Capris, bright makeup and more trending spring style searches  blog.google

This Spanish city is Europe’s top trending destination for summer 2026  Euronews.com

7 Players Trending Up & Down (2026 Fantasy Football)  FantasyPros

All About Recruiting: Miami trending up for Rivals300 DL  On3

Aluminium foil on door handles is trending in 2026: US homes gush over 'surprisingly big effect' but is i  The Times of India

1. Microsoft Gaming reverts to Xbox branding as part of new mission statement  GamesIndustry.biz
2. We Are Xbox  Xbox Wire
3. Microsoft brings Xbox back, scraps Microsoft Gaming  The Verge
4. Xbox Debuts New Identity & Logo Amid Rebranding  Yahoo
5. New Xbox Mission Statement Promises Reevaluation of Exclusivity, Affordability, and More  IGN

1. Microsoft adds uninvited AI co-author to Word docs  theregister.com
2. Copilot’s agentic capabilities in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are generally available  Microsoft
3. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announces Copilot Agent Mode as default across Word, Excel and PowerPoint  Moneycontrol.com
4. Microsoft now lets AI complete tasks directly inside Office apps  NewsBytes
5. Microsoft launches “vibe working” in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint  The Verge

1. Great news, the Moto G Stylus is no longer teeming with bloatware  The Verge
2. This Moto G Stylus phone deal includes a free smartwatch and more - here's how it works  ZDNET
3. I've been using the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra's stylus daily — don't overlook it on Moto's new phone  Android Police
4. For as low as $229.99, the Moto G Stylus (2025) turns into a no-brainer purchase  PhoneArena
5. Motorola Moto G Stylus (2026) in for review - GSMArena.com news  GSMArena.com

1. YouTube TV starts rolling out Multiview upgrade that supports any channel  9to5Google
2. YouTube TV’s fully customizable multiview finally starts rolling out  Android Authority
3. YouTube TV's best feature just got a game-changing upgrade  Android Police
4. YouTube TV Officially Rolling Out ‘Game-Changer’ Feature  Men's Journal
5. Cord Cutting Today: YouTube TV Expands Multiview as Comcast Loses Subscribers and Paramount Merger Advances  | Cord Cutters News

1. AMD Gains on New Ryzen 9 Launch  Yahoo Finance
2. AMD's Ryzen 9950X3D2 Launch Impact: What's Ahead in Gaming Next?  Yahoo Finance
3. ASRock X870E Taichi OCF Achieves Multiple Overclocking Records with AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition Processor  TechPowerUp
4. Grab 32GB of Corsair DDR5 RAM for just $28 in this Newegg combo with the new 9950X3D2 that saves you a huge $441 — $1,729.99 deal with AMD's first dual-X3D CPU also ships with a 2TB WD Black SSD and an Asus TUF Gaming motherboard  Tom's Hardware
5. AMD Launches Ryzen™ 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition Processor, the First Dual Processor with AMD 3D V-Cache™ Technology for Developers, Creators and Gamers  AMD

This shimmering region of star-formation, a close-up of the Trifid Nebula about 5,000 light-years from Earth, was captured in intricate detail by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in an image released on April 20, 2026. The colors in Hubble’s visible light image, which marks the 36th anniversary of the mission’s launch on April 24, are reminiscent of an underwater scene filled with fine-grained sediments fluttering through the ocean’s depths.

Several massive stars, which are outside this field of view, have shaped this region for at least 300,000 years. Their powerful winds continue to blow an enormous bubble, a small portion of which is shown here, that pushes and compresses the cloud’s gas and dust, triggering new waves of star formation.

Learn more about the Trifid Nebula.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

Students in Missouri will hear from NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway as they answer prerecorded science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) questions while aboard the International Space Station.

The Earth-to-space call will begin at 10:50 a.m. EDT Thursday, April 30, and will stream live on the agency’s Learn With NASA YouTube channel.

This event is hosted by the University of Missouri Pre-Employment Transition Services in Columbia, Missouri, for students in grades K-12 and members of the community. This opportunity aims to deepen understanding of space exploration and inspire students to pursue a future career in STEM.

Media interested in covering the event must RSVP by 5 p.m., Wednesday, April 29, to Kimberly Pudlowski at: 636-697-5845 or kimberly.gee@missouri.edu.

For more than 25 years, astronauts have continuously lived and worked aboard the space station, testing technologies, performing science, and developing skills needed to explore farther from Earth. Astronauts communicate with NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston 24 hours a day through SCaN’s (Space Communications and Navigation) Near Space Network.

Research and technology investigations taking place aboard the space station benefit people on Earth and support other agency work, including missions at the Moon. As part of NASA’s Artemis program, the agency will send astronauts to the Moon to prepare for future human exploration of Mars, inspiring the world through discovery in a new Golden Age of innovation and exploration.

