AXA Digital Commercial Platform, a first-of-its-kind AI-powered all-in-one risk management system, has struck a landmark deal with ICEYE, the manufacturer and operator of the world's largest synthetic aperture radar (SAR) microsatellite constellation. AXA DCP, which combines bleeding-edge technology solutions with human expertise, is a ‘one-stop shop’ for solutions to a range of rising threats, including natural disasters, cybercrime, geopolitical shifts, and more. Thanks to its partnership with ICEYE – the global leader in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite operations and a key data supplier to several NATO members – it will be able to track floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events with unprecedented precision.

Airbus has selected Skynopy, a French NewSpace company specialising in satellite ground station services, to support the enhancement of the ground segment for its very high-resolution optical imagery services based on its Pléiades Neo satellites. Through this collaboration, Airbus strengthens the performance and responsiveness of its Earth observation services by leveraging Skynopy’s next-generation, fully virtualised ground station systems. The service is designed to improve Airbus Pleiades Neo reactivity and reduce data latency over several areas of interest, meeting the growing demand from institutional and commercial customers for faster access to very high-resolution imagery.

GMV and the European Space Agency (ESA) have signed a new contract for the development of a new generation of GSS stations for receiving signals from Galileo satellites. The project, called ACHILLES (Advanced Technologies Breadboarding for Low-Complexity Sensor Stations), reinforces GMV's position as a technology leader in satellite navigation systems. GSS stations are part of the Galileo ground network and are essential to the system's operation. They receive and process the signals transmitted by the satellites, analyze their quality, identify errors, and send the measurements and navigation messages received to the system control center. The objective of ACHILLES is to design a new generation of more compact, robust, and low-cost GSS capable of ensuring high accuracy and robust operation under adverse conditions. To achieve this goal, the industrial consortium led by GMV will explore innovative technologies in various fields, such as smart antennas with spatial diversity and dual polarization, configurable and wide-spectrum radio frequency chains, hybrid beamforming techniques, and distributed architectures based on cloud computing.

NASA and Axiom Space have signed a mission order for the fifth private astronaut mission (PAM) to the International Space Station – its fifth consecutive PAM award granted by the agency. Axiom Mission 5 (Ax-5) is targeted to launch no earlier than January 2027 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and is expected to spend up to 14 days docked to the space station. The crew complement is pending final agreements and agency and international approvals and will be announced at a future date.

Burying the dead is woven into the hominin story much deeper, perhaps as part of what made us social creatures. The first upright walkers who paused to bury a body weren't doing it because some cultural code told them to—they felt compelled, and that compulsion echoes in us still. This fits with theories linking mortuary behavior to evolving emotional cognition: grief management, reinforcing group solidarity, or expressing proto-moral obligations to kin. In small-brained species, it might have started as raw empathy—carrying a companion's body away from danger, covering it to protect from scavengers, or simply because leaving it felt wrong. Over time, that impulse got layered with meaning, places, and symbols. This is more a pattern of cultural burial than of natural processes. The authors of the study argue that the bones could not have been deposited by carnivores or by random geological events. Instead, the evidence indicates that Homo naledi brought their dead deliberately into the cave system and buried them. Most importantly, the caves show no evidence of occupation, further supporting the argument that they were used primarily as mortuary space.

Deep in the frozen heart of Antarctica, the South Pole Telescope has been watching one of the most extreme neighborhoods in our galaxy, and it's just caught something extraordinary happening there. Astronomers have detected powerful stellar flares erupting from stars near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. These aren't your average stellar flares, we're talking about energy releases so intense they make our sun's most dramatic outbursts look like flickering candles. The research team, led by scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, monitored the galactic center over multiple observing seasons. They were looking for transient events such as flashes that appear and disappear relatively quickly. The research is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

New 3D map of the sun's magnetic interior could improve predictions of disruptive solar flares. For the first time, scientists have used satellite data to create a 3D map of the sun's interior magnetic field, the fundamental driver of solar activity. The research, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, should enable more accurate predictions of solar cycles and space weather that affects satellites and power grids. Additionally, the scientists tested the model's predictive ability. They stopped the data flow at a certain point, then challenged the model to forecast what would happen next. It accurately predicted key features of solar cycles up to three to four years in advance.

In quantum physics, every object, such as an electron, is matched to a mathematical formula called the wave function. The wave function encodes all the details of an object’s quantum state, which means physicists can predict what an object might do in an experiment by combining its wave function with other equations. But if we accept that the whole world is quantum – and many researchers do – then much larger objects ought to have wave functions, including the whole universe. This is a point of view that was previously argued by, for instance, physics luminaries like Stephen Hawking.

Inside electrochemical devices, strong electric fields dramatically alter how water molecules behave. New research shows that these fields speed up water dissociation not by lowering energy costs, but by increasing molecular disorder once ions form. The reaction becomes entropy-driven—exactly the opposite of what happens in ordinary water. The findings also reveal that intense fields can push water from neutral to highly acidic, with major implications for hydrogen production. Hydrogen is widely seen as a key energy source for the future, which makes it critical to understand how water is split during electrolysis.

