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1. Apple Unveils Touch-Screen MacBook Pro, Reversing Longheld Jobs Stance  Bloomberg.com
2. Apple Unveils Its First Touch-Screen MacBook Pro  The New York Times
3. Apple charges $14,549 for a fully specced touchscreen MacBook Pro  The Verge
4. Apple brings touch to the Mac, reversing years-old stance on touchscreen laptop  CNBC
5. Apple introduces the new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6  Apple

1. Samsung Galaxy Buds On Are the Premium Clip-On Earbuds You Didn’t Know You Were Waiting For  CNET
2. Samsung Joins Cuff-Shaped Earbuds Trend With $229 Galaxy Buds On  Bloomberg.com
3. Samsung Brings Galaxy Buds On to the US for Comfortable, Open-Ear Listening  samsung.com
4. Samsung's Galaxy Buds On Are Its First Clip-On, Open-Ear Wireless Earbuds  Engadget
5. Samsung's first open-ear earbuds, Galaxy Buds On, arrive with Gemini Live  Neowin

1. Sony has new transparent PS5 controllers launching next year  The Verge
2. First look inside the Prism Collection, with three new transparent designs for PS5 accessories  PlayStation.Blog
3. Sony's New See-Through DualSense Controllers Let You Game Like Its 1999  Engadget
4. Sony Wants You to Forget About Discs With Its Gorgeous Transparent Controllers  WIRED
5. These Transparent PS5 Controllers Might Just Distract You From the Death of Discs  Gizmodo

1. Amazon debuts the Alexa Photo Frame and Echo Time smart clock, plus other upgraded devices  TechCrunch
2. Amazon Debuts 16-Inch Echo Smart Display and Alexa Photo Frame  Bloomberg.com
3. Amazon’s 5 New Smart Home Devices: Everything You Need to Know  CNET
4. Amazon adds a camera to its best-sounding smart speaker for $30 extra  Ars Technica
5. Amazon introduces Echo Time, a smarter way to start and end your day  About Amazon

1. Google adding more Connected Apps to Gemini & Search with new dev platform  9to5Google
2. As AI agents reshape the web, Google opens Gemini and Search to more apps  TechCrunch
3. You Can Now Build Apps For Google Search: Connected Apps Platform  Search Engine Roundtable
4. Google will let more developers make apps that plug into Search and Gemini.  The Verge
5. Google Launches Connected Apps Platform For Developers  TradingView

NASA’s Artemis III SLS (Space Launch System) core stage is integrated alongside the twin solid rocket boosters on Oct. 28 inside the Vehicle Assembly Building’s High Bay 3 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.  

Technicians lifted the 212-foot rocket stage from the facility’s High Bay 2 using a one-of-a kind lifting beam designed to place the stage onto the mobile launcher. Once testing and checkouts are complete, teams will roll the core stage and booster stack out to Launch Pad 39B to conduct a tanking test where liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel will be loaded only into the core stage and launch teams will practice countdown procedures and timelines.  

The Artemis III mission will launch NASA astronauts Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio, Andre Douglas, and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Luca Parmitano in the Orion spacecraft on top of the SLS rocket to test rendezvous and docking capabilities between Orion and commercial spacecraft from Blue Origin and SpaceX ahead of future mission to land astronauts on the Moon.  

Photo credit: NASA/Sean Cannon, Cory S Huston, and Frank Michaux

Five years ago, Gavin Gardner was a Michigan State University engineering student researching next-generation drone technology as part of a NASA grant. Garder expected the research to be demanding – but he was surprised that navigating the financial side of the work presented an even greater challenge.

Although Gardner was used to leading fellow students in a lab setting, he and his team were completely new to things like creating budgets, handling large sums of money, and promoting their work for crowdfunding.

That’s why demonstrating both engineering and entrepreneurship skills are major tentpoles of NASA’s University Student Research Challenge (USRC), an initiative that provides grants to teams of college students interested in helping the agency realize its aeronautical research goals.

“Half the battle is building your product,” Gardner said recently. “The other half is selling the product in a way that everyone else can understand what you’re doing and not talking in nerdy, engineering ways.”

Gardner and his Michigan State USRC alumni teammates are still using those lessons today, as aerospace developers. In 2024, they founded their own company, AG3 Labs, which specializes in drones for military training exercises.