See more information on NASA in-flight education calls at:

https://www.nasa.gov/stemonstation

-end-

Gerelle Dodson
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
gerelle.q.dodson@nasa.gov

Sandra Jones
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov

For 10 years, a NASA initiative has helped the agency produce breakthrough aeronautical innovations while fostering the aviation workforce of tomorrow – and the University Leadership Initiative (ULI) is still flying high, making awards with the potential to change 21st century air travel. 

Through ULI, NASA has supported more than 1,100 students at 100 schools, allowing them to pursue advancements in top priority areas for U.S. aviation, including high-speed flight, advanced air mobility, future airspace management and safety, and electrified propulsion.  

Many of those students have used their ULI experience as a springboard to careers in aviation. And many of their ideas — such as designing more efficient wings or building supersonic aircraft that can change shape in flight — are either being investigated further by industry or the technologies adopted outright.  

As it celebrates a decade of success, NASA’s ULI team is looking forward to leveraging student innovations with new awards in 2026 and beyond. 

“Through ULI we’re building the workforce of the future and fostering the skill sets we so desperately need to compete globally,” said John Cavolowsky, director of NASA’s Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 

What makes ULI unique from other NASA research projects, and especially appealing to universities, is that it provides the opportunity for university students and faculty to propose what research to conduct.  

Usually, NASA determines the research it needs and then does the work itself or through partnerships and contracts. But with ULI, the agency shares its goals and universities consider how they can best help realize them.  

“There are no better ways in my mind to help develop that talent within the students than to engage them in identifying big problems and then give them the resources they need to use their creativity to solve them,” Cavolowsky said.  

ULI history 

NASA’s relationship with academia and reliance on its research proficiency is written into NASA’s DNA going back to the days of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, from which NASA was formed in 1958. 

“For more than a century we have leaned on the brilliance and the capabilities of universities to help us think,” Cavolowsky said. “With ULI we can ensure they continue to bring their fresh ideas and young energy to the work we do at NASA Aeronautics.”  

ULI evolved from an earlier project called Leading Edge Aeronautics Research for NASA (LEARN). NASA selected five LEARN teams in 2015 to pursue truly outside of the box ideas that showed promise but needed additional study.  

One of those teams, for example, sought to take a cue from migrating flocks of birds by asking if airliners could save fuel by cruising in a giant ‘V’ formation. The numbers were intriguing and simple flight tests proved the concept, although the idea never made it to practice. 

Slightly retooled but keeping the innovative spirit of LEARN, ULI was officially announced in 2016 and a year later NASA selected five teams of university professors and students to contribute solutions to the biggest aeronautical challenges of the 21^st century. 

A decade later, NASA has made a total of $220 million in awards to 33 teams over eight rounds of solicitations 

Smooth flying 

One of the earliest selected ULI teams was led by James Coder, who at the time was an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. His team worked on technology that would smooth the airflow around a wing to make it more efficient. 

Technically known as slotted natural laminar flow (SNLF) wings, Coder has called the idea a potential game changer for commercial airliners. The more efficient wing would mean less drag on an airplane, which in turn could help airlines save money on fuel. 

Coder credits ULI for not only helping to prove the technology’s effectiveness – with the aid of wind tunnel testing at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California – but for providing students with an experience they couldn’t get elsewhere. 

“After 10 years industry remains interested in the SNLF technology and I am optimistic for good reason about its future,” Coder said. “And project alumni have gone on to do many wonderful things and leverage what they did and learned through the ULI.” 

With ULI experience prominent on their resumes, several of the students on Coder’s team wound up with jobs in industry – such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin – and government labs. One is currently a NASA Pathways intern working on his PhD. 

Now at Pennsylvania State University, Coder remains a strong advocate for ULI. 

“It goes above and beyond simple workforce development,” he said. “We recognized early on the value-add of ULI is the students themselves. While we could have just trained students en masse, we wanted to put them in the front seat of technical leadership on the project. I think this was a very successful strategy that benefited the project and the students as they embarked on their careers.” 

Mighty morphing 

Forrest Carpenter is another example of a student whose ULI support led to work after graduation – in this case at NASA.  

“Working on the ULI project was an incredible experience, one I will always be thankful for and will remember fondly,” Carpenter said. “I think the project challenged me to be something more than ‘just an engineer;’ really helping my professional development and giving me a clearer focus on my passion.”  

As a student at Texas A&M, he was part of a team selected by NASA in 2017 to research a novel idea in which a supersonic aircraft could alter its shape to fly more efficiently based on the atmospheric conditions in real time. Dimitris Lagoudas, now the university’s interim department head for aerospace engineering, led the team.  

