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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.

Biblical epics have a history of big box office hauls, and one of the most famous arrived over two decades ago, when The Passion of the Christ earned over $612 million worldwide and became the highest-grossing Christian movie of all time. This is despite huge controversy which overshadowed the release of the film, including some claims that it promoted anti-Semitic tropes. Co-produced and directed by Hollywood veteran Mel Gibson, the film has since become one of the most famous of its kind, with it now confirmed that a sequel, 23 years later, is coming to the big screen next year.

Younger generations may be aging faster than their predecessors, and this may be linked to a rise in early-onset cancers, a new study suggests.There have been recent increases in the rates of some cancers among adults under 50, including breast, colorectal, kidney and uterine cancers. One 2023 paper suggests that these early-onset cancer diagnoses rose by 25% globally between 1990 and 2019, and scientists are still investigating why."The trend of increased cancers at younger ages is very real, and it is not simply because of more efficient diagnosis, or diagnosis at earlier stages," said Dr. Jyoti Nangalia, a hematologist and cancer researcher at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the U.K. who was not involved in the new study. "It is possible that we are being exposed to new cancer-causing risks or that [our] defences to them are somehow altered," she told Live Science in an email.The new study, published June 22 in the journal Nature Medicine, suggests that younger generations may have a wider "gap" between their chronological ages and their biological ages — a measurement of how quickly the body's tissues and systems are aging — than older generations do. The greater gap among younger adults seems to be linked with a higher risk of developing cancer early in life.The new study cannot prove that faster biological aging causes early-onset cancer, but it provides new clues for scientists trying to unpack what might be driving the worrying trend."This is really proof-of-concept," study co-author Yin Cao, a molecular and clinical epidemiologist at the Washington University School of Medicine and Siteman Cancer Center, told Live Science.Concerning trends lurking in dense dataChronological age is straightforward: It's the number of years that have passed since a person's birth. "Biological age," however, can vary wildly from one person to another. This catch-all term describes a range of metrics, including markers on DNA and in the bloodstream. These are often measured using "aging clocks," which aim to determine if the body is acting much older than its chronological age. Scientists have increasingly used these summary measures in an attempt to understand why some people are more prone to age-related diseases than others. To check whether there could be a link between biological age and the rise in early cancers, the new study analyzed data from more than 150,000 adults in the UK Biobank, a long-running project that has been tracking the health of about half-a-million U.K. adults since the mid‑2000s. The participants had provided blood samples, with many already measured for markers used to track biological aging. The study authors plugged these results into PhenoAge, a statistical model that estimates a person's "age gap" at a given chronological age. In essence, this model can compare snapshots of two 40-year-olds — one born in 1950 and the other in 1965 — and see if their blood markers suggest they're the same biological age."The traditional approach is really focusing on individual risk factors" for cancer, such as a history of obesity or a high intake of ultraprocessed foods, Cao said. "We are testing whether we can leverage these large biobanks and potentially find some biological imprint as a potential reflection of many exposures that can be linked with cancer risk," she said. The analysis revealed a concerning pattern: UK Biobank participants born between 1965 and 1974 had a larger age gap than those born between 1950 and 1954 at the same chronological ages. Based on PhenoAge's metrics, the younger cohort had systemic aging levels about 0.23 standard deviations higher than the older cohort — a modest shift toward older-looking biology. The researchers applied this same approach to about 10,000 participants in the U.S. National Institutes of Health's All of Us Research Program, another large biobank. There, they found a more pronounced pattern: People born between 1990 and 1999 had age gaps about 0.92 standard deviations higher than those born between 1965 and 1969.Another blood-based aging clock, called the Klemera-Doubal method, showed broadly similar patterns to PhenoAge, albeit slightly weaker ones, the study found.One type of cancer that's on the rise in adults under 50 is breast cancer. (Image credit: kali9 via Getty Images)Real trend or data mirage?In the UK Biobank cohort, the researchers found that participants with higher age gaps were more likely to develop early-onset solid cancers, meaning cancerous tumors that appear in tissues, rather than "liquid" cancers present in bodily fluids. This link was strongest for lung, gastrointestinal and uterine cancers. This finding was based on the patients' medical records. When the participants were divided into three groups based on their biological ages, those in the highest group had a roughly 15% higher risk of early-onset solid cancer than those in the lowest group.To probe deeper, the authors used a different model that estimates biological aging at the level of specific organs and systems, using patterns of proteins in the blood. In almost 20,000 UK Biobank participants, they found that markers suggesting an "older-than-expected" immune system were linked with a higher risk of early-onset lung cancer. Similarly, markers suggesting older-than-expected fat tissue were linked with a higher risk of early-onset colorectal cancer.Does this mean younger generations are aging faster and that's causing the rise in cancers? Maybe, but maybe not — there are important caveats to the study's findings. The patterns will need to be confirmed in other datasets and populations, Cao noted. Biological aging tests, including PhenoAge, are also relatively new, and their implications aren't fully understood. While they clearly capture something about health and risk at the population level, at the individual level, different biological age tests can give very different answers for the same person. That raises questions about what any single score really means for individual health. It may be that the differences PhenoAge uncovered between younger and older people have to do with how the test was originally calibrated, Stephen Burgess, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. To know if that's the case, one would have to dig deeper into how PhenoAge scores are calculated and see if that might have skewed its assessment of the UK Biobank and All of Us cohorts, he said.Related storiesMore young people are getting colorectal cancer — here's what scientists think might be happeningBiological aging may not be driven by what we thoughtNew 'biological aging' test predicts your odds of dying within the next 12 monthsCao added that, while PhenoAge scores have been tied to mortality risk across a range of adults, the test "requires further validations" when it comes to assessing cancer risk. As with any observational study using large databases, it is hard to untangle cause and effect, Nangalia added. "The main issue for this paper is one of correlation versus causality," she said. "Either way, it is useful — with the first, as a potential way of tracking population health and cancer risk, and with the second, as insights into cancer-causing mechanisms." Cao hopes her team's approach will serve as another useful tool to figure out why more young people are getting cancer. " Hopefully this is just a starting point," Cao said.