“I don’t think I would discredit our technical expertise in getting us to where we are today, but I know that USRC was a booster that really amplified our trajectory at such a young age,” Gardner said.

NASA USRC manager Steven Holz said Gardner’s experience shows what students can accomplish when they receive both a grant and guidance – enabling a future workforce and contributing to the aviation industry.

“We are proud to see the success of USRC alumni,” Holz said. “We hope that every team that participates in the program sees, like Gavin, how they can grow technically, entrepreneurially, and use the opportunity as a launchpad for their own innovative careers.” 

Research path

Gardner’s path to running his own company began with a middle school age trip to Space Camp, where he began realizing that he wanted to be an engineer.

The engineering bug also bit his brother, Gryson Gardner, and the two of them would often be found in their Michigan garage tinkering with various machinery, including drones and electronic kits.

When Gardner arrived at Michigan State, he looked for extracurricular groups and found one dedicated to the increasingly popular hobby of drones. He gained hands-on, practical experience in how drones are made and operated.

In 2021, Gardner received an email from a friend who told him they had just won a USRC grant from NASA for an activity called Aerial Intra-city Delivery Electric Drones (AIDED), and they needed help building a new drone.

“We had this idea that instead of flying through the whole city, why can’t a drone just hitchhike a ride on a city bus like everyone else does?” Gardner said.

The concept was for a cargo-carrying drone to take off, dock on top of public transportation such as a bus, charge its batteries while riding along, and then take off for its final leg of the delivery. The team built and flew a full-scale drone to prove the concept but decided against pursuing a commercial venture.

“The commercial drone market kind of scared us a little bit with the large number of regulations that go into operating such a novel idea like this with flying over people in a dense city,” Gardner said.

But the team’s demonstration of technical prowess and confidence led to a second USRC award from NASA in 2023 – the Laser Energized Aerial Drone System (LEADS), which focused on using a laser to transfer power directly to a drone in flight.

While working on LEADS, which led to flying a prototype, Gardner’s network of contacts within the drone community expanded to include NASA personnel at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, who made him aware of internship opportunities, which he applied for and was accepted while in graduate school.

Student challenge paves way for opportunity 

As his graduation in the spring of 2025 with a master’s degree approached, Gardner took the initial steps in late 2024 to co-found with his brother and other USRC alumni AG3 Labs after a friend suggested the military could use low-cost drones to test effective counter drone systems.

An initial award from the U.S. Army led to more contracts, allowing the company to expand and ramp up its operations, where today their production capability enables thousands of drones to be built each month.

Gardner credits his experience with USRC, especially when it came to learning more about the business side of running a technical operation, with helping create the opportunities for success he and his team are experiencing today.

So far, 2026 has seen a flood of successes for volunteers who do NASA science, exemplifying NASA’s commitment to gold-standard science—transparent, reproducible and intrinsically collaborative. The Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project announced that their project volunteers have now discovered most of the known brown dwarfs, celestial objects that are similar to planets. The Zooniverse platform, with grant from NASA, reached a milestone of 1 billion classifications. Several projects have come online that leverage new super intelligence (SI) techniques to amplify or extend the work of volunteers. More NASA volunteers are using SI to build their own data tools and help write scientific papers than ever before.

Even with all of those achievements, our science community is already working on the next round of new volunteer projects and innovations. NASA’s Science Mission Directorate has selected nineteen proposals from research teams in 2026 that will result in new opportunities for you to do NASA science.

The Citizen Science Seed Funding Program

The Citizen Science Seed Funding Program (CSSFP-25) of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate aims to support scientists and other experts to develop citizen science projects and expand the pool of professional scientists who use citizen science techniques in their science investigations. Twelve new proposals to this program were selected.

Astrophysics

“The Rogue Worlds Project: Activating volunteers to uncover the hidden population of super Jupiters with SPHEREx” led by Principal Investigator Jacqueline Faherty from the American Museum of Natural History. This project will invite you to search data from NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) mission to find free-floating planets and brown dwarfs in clusters of young stars. The SPHEREx space observatory mapping the entire sky in near-infrared wavelengths.

“Quantifying the calibrations between intrinsic galaxy merger timescales with visual pair/tidal-feature classifications” led by Principal Investigator Kameswara Bharadwaj Mantha of the University of Missouri. This project will investigate galaxy mergers, helping astronomers understand how galaxies evolve through time. You will be invited to classify realistic mock images of galaxies to help probe the statistics and dynamical evolution of galaxy mergers.

