Belgian physicist wins Nobel for turning Antarctic ice into a telescope

Copyright AP Photo

By Una Hajdari & Jonathan Benton with AFP

Published on 06/10/2026 - EURONEWS

Belgian Francis Halzen, 82, turned a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice into the world's largest neutrino detector. On Tuesday, his hunt for "ghostly messengers" from the distant universe won him the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Buried deep in the ice at the South Pole sits a detector the size of a cubic kilometre, built to catch some of the most elusive particles in the universe. On Tuesday, the man who dreamt it up won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Belgian physicist Francis Halzen won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for pioneering work that uses Antarctic ice to capture neutrinos from the far reaches of the cosmos.

"This year's prize is about ghostly messengers from space," Ellen Moons, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, told a news conference in Stockholm.

The jury honoured Halzen "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin".

The academy said his work had been fundamental to the observatory, which it described as "a cubic kilometre of ice that is equipped with light sensors," and that it had "paved the way for a new kind of astronomy".

The detector lets researchers capture neutrinos, rare subatomic particles, "from extremely energy-rich processes in the distant universe".

Halzen, 82, was born in Tienen, Belgium, and is a US citizen. He is a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he directs the Institute for Elementary Particle Physics.

Speaking to the news conference by phone from Italy shortly after the announcement, he said, "it was a great surprise, and I obviously didn't expect it."

"But it's a great pleasure to hear about this prize," he added.

Relat

A giant eye in the ice

High-energy neutrinos form in the same violent cosmic environments as other particles. Unlike the others, though, they travel through space in a straight line and arrive intact.

"Neutrinos reach us without changing direction or losing energy. This means they can provide information that is not available in any other way," the academy said in a statement.

The catch is that they are fiendishly hard to spot. "Cosmic neutrinos with extremely high energies are very rare, so an enormous volume of ice is needed to observe an adequate number of collisions," the jury said.

Halzen first floated the idea of the observatory in 1988, and it quickly won over other researchers. Preliminary tests followed a few years later, but the detector was not completed until 2011.

He has served as principal investigator of IceCube, located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica and the world's largest neutrino detector.

"For me, the main pleasure of it, besides winning the Nobel Prize, is that I hope this reflects on the really courageous people who joined me in the beginning of this project," Halzen said.

From Leuven to Antarctica

Halzen earned a master's degree in physics from KU Leuven in 1966 and a doctorate in 1969.

Since the 1970s, he has been a leading figure in cosmic ray and astroparticle physics, publishing research on cosmic ray anomalies and quark matter.

He has also sat on advisory committees including those of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada and Germany's Max Planck Institutes.

Halzen's award is the second Nobel of the season. On Monday, the medicine prize went to US psychiatrist and neurologist Karl Deisseroth and German scientists Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for their pioneering work in optogenetics, which uses light to control nerve signals.

The chemistry prize follows on Wednesday, with the literature laureate due on Thursday. The most closely watched award, the peace prize, will be announced on Friday.

US President Donald Trump lobbied hard for it last year, and Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who won it, later gave him her Nobel medal. The committee is aware he will be watching closely again.

The economics prize closes the Nobel season on Monday 12 October.

Each Nobel comes with a diploma, a gold medal and 12 million Swedish kronor (€1.1mn), shared if a prize has more than one winner.

The laureates will receive their awards at a formal ceremony on 10 December, the anniversary of the death in 1896 of Alfred Nobel, who created the prizes in his will.

 Franco-Japanese duo Kagan and Soai win 2026 Nobel Prize in chemistry

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to French scientist Henri B. Kagan and Japan’s Kenso Soai for unravelling the mystery of why only one of two forms of certain molecules occurs in nature.

Issued on: 07/10/2026 - RFI

Portraits of the Frenchman Henri Kagan (left) and Kenso Soai (right) from Japan were shown on a screen at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm as they were awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Fredrik Sandberg/TT News Agency - Fredrik Sandberg

By:  Paul Myers

Many molecules can exist in two mirror-image forms, but in nature only one form often predominates – a phenomenon known as homochirality. Chemists have long struggled to explain how this happens.

Kagan and Soai's discoveries helped show how chemical reactions can be steered towards one molecular form rather than the other, work that has proved important in fields including pharmaceutical manufacturing, the Nobel committee said.

"They have enabled chemists to drive chemical reactions that lead to homochirality," the jury added.

One area of this field, asymmetric catalysis, had already been recognised with a Nobel Prize in 2001.

