Starlink sent and received texts over a 4G/LTE connection between mobile phones via its latest generation of satellites, called v2mini, for the first time this month, following similar projects from Amazon, Apple, AST SpaceMobile, Huawei, and Lynk Global. Starlink—the satellite constellation operated by SpaceX—will offer text messaging to subscribers of at least eight different mobile-network operators around the world and may offer voice and data coverage without the need for the ground terminals its customers now use in “coming years,” Starlink’s U.S. partner T-Mobile said in a statement.

The Starlink achievement is the latest example of how satellites and cellular base stations are converging. A handful of companies are exploiting cheaper satellite fabrication and launch costs, as well as adapting existing technologies such as beamforming, to bridge the several hundred kilometers between mobile phones and orbiting satellites. Among the many new wrinkles those companies have to iron out is the fact that for the first time, the towers themselves are the mobile component of the network: Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites move at tens of thousands of kilometers an hour, so they have little time to communicate with any one mobile phone on the Earth’s surface.

The companies competing to solve these problems have so far sent and received text messages on conventional phones via a commercial satellite (Huawei/China Telecom; Lynk Global; Apple/Globalstar) and performed voice and data calls over 5G via an experimental satellite (AST SpaceMobile) as IEEE Spectrum has reported. Investors have taken notice: Lynk Global is going public in a deal that values the company at up to US $800 million while AT&T, Google, and Vodafone recently invested in AST SpaceMobile, which has a market capitalization of $674.6 million.

Counting seconds between a lightning flash and thunderclap is how anyone can tell how far away a thunderstorm is. (The storm is one kilometer away for each three seconds you count.) But if you want to know when the storm is coming and how strong it will be, you’re better off counting lightning flashes. That’s because supercomputer-armed meteorologists can use lightning-flash data to make more sophisticated predictions.

A team led by meteorologist Ming Xue at the University of Oklahoma reported last month a new way to incorporate lightning data into thunderstorm-forecasting models in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. Early efforts to use lightning flashes were centered on regional ground-based networks of lightning detectors. In 2016, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) launched the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-16 and -17 satellites with cameras designed to detect lightning flashes, making it possible to watch how lightning evolved over most of both American continents.