“Overlap Zoo; cosmic light tables for galaxy transparency” led by Principal Investigator Benne Holwerda of the University of Louisville. Galaxies, which glow with the light of the billions of stars they contain, also contain dust. This dust is easiest to see and quantify when it overlaps, or is backlit by, another galaxy. Help spot and characterize these rare overlapping galaxy pairs to help reveal how much dust they contain. Overlap Zoo is live! Follow this link to learn more and join the project.

“Planet Hunters Roman: Extending Citizen Science to Planetary Microlensing” led by Principal Investigator Bernard Gaudi of the Ohio State University. Exoplanets are planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. Their gravity can bend the light that travels around them. This project will invite you to spot exoplanets in data from NASA’s new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope data by the way they bend starlight.

Heliophysics

“Space Weather UnderGround: Deploying a low-cost Magnetometer Array with Citizens for Heliophysics Research” led by Principal Investigator Hyunju Connor at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Along with sunshine, our Sun produces the solar wind, an unrelenting flow of charged particles. Earth’s protective magnetic field shield deflects most of these particles, but not all, and not during extreme events. Help scientists monitor the subtle disturbances of Earth’s magnetosphere by the solar wind by setting up and monitoring your own magnetometer in Alaska.

“A Citizen Science Initiative for Sonified Plasma Wave Characterization” led by Principal Investigator Lauren Blum of the University Of Colorado, Boulder. “Plasma” is the name given to the ionized gases at the edge of Earth’s magnetosphere. Solar wind, the rain of charged particles that flows out from the Sun, can interact with and generate waves in the plasma. This project will turn data from this dynamic zone into sound signals. You will be invited to listen in to identify waves in the Earth’s magnetosphere.

“Revealing the Consequences of Foreshock Transients for Earth’s Magnetospheric System Through Participatory Science” led by Principal Investigator Wenli Mo at the Johns Hopkins University. This project will invite you to examine data from NASA’s MMS (Magnetospheric Multiscale) mission to identify “foreshock transients,”  phenomena that have a critical but poorly understood role in space weather. The resulting dataset will help reveal how foreshock transients form, their properties, and their impacts.  

“IMPACT: Interactive Magnetospheric Particle Analysis and Citizen Technology” led by Principal Investigator Muhammad Fraz Bashir at the University of California, Los Angeles. Energetic particles rain down from the magnetosphere into the upper ionosphere, heating and perturbing the ionosphere, disrupting the scatter of radio waves and GPS operations. This project will invite you to help match patterns between two types of data: measurements from satellites flying overhead that detect energetic particles raining down from space and measurements from ground-based instruments that detect electromagnetic waves. By comparing these patterns, volunteers will help scientists figure out which types of space waves are causing different kinds of particle precipitation, and in turn, help scientists better understand and predict disruptions to GPS and increased radiation risks during space weather events.

“Unlocking Clues About Particle Acceleration and Transport Using Particle Distributions” led by Principal Investigator Gang Kai Poh at the Catholic University Of America. NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer, Parker Solar Probe, and Solar Orbiter are complementary missions gathering data to help scientists improve understanding of the Sun, solar wind, and space weather. Examine data from these missions to contribute to the study of the complicated flow of energetic particles from the Sun.

“Data Fusion in Space: Combining Citizen Observations to Classify Solar Wind Tracers” led by Principal Investigator Cynthia Lopez-Portela of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This project will invite you to use their pattern-recognition skills to spot features in images of the Sun’s corona, where the solar wind begins. These features can be used as tracers to help scientists track the movement of the solar wind and build better models of how it behaves.

Planetary Sciences 

“Mapping Lunar Iron Abundance Hotspots to Enable In-Situ Resource Utilization of Regolith Consolidation Technologies” led by Principal Investigator Karen Martirosyan at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley. Building a base on the Moon will require creative use of Moon materials. So what materials will future teams of astronaut base-builders have to work with? This project will invite you to help locate iron deposits in data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper mission to help understand how the Moon formed and to aid future exploration.