Kagan, professor emeritus at Paris-Saclay University, was not among the recipients then despite being widely regarded as one of the fathers of the technique. The omission prompted protests at the time from France’s Research Ministry.

Soai, 76, was out shopping near his home when he was informed of his award.

Nobel Prize announcements begin, with hopes of a 'less controversial year'
'Most incredible day of my life'

“This is the most incredible day of my life,” the laureate said in a telephone interview with the Nobel Foundation.

The professor at the Tokyo University of Science added: "I think our prize should lead people to recognise the importance of molecular chirality. I am therefore particularly happy about that."

Like hands, some molecules, known as chiral molecules, can exist in “right-handed” or “left-handed” forms.

They have identical physical properties but can have very different biological properties.

"Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old: how homochirality can emerge spontaneously. The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular," said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for chemistry.

"Their discoveries have been decisive for chemists who design reactions for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals."

French economist shares Nobel for 'creative destruction' theory of innovation
Literature prize on Thursday

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was first awarded in 1901. Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff from the Netherlands was honoured for discovering the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions.

In 1911, the Frenchwoman Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, eight years after sharing the physics prize – becoming the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two scientific fields.

The accolade in chemistry is the third of the 2026 Nobel science prizes to be awarded.

On Monday, the American psychiatrist and neurologist Karl Deisseroth and his German colleagues Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel were given the honour in medicine for their work in the field of optogenetics.

Francis Halzen from Belgium won the 2026 Nobel physics prize on Tuesday for groundbreaking work using Antarctic ice to capture particles originating in the cosmos.

In addition to being one of the world’s most prestigious awards, the Nobel winner receives a diploma, a gold medal and a cheque for 12 million kronor – €1 million.

After chemistry, it will be the turn of literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics prize will bring the Nobel award season to a close on 12 October.

How light became a remote control for the brain, and won a Nobel Prize

Copyright Pontus Lundahl/TT News Agency via AP

By Marta Iraola Iribarren

Published on 05/10/2026 - EURONEWS

Optogenetics, the technique that lets scientists control brain cells with light, has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work in light-gated ion channels and optogenetics, a method that lays the foundation "of a new era in neuroscience", the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced on Monday.

But what exactly is optogenetics, and how did the laureates develop the technique?

Optogenetics is a method for controlling selected cells using light as a remote control. It allows scientists to switch cells on or off in a living brain and investigate how particular cells and neural circuits influence behaviour.

This new method was given the name optogenetics in 2006, but the story behind the technique began more than a decade earlier, when Peter Hegemann was studying the unicellular alga Chlamydomonas, an organism famous for swimming towards light.

Hegemann wanted to understand what makes algae move towards light. He studied its eyespot, a tiny orange dot on the cell’s surface that detects light. Through a series of experiments, Hegemann and his colleagues identified light-sensitive proteins called channelrhodopsins, which allow algae to detect light and respond to it.

Together with Georg Nagel at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt, he inserted the algal genes into frog egg cells and human kidney cells and proved that channelrhodopsin was indeed a light-controlled ion channel.

When exposed to blue light, the channel opened in just 0.2 milliseconds, allowing positively charged ions to flood into the cell and generate a tiny electrical impulse.

Years later, Karl Deisseroth, the third laureate, introduced the channelrhodopsin gene into rat nerve cells. By shining blue light on the cells, they could trigger nerve signals, showing that the protein could act as a light-controlled switch. He then used the technique to control nerve cells in the brains of living mice.

For example, scientists could trigger movements in a mouse's whiskers or wake sleeping mice simply by switching on a light.

Related

• Scientists produce complex map of mouse's brain that could unravel mystery of how ours work

A portrait of Karl Deisseroth is shown on the screen as he, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel are awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Pontus Lundahl/TT News Agency via AP

What does the future hold?

The discovery “provides opportunities for mapping the brain in a way that we could once only dream of,” said Per Svenningsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, in a press release.

Optogenetics is currently used primarily as a research tool. By allowing researchers to turn targeted cell types on or off using pulses of light, it enables scientists to establish direct cause-and-effect relationships between neural activity, brain function, and behaviour.

It allows researchers to map the neurons involved in emotional states such as fear, anxiety or reward. They can also map specific neural circuits governing pain, thirst, attention or aggression.

Optogenetics is also widely used in research into neurological or psychiatric conditions such as depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.

The science has also entered clinical trials to treat retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that causes blindness due to the loss of light-detecting cells in the retina.

By delivering light-sensitive opsin genes into surviving retinal cells, researchers have enabled a blind patient wearing light-emitting goggles to regain partial vision and perceive high-contrast objects.