A laser shooting out ahead of the aircraft would take measurements of the oncoming air and then the aircraft’s computer would command patches of shape memory alloys and other mechanisms to morph the aircraft’s outer shape. 

One possible application of the technology could be in contributing to the reduction of the loudness of a sonic boom, expanding on the science behind NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic technology demonstrator that seeks to reduce the sonic boom to a sonic thump.  

“My main research role on the team was performing Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations of the various geometries we were looking at, including a pre-production version of X-59,” Carpenter said.  

His work on the idea continues. A follow-on NASA project, GoSWIFT, will flight test the core technologies Carpenter and his ULI team worked on at Texas A&M. Only this time, Carpenter is the co-lead for the tests, which are targeted to take place at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California in the near future.  

Carpenter’s enthusiasm for his work and gratitude for how ULI led to his career with NASA resonates with many other ULI alumni.  

“The number of students impacted, and how they were impacted, by a long-term project like ULI is huge,” Carpenter said. “NASA’s involvement in this kind of activity can only strengthen the research done in this country and to help inspire and develop the next generation of our workforce.”  

ULI is supported by the Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program within NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, which publishes ULI solicitations and other opportunities to collaborate with the agency’s aeronautical innovators. 

About 23 million people live in Taiwan, a Pacific island about the size of Maryland. Despite its size, the island produces a tremendous amount of agricultural goods per year—about $18 billion, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Agriculture.

The average size of a farm in Taiwan (less than 1 hectare) is much smaller than in the United Kingdom (87 hectares) or the United States (187 hectares). Since much of the island is mountainous, only about one-quarter of Taiwan’s land is arable, and it is mostly located on the southwestern side of the island in the Chianan Plain. That amounts to 0.03 hectares of farmland per Taiwanese citizen—about half as much arable farmland as there is per person in the United Kingdom and one-tenth as much as in the United States.

The small plot size is apparent in this satellite image of farmland in Yunlin County in southwestern Taiwan, one of the island’s most productive agricultural areas. The modest scale is partly a result of past policies that limited the size of farms and partly a byproduct of cultural traditions that often lead to the division of farms into smaller parcels as property is passed from one generation to the next.

Located along the floodplains of the Zhoushui and Beigang rivers, Yunlin County is mostly flat, has fertile soils, and has easy access to irrigation water. The county, one of Taiwan’s main agricultural hubs, is known for producing a wide range of crops, including rice, sweet potatoes, peanuts, corn, sugarcane, garlic, scallions, coffee, fruit, and leafy greens. Farms in the county also raise millions of pigs, the most of any county in Taiwan.

Most crops in Yunlin County are grown in small rectangular plots defined by roadways and networks of irrigation canals. The exception is sugarcane, which was grown widely in the county in the early 1900s when Japan controlled Taiwan and established an expansive network of sugarcane plantations in the southwestern part of the country. These plantations were consolidated into the Taiwan Sugar Corporation after the conclusion of World War II, and the large plot sizes in the farmland north of Baozhong in the image above persist as a legacy of this period.

While the amount of sugarcane cultivated in Taiwan has declined in recent decades and many of the fields have transitioned to other crops, Taiwan Sugar Corporation still raises sugarcane around Baozhong. The company operates a railway that transports harvested cane to nearby Huwei, site of one of just a few remaining sugar refineries on the island. Although Taiwan also once had a large network of sugar railways that serviced thousands of kilometers of track and dozens of sugar refineries, the line that serves Huwei is the only one on the island that remains active.

Another area that stands out in the mosaicked agricultural landscape of Yunlin is located around Xiluo (above). Here the fields take on an unusual greenish-blue hue, largely because of the ubiquity of shade nets. Farmers use the nets to protect crops from heat, sun, heavy rains, and pests. They are generally deployed for specialty crops such as vegetables, fruit, and flowers. This area contrasts with the darker green region in the lower right of the first image, where rice is the dominant crop.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.