A strange, glowing form of matter called dusty plasma turns out to be incredibly sensitive to magnetic fields. Researchers found that even weak fields can change how tiny particles grow, simply by nudging electrons into new motions. In lab experiments, this caused nanoparticles to form faster and remain smaller. The discovery could influence everything from nanotechnology design to our understanding of space plasmas. Rendering of dusty nanoparticles suspended in a glowing plasma cloud, where magnetic fields guide their motion and growth, showing how even weak magnetism can reshape matter at the nanoscale.

Jupiter’s swirling storms have concealed its true makeup for centuries, but a new model is finally peeling back the clouds. Researchers found the planet likely holds significantly more oxygen than the Sun, a key clue to how Jupiter—and the rest of the solar system—came together. The study also reveals that gases move through Jupiter’s atmosphere much more slowly than scientists once thought. Together, the findings reshape the understanding of the solar system’s largest planet. From orbit, scientists can identify chemicals in the upper atmosphere, including ammonia, methane, ammonium hydrosulfide, water, and carbon monoxide. Researchers combine those measurements with known chemical reactions to infer what may be happening deeper below the clouds.

The Air Force said it has to ensure its command-and-control networks and communications architectures are able to securely transmit critical instructions and status updates to and from bombers and other aircraft. The Air Force's in-development successor to the B-2 - the B-21 Raider, will play a central role in future penetrating strike missions. Northrop Grumman, the maker of the B-21, has touted it as the world’s first sixth-generation aircraft, in part because of its advanced data-sharing capabilities.

China launched a satellite for Algeria late Friday, as signs mount that multiple missions have been delayed amid preparations for a key human spaceflight test. Liftoff of the Long March 2C from Jiuquan carrying the AlSat-3B remote sensing satellite for Algeria.

On January 12, the U.S. Treasury, a co-chair of the G7 Cyber Expert Group, announced that the group had published a roadmap designed to guide financial institutions, authorities, and technology vendors in planning a coordinated transition to quantum-resilient cryptographic systems. The group emphasized the need for coordinated action, noting that quantum computers could soon break widely used cryptographic protocols that protect financial systems and consumer data. The roadmap outlined a flexible, risk-based approach for migration, emphasizing that organizations should prioritize critical systems and collaborate across jurisdictions to ensure interoperability and resilience. The roadmap also recommended that organizations tailor timelines and implementation approaches to their risk profiles and operations contexts.

Using the world's most powerful particle accelerator, CERN's Large Hadron Collider, scientists have discovered that the trillion-degree hot primordial "soup" that filled the cosmos for mere millionths of a second after the Big Bang actually behaved like a liquid, making it akin to a literal soup. This primordial soup was composed of a plasma of particles called quarks and gluons that rapidly cooled, causing these two types of particles to fuse and create fundamental particles like protons and neutrons, which today sit at the heart of all atoms that make up the matter all around us.

In his new paper published in the Planetary Science Journal, Dr. Emran reports the detection of a characteristic ammonia absorption feature at 2.20 microns in near-infrared spectra of Europa’s surface. The signal was identified in observations from Galileo’s NIMS instrument, which surveyed Europa during flybys in the 1990s. Ammonia hydrate and ammonium chloride are the most plausible materials responsible for the detected feature. Ammonia is unstable under intense space radiation, a property that makes its presence on Europa’s surface significant.

Using cutting-edge material licensed from NASA, a protective heat shield manufactured in-house by Varda Space Industries for the first time enabled one of its capsules to blaze through Earth's atmosphere, marking a significant milestone for the agency and America's space industry. The material, known as C-PICA (Conformal Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator), provides a stronger, less expensive, and more efficient thermal protection coating to capsules, allowing them - and their valuable contents - to return to Earth safely.

The Luch/Olymp satellite, launched in 2014, is one of two secretive military Russian satellites that have been used to stalk spacecraft from the US and others in the geostationary belt (GEO), around 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above the equator. Luch/Olymp (NORAD catalog number 40258) had recently been decommissioned and sent into a graveyard orbit a few hundred miles above GEO in October 2025. Optical ground-based imagery from Swiss space situational awareness company s2A systems shows what appears to be a fragmentation event as the satellite disintegrates and begins to tumble. Additional objects have been spotted around the satellite following the fragmentation event at 06:09 GMT on Jan. 30, according to a post on social media platform X.

Apolink has partnered with ground segment provider RBC Signals to resell the startup’s proposed in-orbit relay services, aiming to fill connectivity gaps when satellites are out of view of terrestrial command-and-control links. The agreement would enable satellite operators to access an in-orbit data relay service through RBC Signals’ established commercial channels.

Axiom wins fifth private astronaut mission to space station. NASA has selected Axiom Space for its fifth private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, scheduled for 2027. The Ax-4 Crew Dragon spacecraft at the International Space Station in 2024.