 SPACE/COSMOS

The Algorithm Is Part Of The Telescope: Publish Its Blind Spots – Analysis

October 5, 2026

By Burak Oktenli

Key Takeaways:

The essay says automated filters are now part of the instrument: Rubin may issue about seven million alerts a night, and brokers using machine learning decide which events astronomers see.

CHIME/FRB’s injection of 587,367 synthetic bursts into the live pipeline is cited as the right way to map what is missed; a SETI lunar-soil search is praised for reporting no technosignature while stating what the method could have found.

The ask is a published selection record—software version, recovery rates, weak coverage, rejected samples, and a trail from raw data to claim—so a null result is a coverage map, not proof of absence.

Astronomy is entering an era in which software decides which signals become candidates, which become noise, and which receive scarce follow-up time. The selection function of that software should be treated as part of the measurement.

September offered a useful glimpse of where astronomy is heading. A Nature Astronomy study used fast radio bursts to probe how matter clusters across the universe. Caltech described future arrays that could detect tens of thousands of FRBs, turning brief radio flashes into precision tools for cosmology. The same week, the SETI Institute highlighted a proposal to search lunar soil for microscopic technosignatures with modern materials analysis and AI-assisted imaging.

These projects ask very different scientific questions. They share a methodological problem. The more discovery depends on automated filtering, classification, reconstruction, and prioritization, the more the software becomes part of the measuring instrument.


At modern data volumes, an algorithm increasingly does more than accelerate what a scientist would otherwise inspect by hand. It determines which observations reach human attention at all.

The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory makes the scale visible. Rubin expects to generate about seven million alerts per night. Those alerts flow to community brokers that filter, cross-match, classify, and prioritize events, often using machine learning. No research team can inspect the entire stream manually. The broker is therefore more than a convenience layer. For many scientific programs, it is part of the route by which the observable sky becomes the studied sky.

Astronomy should respond by treating an algorithmic selection function as a scientific result in its own right.
What the pipeline misses can change the science

Fast radio bursts show why. A catalog records the events an instrument and its software detected under particular observing conditions, rather than a neutral inventory of everything that occurred in the sky. If broad, faint, scattered, or otherwise unusual bursts are less likely to survive the pipeline, conclusions about the underlying FRB population can inherit that bias.


The CHIME/FRB collaboration has moved in the right direction. Work using its second catalog has employed 587,367 synthetic bursts injected into the live search pipeline to estimate how detection probability changes across observable properties. The resulting selection function is part of the evidence needed to move from “these are the bursts we detected” to “this is what the burst population may actually look like.”

The importance grows as FRBs become tools for questions far beyond their own origin. If researchers use them to infer the distribution of matter, constrain astrophysical feedback, or eventually sharpen cosmological parameters, the pipeline’s blind spots can propagate into claims about the universe itself.

A major pipeline revision should therefore publish more than an accuracy score. It should state which signal families were used in testing, where recovery is weak, how candidate acceptance changed from the previous version, and which observations were removed before a scientist ever saw them.

Synthetic injections are especially useful because they test the complete path from input to detection. Their limits matter as well: every simulation contains assumptions chosen by its designers, and an unfamiliar physical event may violate them. Surveys should also preserve a strategically sampled set of low-scoring or rejected observations for independent inspection. Otherwise, the mechanism built to find the unexpected can be calibrated mainly on examples of what researchers already know how to imagine.
A null result also needs a coverage map

Technosignature research makes the same issue visible from the opposite direction. A search can find nothing convincing and still produce valuable science. The value depends on being able to say what the search was capable of finding.


The new lunar proposal is careful on this point: the researchers report no evidence of extraterrestrial technology and present the work as a framework for making a new class of search testable. That discipline should become standard across AI-assisted searches for unusual signals.

A classifier that assigns low probability to every candidate does not establish that the searched phenomenon is absent. A null result becomes informative when it is paired with a coverage statement: what target population was examined, what sizes or signal strengths were detectable, what backgrounds can mimic the signature, which assumptions control sensitivity, and where the analysis loses discrimination.

This is particularly important in technosignature science because the hypothesis space is unusually broad. Radio emission, infrared waste heat, artifacts, atmospheric chemistry, and microscopic engineered materials test different possibilities. Failure to find one selected signature should narrow that hypothesis, not silently become a statement about the absence of technology in general.
Preserve the measurement trail

Selection is only one part of the problem. Scientific AI can also correct detector response, remove noise, reconstruct missing values, reject observations, and transform raw measurements into cleaner products. Those operations can be useful while making the route from measurement to conclusion harder to inspect.