“Small Body Discovery and Outburst Monitoring with a Worldwide Citizen Science Telescope Network” led by Principal Investigator Ariel Graykowski at the SETI Institute. This project proposes to activate a global network of citizen scientists, each equipped with a standardized small-aperture telescope, to conduct follow-up observation of cometary outbursts and small moving bodies (comets, near-Earth asteroids, and main-belt asteroids). With their global distribution and a program of twilight observations, amateurs will complement professional surveys. The project will develop systems to automate processing of contributed images and to distribute alerts for objects of interest to the network.

The Science Activation Program

The Science Activation Program (SciAct) from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate supports a portfolio of competitively selected, collaborative project teams that extend the impact of NASA science. These “SciAct Teams” accomplish this by connecting people and communities – many of whom would not otherwise meaningfully engage – with NASA science data and experts, local partnerships, and authentic science experiences. Seven teams selected in the latest round of competition will engage learners with citizen science efforts directly related to NASA research priorities. Several other selected teams plan to incorporate citizen science projects or community science projects (research efforts led by and focused on specific communities) into their work. 

The selected proposals include: 

“Growing Beyond Earth: Science Activation Through Distributed Space Crop Research” led by Principal Investigator Carl Lewis at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Inc. To travel or live in space, humans will need to eat. Growing Beyond Earth trains and equips middle- and high-school classrooms to conduct growth experiments with seeds and crops being evaluated for use as space food.

“Sungrazer 2.0: From Armchair Discovery to Data-Driven Comet Science” led by Principal Investigator MaryKay Severino of the ARISA Lab and science lead Karl Battams of the Naval Research Laboratory. The original Sungrazer Project launched in 2006 in response to requests from citizen scientists for verification of comet discoveries. Since then, project volunteers have identified 5,204 comets and counting – the majority of known comets. Sungrazer 2.0 will bring the thrill of comet discovery to new audiences who will join the hunt for comets in images from NASA’s SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) and STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) missions.

“Discovering the SPARC: Space Physics through Amateur Radio Communications” led by Principal Investigator Nathaniel Frissell of the University of Scranton. Since 2017 amateur radio operators have worked together in the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) community to study Earth’s ionosphere through carefully designed and conducted investigations of how their signals bounce off this high, ionized layer of Earth’s atmosphere. This project will bring hands-on space weather science to communities nationwide through amateur radio equipment and enroll high schools in a national research network.  

“Telescopes for All: Promoting audience engagement with NASA science via participatory data experiences using robotic telescopes” led by Principal Investigator Mary Dussault of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. This project will expand public access to a suite of 22 user-friendly, professional robotic telescopes. This access will allow people to observe, analyze, and contribute to NASA-aligned research, including the search and study of exoplanets and other citizen science projects. 

“Researchers Inspiring Public Participation in Lake Education and Science (RIPPLES)” led by Principal Investigator Sarah Yelton and science lead Tamlin Pavelsky, both at the University Of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. This project will collaborate with the Lake Observations by Citizen Scientists and Satellites (LOCSS) project to expand participation in lake and reservoir level monitoring. Submitted data will be used to validate observations such as those made by NASA’s SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) mission. 

“ARK (Antarctic Resilience and Knowledge): A Collaborative Network for Discovery and Education of Antarctica’s Iconic Species and their Changing Habitats” led by Principal Investigator Sharon Stammerjohn at the University of Colorado, Boulder. This project will invite you to examine NASA’s very high-resolution satellite images of Antarctica to study and monitor habitat changes affecting penguin, seal, and whale populations. With validation by scientists and integration of machine-assisted detection tools, this project will expand the analytical capacity of Antarctic researchers and build public literacy in polar ecosystem science. 

“Arctic Learning and Engagement with NASA Data for Community Solutions (Arctic LENS)” led by Principal Investigator Katie Spellman of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. This project will invite Alaskans to contribute seasonal environmental monitoring (snow, ice, aurora, spring ice-out, and green-up) in support of NASA missions including FORTE (Arctic Coastlines: Frontlines of Rapidly Transforming Ecosystems), SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography), PACE (Phytoplankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem), and Landsat. 

Explore citizen science awards from previous years: 

• November 2025
• January 2024
• September 2023 
• August 2022
• July 2021

For more information on NASA’s citizen science programs, visit https://science.nasa.gov/citizen-science.

