The EU-China SMILE mission was launched on Monday night from Kourou, FranceGuyana, and its goal is to investigate how the solar wind affects Earth's magnetosphere and space weather.

The spacecraft launched aboard a Vega C rocket from the European Spaceport in Kourou at 11:52 p.m. EST, or 5:52 a.m. local time, on May 19. According to the mission, everything went according to plan, and the three-stage rocket placed SMILE into a circular orbit at an altitude of 430 miles (707 kilometers) about 56 minutes after launch.

SMILE, short for Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer, carries four scientific instruments to study the impact of the solar wind, the constant stream of charged particles from the Sun, on Earth. European Space Agency officials stated:
"In doing so, SMILE will advance our understanding of solar storms, geomagnetic storms and space weather science."

This is why architecture is called a form of art.

An astrophysicist compares Bitcoin to a growing network of cities. From this, he derives an extreme price prediction.

One million US dollars by 2034
Bitcoin's price fluctuates wildly in daily trading . However, according to Santostasi, logarithmic charts reveal a comparatively stable long-term trend. And it is precisely this that makes the model so attractive to some investors. The astrophysicist predicts a Bitcoin price of around one million US dollars within the next eight years. In twenty years, he even sees the oldest cryptocurrency reaching ten million US dollars. He puts the probability of this at 90 percent.

The model currently places Bitcoin at around $120,000. Santostasi derives the lower end of its long-term range from a second power law between price and hashrate. This currently lies between $56,000 and $57,000.

The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was coined in the 1950s, a marketing ploy by John McCarthy, who also wanted to distinguish his research from the field of cybernetics. Since then, several sub-disciplines have developed under this umbrella term, such as machine learning and neural networks. These are already used in numerous software applications.
Generative AI is attracting a lot of attention – this includes image generators or chatbots like ChatGPT , which can compose texts in natural language. However, its capabilities are not yet sufficient for the fictional supercomputer HAL or for human-like robots. A so-called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) possesses cognitive abilities, while an Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) is superior to humans. These are currently only hypothetical concepts.

The search engine is becoming an AI platform: agents, mini-apps, automatic research and bookings – and even fewer reasons to visit other websites.

At its I/O developer conference, Google announced a comprehensive overhaul of its search engine. The centerpiece is a completely redesigned search box, which Google describes as the biggest upgrade in 25 years: It expands dynamically, suggests AI-powered rewording, and accepts not only text but also images, videos, and Chrome tabs as input. Gemini 3.5 Flash replaces its predecessor as the default model in AI Mode.

Also new are so-called Search Agents: Background information agents will monitor the web, news, social media, and real-time data on finance and sports around the clock and proactively notify users – for example, when a property listing matches their criteria. The feature will launch this summer, initially for paying Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.

Expanded agent-based booking capabilities complement the package. Starting this summer, the new search function will be able to process bookings and, in certain categories such as crafts or beauty, even make calls to businesses itself, initially only in the US. This will utilize a "Universal Cart" —a cross-merchant AI shopping cart for search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail.

Furthermore, Google is bringing its Antigravity technology to search: In combination with the coding capabilities of Gemini 3.5 Flash, Search will be able to generate customized interfaces on-the-fly – from interactive visualizations and tables to mini-apps for all kinds of tasks, such as wedding planning or moving organization. This feature will initially be available only to Pro and Ultra users in the US "in the coming months."

Google is expanding Personal Intelligence , its feature for connecting personal apps like Gmail and Google Photos, to nearly 200 countries and 98 languages, without requiring a subscription.

From signpost to platform

One year after the launch of AI Mode, Google reports one billion monthly users; the number of requests has doubled quarterly since the launch.

For alternative search engines like Kagi, Brave Search, or Mojeek, these changes are likely to further increase the pressure. Google is demonstrating that it can directly translate its data advantage—billions of search queries daily, plus Gmail, Calendar, and Google Photos—into personalized AI experiences that independent providers can hardly replicate structurally. Those without their own user base of this magnitude cannot offer personal intelligence with comparable depth.

Publishers and media companies face an increasingly acute dilemma. If search engines not only aggregate results in the future, but also continuously monitor users in the background via information agents, analyze content, and directly notify them, the incentive to click on a website will decrease. The model that sustains journalism and many other content providers—advertising revenue generated through page views—will be further eroded.

In e-commerce, the combination of agent-based booking and search agents could redefine platform dependency. Those who previously relied on Amazon or booking.com as intermediaries now have another powerful gatekeeper in Google. And Google not only compares prices but also handles the entire purchase process itself. For smaller retailers and service providers, this means their visibility will depend even more heavily on whether and how well their data is integrated into Google's ecosystem.