Every consequential AI-assisted result should therefore retain a recoverable measurement trail: the relevant original observations, calibration state, software and model versions, processing steps, thresholds, exclusions, and places where information was reconstructed rather than directly measured.

The principle is consistent with the FAIR data stewardship framework, which extends reproducibility concerns beyond a final dataset to the tools and workflows needed to understand and reuse it. The practical goal is simple. Another qualified researcher should be able to identify which parts of a result came from the instrument, which came from the transformation, and which assumptions materially affect the conclusion.

Independent reviewers also need intermediate products. A final image can look persuasive even when a threshold, calibration revision, or exclusion rule changes the interpretation. If access to the essential evidence is limited by data volume, proprietary constraints, or security, the answer should be proportionate preservation and controlled review. The strength of the public claim should follow the evidence that can actually be inspected.
Publish the algorithmic selection record

A workable reform can avoid archiving every rejected byte forever while still creating a standard scientific record for the parts of the pipeline that can change what researchers are allowed to see.


For major AI-assisted surveys, that record should include the software and model version, the tested operating domain, recovery rates from synthetic injections or other challenge tests, known regions of weak coverage, representative rejected cases, changes in selection behavior after updates, and the uncertainty or assumptions that most strongly affect the final inference.

For high-profile null results, add a compact coverage map describing what the experiment could and could not have detected. For discovery claims, preserve enough intermediate evidence for an independent team to test whether the feature survives reasonable changes in calibration and processing.

These requirements make the algorithm’s scientific influence visible without pretending to make it infallible.

Astronomy has always calibrated its instruments. A detector’s sensitivity, noise, field of view, and response curve belong in the interpretation because they determine what can be measured. As machine learning becomes part of detection and triage, its selection behavior deserves the same status.

The next major discovery may come from an event that an algorithm ranks highly. It may also come from a class of events the algorithm has been quietly pushing aside. Science should be prepared for both possibilities.

The algorithm is now part of the telescope. Its blind spots belong in the published evidence.


About Burak Oktenli
Burak Oktenli holds an MBA and a Master of Professional Studies in Applied Intelligence from Georgetown University. His research addresses the governance of authority in autonomous and AI-enabled systems, and his writing has appeared at the Modern War Institute at West Point, RUSI, RealClearDefense, RealClearMarkets, and Geopolitical Monitor. He is the author of Authority Architectures for Autonomous Systems, a ten-volume series on how authority in autonomous systems is delegated, monitored and recovered, at authority-architecture.me.
View all posts by Burak Oktenli →

Poland's Creotech releases first Mikroglob-1 satellite images, boosting shares 8.2%

Part of New Orleans imaged using Creotech's NIR (near-infrared) channel. / CreotechFacebook

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By bne IntelliNews October 6, 2026

Poland's Creotech Instruments, the country's largest space mission integrator, released the first Earth observation images captured by its Mikroglob-1 satellite on October 5, sending its Warsaw-listed shares up 8.2% on the day.

The satellite, operating as part of the Mikroglob Satellite Earth Observation System (SSOZ), was developed under a contract with Poland's Armament Agency and was launched into orbit on July 7, 2026. The released imagery includes images of Los Angeles International Airport, the Los Angeles metropolitan area, New Orleans Airport, and the city of Dalian in China.

"The first images represent an important milestone for us, as this is the first time we can publicly present data acquired by a satellite that forms part of the Earth Observation System we are building. The system enables both detailed observation of individual objects and the acquisition of data covering much larger areas," said CEO Grzegorz Brona.

Brona also highlighted the satellite's ability to capture imagery across different spectral ranges, including near-infrared, which provides additional information about the characteristics of the observed terrain.

"Mikroglob demonstrates that domestic solutions can combine high imaging detail, flexibility in the use of data, and the ability to carry out tasks that are important from a security and defence perspective. The next stages of the project will further increase these capabilities as the entire constellation is developed," he said.

The presented images were captured during the satellite's acceptance phase.

Poland's BGK to channel €114mn into space technology companies via new Vinci fund

/ BGKFacebook

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By bne IntelliNews October 7, 2026

Poland's state development institution Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego (BGK) said on October 6 it would allocate PLN500mn (€114.4mn) to investments in high-growth space technology companies through a new vehicle, the Vinci Space Tech Fund.

The fund will offer financing of between PLN10mn and PLN100mn per company, with a portfolio expected to ultimately comprise 15-20 firms. Investments will primarily target Polish companies, though the fund's strategy does not exclude European companies with their core operations in Poland.

