The Vera C. Rubin Observatory won our Innovation of the Year honors. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. From the most detailed movie of the night sky ever made to the first commercial soft landing on the moon, this year has been an inflection point for exploring and understanding the vast expanse above our heads. We also saw breakthroughs in small changes to commercial airliners that improve efficiency, as well as a new type of rocket engine that might be the future of extremely high speed air travel, plus the closest view of Mercury we've ever seen! Vera C. Rubin Observatory by U.S. National Science Foundation & Department of Energy: World's largest digital camera to conduct 10-year survey of the night sky Prepare to see space like never before.

Car and motorbike maker Honda Motor Co. is positioning itself for a vertical takeoff. The Tokyo-based company is embarking on efforts to field a new electric-hybrid air taxi, a robot with human-like hands that may one day toil on the moon and a reusable rocket to carry small satellites into space more economically. Honda's vision of how people will work, travel and spend leisure time in the future will help expand its business beyond cars, lawn mowers and motorcycles. The efforts are a key component of Honda's "2030 Vision" to broaden the definition of mobility and to improve peoples' daily lives. The automaker, which also has a niche business in small planes, is a newcomer to the space industry, dominated today by established defense contractors such as Boeing Co. and well-funded upstarts such as Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin.

Cobots or collaborative robots are robots that are built for direct contact and interaction with humans like a robot dog or a robotic vacuum. There have been a surprising amount of cobots in space. CIMON was made by IBM, AIRBUS and the DLR (German Aerospace Center). The original CIMON was first proposed in 2016 and went to the ISS in 2018 for 14 months. CIMON 2 went up to the ISS on December 5th, 2019 and it is scheduled to stay there for 3 years.

Japan's Hayabusa2 on Thursday released a robotic explorer bound for the surface of an asteroid in the probe's final task before returning to earth, the nation's space agency said. The Minerva-II2, a small rover attached to Hayabusa2, began its descent toward the surface of the Ryugu asteroid at around 1 a.m. Its primary task will be to research the asteroid's gravity. Previous plans for surface observations were scrapped due to glitches, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Observing the explorer's descent to the surface will be the last mission for the probe before it leaves the asteroid in November or December, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said.

Two of the Switch's biggest games are about to get virtual reality updates. Both Mario and Zelda are getting new features that will allow people to disappear into a cardboard headset and find themselves in New Donk City or Hyrule. The new updates follow the new Nintendo Labo kit, which allows players to buy and then create their own cardboard virtual reality headset. The Switch itself will then slot in the front, allowing the cardboard creation to work as a normal VR headset. We'll tell you what's true.

God of War has won most of the big prizes at this year's Bafta Games Awards, including being crowned the best game of the year. The tough action-adventure game saw off other contenders such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey to dominate the awards, picking up a variety of technical praise as well as the top prize. Other big winners included Nintendo Labo, the cardboard toys that can be played with the Switch. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.

Gamers who pay for online services on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation and Xbox could be getting unfairly hit by fees. The competition watchdog has launched an investigation into the gaming platforms to understand whether their automatically renewing subscriptions are cheating gamers. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Friday that its consumer law investigation will seek to determine if the consoles' business practices are legal. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.

Virgin Media's TV services have stopped working, briefly leaving people service on their television. The company's services are down across the UK, according to the tracking website Down Detector. Users reported problems with both its mobile service for phones as well as its cable service for homes, though Virgin said the only problems were with its televisions services. TV services also stopped working, with affected users seeing a "V53" error. We'll tell you what's true.

Nearly half a million songs that were thought to have been lost when MySpace accidentally deleted its archive of tracks have been rediscovered. The files – which are now available to listen to – were kept by coincidence and have been shared with the world once again. But they only represent the tiniest sliver of the total number of tracks that were deleted during the accidental clearance. Together they amount to less than one per cent of the estimated 50 million tracks that disappeared during a server migration at MySpace. We'll tell you what's true.

Twitter has been forced to backtrack after the French government accidentally fell foul of its own law designed to prevent the spread of fake news. The #OuiJeVote (Yes, I Vote) campaign was rejected by the social media giant as it risked contravening a law introduced in December, that requires paid-for political content on the platform to be transparent about who funds it, even though the campaign is aimed at encouraging people to vote. Twitter's decision was criticised by the French government information service (GIS), which planned to pay for the sponsored tweets. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.