's Galileo probe, which launched in 1989: lubricant loss and launch vibrations during launch are thought to have stripped the oxide layer from parts of its furled high-gain antenna. When engineers attempted to deploy the antenna in 1991, it never fully opened. An illustration of NASA's Galileo spacecraft, whose high-gain antenna never fully deployed during its journey to Jupiter. The failure is widely attributed to cold welding. (Image credit: MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images)Some metals are more troublesome than others. Gold and platinum don't form an oxide layer at all, even on Earth, which makes them notoriously prone to cold welding. "Gold definitely is a very notorious metal for cold welding," Greer said, adding that gold's softness lets it conform easily to whatever surface it touches and it bonds even more easily.How to prevent cold welding in spaceTo prevent components from accidentally fusing in orbit, engineers rely on a few strategies. One is anodizing, a process that locks an artificial oxide layer onto a metal surface. Another method is to coat moving parts with dry lubricants, such as molybdenum disulfide, to physically keep surfaces from touching.Related mysteriesCan other metals be turned into gold? Why doesn't stainless steel rust?How do tiny pieces of space junk cause incredible damage?A third strategy is to pair dissimilar metals — for instance, gold next to a "body-centered" metal, like molybdenum — so their atomic structures don't mesh as neatly. "Their packing order is not quite perfectly aligned, and so there'll be a lot more energetic kind of barrier to overcome," Greer said. Before launch, hardware also gets shaken on vibration tables and cycled through extreme hot-and-cold swings inside vacuum chambers, simulating the stresses of liftoff and orbit to catch problems on the ground.Even with all of those precautions, cold welding can still happen. Bilén recalled bolts in his own lab's vacuum chamber fusing shut after a move across campus. They eventually had to be drilled out. "It happens even on Earth," he said.See how much you know about human exploration into space with our spaceflight quiz!

Any new tax on the rich won’t raise much money unless many of the exceptions and loopholes are dealt withIn this new era of rampaging oligarchs, nothing may seem as satisfying as slapping a tax on Elon Musk’s new trillion-dollar fortune. What most bothers Americans about federal taxes is that billionaires don’t pay their fair share. As the race to develop artificial intelligence mints more billionaires, policymakers’ temptation to directly tax their brobdingnagian wealth is becoming unbearable.The first state out of the blocks is California, where voters in November will decide whether to impose a one-time tax of 5% on fortunes worth more than $1bn. Given the ease with which plutocrats avoid paying income taxes, the case for this sort of direct tax on their stash appears unassailable. Continue reading...