"Today, technology is not just about the economy and innovation — it is also about Poland's security. In the space sector, we now see solutions that enable us to respond more quickly to threats, better protect critical infrastructure, support energy security, and monitor the situation within our territory and in the surrounding area. That is why investment in the space sector is, at the same time, an investment in Poland's modern economy and competitiveness," said Andrzej Domański, minister of economy and finance and the fund's originator.

Satellite reconnaissance specialist ICEYE, described as a global leader in its field, is to serve as the fund's strategic partner, contributing expertise in scaling a global business. Further strategic partners include the Kraków Technology Park, the Ministry of Development and Technology, and the Polish Space Agency.

The fund's strategy covers six key investment areas: satellites, optics and Earth observation; satellite communications; electronics and photonics; rockets and propulsion; and data and artificial intelligence.

The Vinci Space Tech Fund will be the third vehicle managed by Vinci, bringing BGK's total committed capital across the three funds to PLN1.6bn. Vinci has to date invested in two space technology companies: ICEYE and Sybilla Technologies.

SPACE/COSMOS

Robert Reich: Mercury Is Shrinking, So Am I – OpEd

October 3, 2026

By Robert Reich


Key Takeaways:

A Geophysical Research Letters study led by Gaku Nishiyama finds Mercury’s cooling core is shrinking the planet up to 30% faster than earlier estimates, by as much as 14.5 miles—nearly 1% of its 1,516-mile radius—versus a few miles before.

The estimate comes from surface wrinkle ridges; the author notes interior contraction may be faster and harder to see.

The column uses that cooling, plus spinal-disc compression and osteoporosis, as a joke about human height loss, not as a claim that people and planets shrink by the same process.

I’ve always felt a certain affinity for Mercury. Maybe that’s because Mercury is by far the smallest planet in our solar system — about 1/29th the width of Jupiter and just one-third the width of Earth — and I’m not a giant myself.

Mercury is becoming even smaller — it’s actually shrinking.

Apparently, when Mercury formed about 4.5 billion years ago in the primordial collisions of the early solar system, it was much hotter than it is now. Over many millennia since then, its metallic core has cooled and contracted, causing the planet’s surface to warp and wrinkle.

You know who else is warping and wrinkling, and shrinking?

Previous estimates suggested that Mercury had shrunk by just a few miles since its formation. Now, scientists say it’s shrinking up to 30 percent faster than expected. It might have even shrunk by as much as 14.5 miles, which is nearly 1 percent of its current radius of 1,516 miles.

This new estimate, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, gives astronomers a new understanding of how the planet — and others like it — formed and evolved.

And what’s in store for them. It’s not great news.

“Many bodies are shrinking nowadays,” said Gaku Nishiyama, a planetary scientist at the German Aerospace Center Institute of Space Research, who led the study.

Tell me about it. Humans start a slow, gradual loss of height during their 30s. Then they lose a half inch every 10 years. Between 30 and 70, they lose an inch or two.

That may not sound like much, but if you’re 4 feet 11 inches at your zenith, the loss of an inch or two is not welcome. Then, after age 80, the typical human who survives loses another inch. At this rate I may disappear entirely.

Dr. Nishiyama says Mercury’s estimated shrinkage is difficult to measure because researchers have to rely on topographies visible on the surface of the planet. “Inside, things may be getting much worse, much faster,” she said.

I know about that, too.

All heavenly bodies are shrinking, as are human bodies. With humans, it’s partly due to compressed spinal discs —as the soft cushions between back bones dry out and flatten over time. And because of osteoporosis, that can cause tiny cracks in spinal bones.

“Every planet is an odd little duck that has a story to tell,” says Dr. Sam Birch, a planetary geoscientist at Brown University.

Well, Dr. Birch, every human is an odd little duck with its own story, too. Planets and people — we’re all part of the same cosmos, with slightly different combinations of hydrogen and helium, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and neon.

We’re all parts of the same mystery.

This article was published at Robert Reich’s Substack


About Robert Reich
Robert B. Reichis Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, and writes atrobertreich.substack.com. Reich served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and"Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "The Common Good," which is available in bookstores now. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality For All." He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.
View all posts by Robert Reich →

Three space agencies to research how to grow crops on the moon

05.10.2026, DPA

Photo: Owen Humphreys/PA Wire/dpa

The space agencies of the United States, Germany and Canada will conduct joint research to learn how to grow crops on the Moon, which will be essential to helping astronauts go farther and stay longer in space.