^{New NASA citizen science projects launched in 2026. Top row, l-r. Galaxy Zoo: Tidal Tails, Artifact Inspector, CoCoRaHS. Middle row. Spiral Graph: Cluster Buster, Backyard Worlds: Binaries, Galaxy Zoo: Clump Scout Two. Bottom row. Overlap Zoo, Impact Flash! and Shock Detectives.}

In this Webb image released on Oct. 22, 2026, we see a turbulent cauldron of star formation filled with dense clumps of gas. This region is named N159 and is located 161,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way galaxy.

This region has a lower metallicity (proportion of elements that are heavier than helium and hydrogen) than the Milky Way, giving astronomers an opportunity to learn more about conditions found in the early universe and how stars formed under those conditions.

Read more about N159.

Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, E. Sabbi, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb); Acknowledgement: M. H. Özsaraç

Written by Lucy Lim, Planetary Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Earth planning date: Friday, Oct. 16, 2026

Following the Basque Lakes drill campaign, Curiosity has returned to a spot just a few meters away from the “Chiu Chiu” block to conduct our next drill campaign. “Chiu Chiu” itself wasn’t a good candidate for drilling but the block just beyond it was much more promising, so it became our drive target during Monday’s planning. I was on planning Friday as Geology and Mineralogy Science Theme Lead when we received our close-up views of the neighbor block from the post-drive imaging and our team was happy to see that it was jam-packed with the “disc- and needle-” shaped lumps, just like “Chiu Chiu.” We quickly gave the science go-ahead to proceed with preparations for drilling at the newly named “Nazca” site.

One major hypothesis about how the “discs and needles” texture formed is that the characteristic shapes were originally created during the growth of crystals, or “crystal forms.” Minerals will tend to grow into specific shapes depending on their microscopic crystal structure, similar to the salt crystals that you can grow in your kitchen as a home science project. (Maybe you have grown one of those for a science class in school!) The relatively large sizes of the crystal forms at “Nazca” and “Chiu Chiu” are providing clues about the temperature at the time when they grew and the availability of salts and fluids. However, we can’t necessarily assume that the modern-day composition represents the original mineral because sometimes mineral crystals are replaced by other minerals some time after original crystallization. The new minerals are then known as “pseudomorphs” because they have the same shape as the first minerals but not the same composition or molecular structure. 

As we prepared for the drill preload test, we also planned several special observations aimed at highly detailed characterization of the crystal forms. MAHLI will execute a Quantitative Relief Model (“QRM”) observation consisting of five overlapping images at slightly different geometries. The combination of these will enable a detailed three-dimensional relief model to be constructed. In addition, MAHLI will also add extra frames to its highest-resolution imaging by doubling the number of focus mechanism steps. Together, these observations will increase the resolution of the 3D models we will have of the crystal forms.

Meanwhile, the ChemCam LIBS will conduct a “depth profile” experiment to obtain compositional information from slightly deeper layers within a nearby crystal-form-rich target, “Toucan”. Normally the 150 LIBS laser shots from each sol’s observation are spaced out over a five-point raster at 30 shots per point, but this time we are concentrating all 150 laser shots on the same spot on the rock. Since each laser shot vaporizes a very small amount of the rock to form a plasma, the 150-shot profile should penetrate approximately five times deeper than a normal 30-shot point observation. We will thus be able to observe the composition deeper inside the exposed crystal form and see whether it’s different from the surface-level composition. There are several reasons this could be the case including exposure of the surface to the modern Martian environment and also the circumstances in which the crystal form developed originally, so it’s an experiment worth pursuing.

The LIBS, DRT and APXS will also be applied to the “Nazca” spot before the preload test to characterize its surface composition as thoroughly as possible before drilling. The third LIBS of the plan will go to “Condor,” a nearby block in which a finely layered texture is exposed.

We also continued to observe the modern Martian environment as twilight cloud season begins. In this plan we included some nighttime imaging of the larger and brighter of Mars’ two satellites, Phobos. Capturing images of Phobos and the nearby sky when Phobos is full can show sunlight reflecting off the moon and scattering in the Martian atmosphere, providing a good way to estimate the particle sizes in the Martian clouds. We can do similar measurements sometimes with solar observations, but the Phobos data allow us to measure cloud particle sizes later in the night. We expect to be measuring high-altitude carbon dioxide (CO₂) clouds in this observation.

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