References & Resources

• Britannica Yün-lin. Accessed April 23, 2026.
• Chen, Y.Y., et al. (2019) Reconstructing Taiwan’s land cover changes between 1904 and 2015 from historical maps and satellite images. Scientific Reports, 9, 3643.
• Kollar, J. (2019) Democratizing Control Over the Landscape: A Genealogy of Taiwan’s Infrastructural Bureaucracy. Accessed April 23, 2026.
• NASA Earth Observatory Food and Agriculture Collection. Accessed April 23, 2026.
• Nie, H., et al. (2025) The introduction and impact of food crops in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 9.
• Shih, C.M. & Yen, S.Y. (2009) The Transformation of the Sugar Industry and Land Use Policy in Taiwan, Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering, 8(1), 41-48.
• Statbase (2023) Arable land area – Taiwan Province of China. Accessed April 23, 2026.
• Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute (2015) Development of map data for precision agriculture. Accessed April 23, 2026.
• Taiwan Agricultural Tourism (2026, March 31) Yunlin County. Accessed April 23, 2026.
• Taiwan Panorama (2019) The Home of Vegetables. Accessed April 23, 2026.
• Taiwan Today (2010, February 1) A Sweet Journey. Accessed April 23, 2026.
• World Bank Group (2023) Arable land (hectares per person). Accessed April 23, 2026.
• Yang, J.H., et al. (2024) Mapping Paddy Rice Fields by Sentinel-1 Time Series in Yunlin, Taiwan. International Journal of Remote Sensing, 46(12), 4533–4558.

The National Space Club & Foundation announced its annual award recipients March 13, 2026, in Washington, D.C.  

Two dedicated leaders from NASA’s Johnson Space Center were recognized for their contributions to human spaceflight. 

Orion Program Manager Howard Hu received the Norman L. Baker Astronautics Engineer Award for sustained technical contributions to multiple human spaceflight efforts.  

Hu leads the design, development, production, and operations of Orion, NASA’s spacecraft for Artemis missions to the Moon. He has held several leadership roles within the Orion program, including deputy program manager, a manager of the Avionics, Power, and Software Office, and deputy manager of the Vehicle Integration Office. Hu has supported Orion since its inception, beginning as the Vehicle System Performance and Analysis lead. 

On April 1, 2026, Artemis II launched on a 10-day voyage around the Moon, marking the first crewed flight of the Orion spacecraft. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen splashed down safely inside Orion April 10 in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego. At their farthest point, the crew and spacecraft traveled 252,756 miles from Earth, setting a new record for the greatest distance traveled by humans in space. 

The mission successfully proved the capability of Orion’s critical systems such as life support with humans aboard. Data from Artemis II will help refine mission operations and further evaluate Orion’s performance in deep space, supporting future Artemis missions.  

NASA and its partners are now shifting their focus to Artemis III, which will test integrated operations between Orion and the human landing system in lunar orbit and advance plans to return astronauts to the Moon. 

Before joining Orion, Hu served in multiple technical and leadership roles at Johnson, including chief engineer for exploration in the Aeroscience and Flight Mechanics Division, project manager and co-developer of shuttle abort flight management software for the Space Shuttle Cockpit Avionics Upgrades Program, and deputy guidance, navigation, and control system manager for the International Space Station program. 

International Space Station Program Manager Dana Weigel received the Eagle Manned Mission Award. She leads development, integration, and operations for the International Space Station. The space station celebrated a historic milestone on Nov. 2, 2025, marking 25 years of continuous human habitation. The orbiting laboratory remains a critical testbed for future commercial destinations in low Earth orbit and for deep space exploration, supporting Artemis missions and future human missions to Mars. 

Weigel has held several leadership roles within the program, including deputy chief of the Flight Director Office, where she led the Extravehicular Activity Recovery Team following a major in-flight spacewalk anomaly. She also served as a NASA flight director for STS-123 and led the agency’s geosynchronous Earth orbit satellite servicing habitat study. 

Selected by panels of experts across industry, government, and academia, the awards reflect achievements that advance aerospace and national interests. Honorees were recognized at the 69th Annual Robert H. Goddard Memorial Dinner at the Washington Hilton.  

“Dana Weigel and Howard Hu’s contributions to human space exploration, through their leadership and roles within the agency, are paramount,” said Johnson Director Vanessa Wyche. “It was a privilege to be there in person to celebrate and champion them as they were recognized for the lasting impact of their work. Congratulations to Dana, Howard, and all the award recipients on this well-deserved recognition.” 

Hu and Weigel’s service exemplifies the leadership and technical excellence that continue to advance U.S. human space exploration. 

Amazon-backed X-energy was able to raise around 20% more money in its IPO as demand for nuclear power surges.

Researchers have found a new case where government authorities used a fake Android app to plant spyware on a target’s phone. The company that allegedly developed the spyware was not previously known to sell this type of software.

Surprise! StrictlyVC San Francisco, which will kick off this year’s events lineup for TechCrunch on April 30 at the Sentro Filipino Cultural Center, is getting a new addition to its increasingly stacked lineup of speakers. Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga will join the rest of the lineup to discuss operating at scale in the age of AI.

Nothing's new on-device dictation tool supports over 100 languages.

DeepSeek says both models are more efficient and performant than DeepSeek V3.2 due to architectural improvements, and have almost "closed the gap" with current leading models, both open and closed, on reasoning benchmarks.