NASA, Canadian Space Agency and the German Aerospace Center signed a joint statement of intent to begin coordinated, preparatory work toward an Earth-based demonstrator, called The Lunar Agriculture Module-Ground Test Demonstrator.

It aims to develop the technologies needed to grow space crops and study how they perform under atmospheres and controlled environments similar to those expected during missions at Moon Base.

Through Moon Base, NASA and its partners will build the infrastructure to support an enduring human presence near the Moon's South Pole, advancing science and technology while preparing for future human missions to Mars.

Space crops will provide deep space crews with whole-food nutrition and increase dietary variety. They can also absorb carbon dioxide, produce oxygen, and recycle water. These capabilities will become increasingly important as human missions extend farther from their home planet, NASA says in a press release.

(c) 2026 dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur GmbH

Whisky to be aged in space for first time in uni satellite project

05.10.2026,  DPA

Photo: Jane Barlow/PA Wire/dpa

Whisky will be distilled in space for the first time as part of an experiment which will also measure how the spirit ages in the harsh environment beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.

Engineers in Scotland and Japan are planning to put Scotch on a rocket in 2028, sending a satellite containing samples of whisky and its base ingredients on a five-year mission to orbit the Earth.

It is hoped the frequent changes between extreme heat and freezing cold experienced by the whisky as it rotates the planet every 90 minutes could speed up the maturation process.

This could potentially open the door to future production of space-aged whisky, which the scientist behind the project expects to have “very bold” flavours as a result of its unusual journey.

While such whisky would command astronomical prices due to the cost of launching and recovering the liquid, collectors are already known to pay hundreds of thousands for some of the rarest bottles.

Dr Gilles Bailet, of the University of Glasgow, said a number of students have travelled from Scotland to Japan to help to co-design the “cubesat” which will contain the tiny whisky samples and ingredients.

The research is also expected to provide insight into how orbital factories could work, which could develop molecules for medications which are difficult to produce on Earth.

Bailet told Press Association: “We want to see what the effect of a space environment is on the ageing of the whisky.”

He added: “We’ve got the best people here in Scotland to be able to inform that, with centuries of experience, so we can bring this whisky experience into space.”

The current plan for the whisky experiment – nicknamed “Space Puffin” – is to launch the cubesat in 2028 on a SpaceX supply mission to the International Space Station, before deploying it into orbit from the Japanese module of the space station.

The science around the process of whisky “breathing” as it ages in wooden casks is not well understood, Bailet said, but the cycles could happen much faster in space – where temperatures can quickly vary between minus 150 degrees to 200 degrees.

Bailet continued: “We build our spacecraft to be able to get an environment which is better for the whisky, but this wood will breathe faster than on Earth.

“And so we are hoping that we’ll be able to accelerate the ageing to be able to get something more interesting.”

The whisky on the cubesat will be monitored while it is in space, feeding data on its colour and chemical composition back to scientists on the ground.

On Earth, whisky is produced by mixing barley with water and yeast.

Yeast breaks down the sugars in the barley, creating ethanol as a byproduct.

The team’s system will demonstrate how ethanol, which plays a role in the production of many drugs, can be extracted in orbit.

While the cubesat will not be recovered at the end of its five-year mission, Dr Bailet said he is keen to scale up whisky maturation in space and develop a system for launching Scotch into space and landing it on Earth after maturation.

He said: “We are really keen to be able to actually fly a full whisky-making system, with a full cask, if we’re able to collaborate with investors or other people interested about it.

“But it’s totally in the realm of possible to bring back something like a litre of whisky within the next three to five years.”

He hopes this process would produce “really bold whiskies” with “extremely complex flavour profiles”.

While whisky has previously been into space as part of an experiment to understand flavour, it did not leave the temperature-controlled confines of the International Space Station.

The cubesat will not have a full whisky cask on board. However the liquid samples will be contained by small wood chips to mimic the cask ageing process on Earth.

Different distilleries in Scotland and Japan are expected to contribute the whisky, though these have not been chosen yet.

Bailet said: “Previous research has suggested that the microgravity of space may allow us to grow larger, purer chemical crystals and to fold proteins in new ways.

“Big questions still remain over how we might actually do chemistry in space, however, and this project aims to provide some answers.

“Whisky gives us a very recognizable, very well-understood model for studying and monitoring biological and chemical processes in microgravity.”

The initial visit to Japan is the result of a grant from distillery-design consultancy Allen Associates.

Geoff Nisbet, lead process design engineer at the consultancy, said: “We often say that our fingerprints are found all over Scotland’s distilleries - we never expected the next set might end up in space.

“We’re delighted to support a project which brings together Scotland’s world-renowned whisky industry, engineering innovation and the next generation of engineers.

“There is also something quite fitting about Scotland and Japan being brought together through whisky once again, this time with a project looking far beyond the distillery itself.”

(c) 2026 dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur GmbH

OBITUARY

Rwandan genocide hunter Dafroza Gauthier dies after long battle for justice

Dafroza Gauthier, who spent spent decades tracking down Rwandans in France accused of involvement in the 1994 genocide, has died from cancer at the age of 72. By filing a string of civil lawsuits against suspected fugitives, she and her husband Alain pushed the French legal system to hold them to account.


Issued on: 04/10/2026 - RFI

Dafroza Gauthier and her husband Alain at the Palais de Justice courthouse in Paris, 10 May 2026. The pair founded a collective dedicated to bringing Rwandans in France to justice for their suspected involvement in the 1994 genocide. © AFP - DOMINIQUE FAGET


Dafroza Gauthier died on Saturday in Reims, the French city where the couple had lived since the 1980s. She is survived by her husband and three children.

The Gauthiers were often compared in France to Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, the Nazi hunters who tracked down war criminals after the Holocaust.

They founded the Collective of Civil Plaintiffs for Rwanda (CPCR), an association that filed civil suits against dozens of genocide suspects in France. In several cases, these led to criminal trials under the principal of universal jurisdiction, which allows suspects residing in France to be tried for serious crimes regardless of where they were committed.

Seven have received a final conviction and prison sentences ranging from 14 years to life.

Witness to horror

Dafroza Mukarumongi was born on 4 August 1954 in Butare, in southern Rwanda, into a Tutsi farming family.

She experienced ethnic violence from a young age, seeing her family's house burned and property looted. In 1973, her mother sent both her daughters to Burundi for safety. From there, Dafroza moved to Belgium and studied chemistry.

She had met French-born Alain Gauthier while he was working as a teacher in Rwanda, and later visited him in France. The couple married in 1977.

In February 1994, Dafroza – by then a chemical engineer – returned to Rwanda to visit family. She saw militia on the streets of Kigali and heard Hutu extremists broadcasting hate speech against Tutsis.

Her mother pushed her to leave. "I still feel an indescribable sense of guilt for having left her behind," Dafroza Gauthier told Le Monde newspaper decades later.

On 8 April 1994, two days after Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana's plane was shot down and the killings began, Dafroza's mother was shot dead in a Kigali church.

Back in France, "we were glued to the telephone all day", Dafroza Gauthier told the New York Times in 2014. "People would tell us, 'At X's home, they're all dead. They've been killed this morning.' It didn't mean anything anymore. I can't express it with words."

In total, she said, around 70 to 80 of her relatives died – her mother's entire family.

A life's work

In 2001, the Gauthiers attended the trial in Belgium of four people accused of taking part in the genocide. All were convicted.

Later that year, they set up the CPCR. Their investigations unmasked several suspects living comfortably in France – including Dominique Ntawukuriryayo, who played in a role in the killing of as many of 25,000 Tutsi refugees and was subsequently convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

They secured their first criminal case in France in 2014, when former chief of intelligence Pascal Simbikangwa was tried in Paris for genocide and crimes against humanity. He was found guilty and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Thinking about the 1994 atrocities "makes your head spin", Dafroza Gauthier told France Culture radio around the 30th anniversary of the killings. "But we can't just think – we have to act, do something about this slaughter."

She often said she was seeking not revenge, but justice.

"She was a remarkable person," Christophe Renzaho, president of the Rwandan Community in France expat group, told RFI. "The justice system has lost someone very important, a person who knew no bounds when it came to bringing those who committed genocide against the Tutsis to justice.

"It was her life's work and she carried it out until her very last breath."

 

Fine-tuning cobalt for cleaner chemical transformations

Controlling cobalt’s oxidation state during electrolysis enables highly selective hydrogenation without relying on scarce precious metals

Yokohama National University

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A carbon-supported cobalt catalyst dynamically balances metallic Co and residual CoOx under electrolysis conditions, enabling selective hydrogenation of nitrogen-containing aromatic compounds using water as the hydrogen source. Controlling this mixed cobalt state provides an earth-abundant alternative to platinum-group-metal catalysts.

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Credit: YOKOHAMA National University

Finding alternatives to precious metals in chemical manufacturing may be less like sourcing a substitute and more like tuning an instrument already in hand.

YOKOHAMA National University scientists have found that an earth-abundant cobalt catalyst can selectively hydrogenate nitrogen-containing compounds when the balance between metallic cobalt and cobalt oxide is carefully tuned. Their findings could allow for more sustainable approaches to chemical manufacturing that do not depend on the use of very valuable, very rare metals.

The study will be published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on September 29.

From medicines to plastics, many products we rely on every day begin with chemical transformations that require carefully designed catalysts. One important example is hydrogenation, which adds hydrogen to molecules to produce useful chemical compounds.

Conventional hydrogenation commonly relies on hydrogen gas, but electrocatalytic hydrogenation can generate hydrogen equivalents from water using electricity. This offers a potentially more sustainable approach to reductive chemical transformations, particularly when powered by renewable electricity.

This technology, however, has its own shortcomings.

“A major challenge in electrocatalytic hydrogenation is replacing scarce platinum-group metals with earth-abundant catalysts without sacrificing activity or selectivity,” said Mahito Atobe, professor at YOKOHAMA National University’s Faculty of Engineering and a corresponding author of the study.

In a quest for alternatives, the team turned to cobalt, an abundant and economical metal.

“We wanted to understand how the oxidation state of cobalt changes under operating conditions and whether controlling the balance between metallic cobalt and cobalt oxide could provide an effective catalyst,” said Naoki Shida, associate professor from the same Faculty and co-corresponding author.

The researchers prepared their catalyst from cobalt sulfate and calcined it at 750 °C. They then tested it in an anion-exchange membrane electrolyzer, in which electricity drives hydrogenation reactions.

The optimized catalyst converted pyridine to piperidine with a yield of more than 99% under ambient electrolysis conditions. In other words, almost all of the pyridine that reacted was converted into the desired product rather than unwanted byproducts. Piperidine is an important building block in synthetic and medicinal chemistry, making this reaction a useful test of the catalyst’s ability to carry out selective hydrogenation.

Such performance, however, is not always guaranteed.

“We found that the catalytic performance of cobalt is determined not simply by its elemental composition, but by its dynamic oxidation state during electrolysis,” Atobe said.

During electrolysis, cobalt can shift between metallic Co(0) and cobalt oxide, CoOx. The researchers found that catalysts containing too much of either form were less active. Instead, the best performance came from an intermediate Co(0)/CoOx ratio.

To understand why, the team combined experimental characterization with in situ X-ray spectroscopy and theoretical calculations. The results suggest that the coexistence of metallic Co and residual CoOx creates a favorable environment for pyridine adsorption and hydrogenation.

“Maintaining an appropriate balance between metallic Co and residual CoOx enables highly selective hydrogenation,” Atobe said.

The catalyst also selectively hydrogenated a broad range of nitrogen-containing compounds, including pyridines, quinolines, pyrazines, nitriles and nitroarenes. It also suppressed undesired hydrogenation pathways that are observed with rarer rhodium-based catalysts.

The researchers then addressed a practical challenge: prolonged electrolysis can over-reduce the catalyst, pushing it away from its optimal state. The team introduced intermittent electrolysis to help maintain the appropriate Co(0)/CoOx balance. The strategy enabled gram-scale conversion of pyridine to piperidine with an 89% yield while maintaining a stable cell voltage.

The findings highlight a broader principle for catalyst design: controlling a catalyst’s chemical state while it operates can be as important as choosing the catalyst itself.

The team plans to extend this oxidation-state-control strategy to other earth-abundant transition-metal catalysts and a broader range of synthetically important reactions.

“Our ultimate goal is to develop scalable electrochemical processes in which catalyst states can be actively controlled under operating conditions,” Shida said. “This could enable selective chemical manufacturing without relying on scarce precious metals.”

Funding 

• JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP22K14541, JP23H04916 (Green Catalysis Science), JP23K23386, JP23K17370, JP24K01279.
• Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) as a part of PRESTO program (JST Grant No. JPMJPR2373 and JPMJPR2471),
• Adopting Sustainable Partnerships for Innovative Research Ecosystem (ASPIRE), Grant Number JPMJAP2528.

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YOKOHAMA National University (YNU) is a leading research university dedicated to academic excellence and global collaboration. Its faculties and research institutes lead efforts in pioneering new academic fields, advancing research in artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum information, semiconductor innovation, energy, biotechnology, ecosystems, and smart city development. Through interdisciplinary research and international partnerships, YNU drives innovation and contributes to global societal advancement.

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Journal

Journal of the American Chemical Society

DOI

10.1021/jacs.6c12207

Method of Research

Experimental study

Article Title

Oxidation-State Control of Cobalt Electrocatalysts Enables Selective Hydrogenation of Nitrogen-Containing Aromatics