Prediction: Michigan trending for touted DB ahead of July 1 decision  On3

Colorado primary election turnout trending higher than 2022 and 2024.  Denver7

Pinned Golf Is Trending Up  MyGolfSpy

There’s a Summer Dress for Everyone—6 Best Trending Styles to Shop Now, From Drop-Waists to Linen Shifts  Cosmopolitan

Podcast: LSU football trending for SEC flips, eyeing blue-chippers as July nears  247Sports

1. Sony will cease production of discs for new PlayStation games in 2028  Game File | Stephen Totilo
2. Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles  PlayStation.Blog
3. Sony Phasing Out Physical Discs for PS5, Closes PS3 and PS Vita Stores  CNET
4. PlayStation will end physical disc production for new games in 2028  CNBC
5. PlayStation abandons physical games as Xbox and Sony lose sight of players  Windows Central

1. iPhone 18 Pro to offer only these three colors, per leaker  9to5Mac
2. Apple iPhone 18 Pro leaks are about to get a lot more intense  Yahoo Tech
3. The iPhone 18 Pro just leaked, and it might be the single biggest Apple leak since the iPhone 4  Creative Bloq
4. iPhone 18 Pro leaks: Qualcomm or Apple C2 model, A20 details, camera upgrades  AppleInsider
5. Apple iPhone 18 Pro And iPhone 18 Pro Max Release Date: iOS 27 Signals September Schedule  Forbes

1. Microsoft set for new round of job cuts next week, spanning Xbox, sales and consulting  GeekWire
2. Microsoft to cut under 2.5% of workforce in latest layoffs, Business Insider reports  Reuters
3. Microsoft layoffs 2026: cuts hitting sales, consulting, and Xbox  Yahoo Finance
4. Xbox weighs canceling Blade game and shuttering Arkane  The Verge
5. Microsoft plans thousands of job cuts, impacting less than 2.5% of workforce  Business Insider

1. Sony is closing the PS3 and Vita digital stores  The Verge
2. An update on PlayStation Store for PS3 and PS Vita  PlayStation.Blog
3. PS3 and Vita PlayStation Store Closing, PS5 Physical Game Copies Ending  Siliconera
4. The PlayStation Stores On PlayStation 3 And Vita Are Being Shut Down  Game Informer
5. Response to "Invincible": DC Studios Announces "Absolute Batman" Animated Series  ixbt.games

1. Rhythm Heaven Groove reviews roundup  Nintendo Everything
2. 'Rhythm Heaven Groove' shows that the Switch 1 still has the juice  Mashable
3. Rhythm Heaven Groove Review - Technique Is Solid  Game Informer
4. Nintendo’s weirdest series is a lot more normal on Switch 2  Polygon.com
5. Nintendo's Weird Rhythm Heaven Is My Song of the Summer  CNET

NASA is recruiting research participants for the agency’s next simulated deep space mission. Beginning no earlier than August 2027, research volunteers will spend one year living and working in interplanetary environments at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, operating under isolated conditions expected during crewed missions to the Moon or Red Planet.
 
Insights from this new, yearlong experience, called the Moon and Mars Exploration Analog, can be used to help keep astronauts safe and mission-ready during future planetary surface operations. The results also could inform plans for a sustained lunar presence through the agency’s Moon Base and future Artemis missions.
 
NASA is looking for applicants for the approximately year-long mission simulation, which will take place in two confined habitats. In addition to specific physical and education requirements, volunteers must be willing to take part in a multi-day selection process and pass NASA’s physical and psychological assessments, found on the Moon and Mars Exploration Analog web page. Candidates also should have a strong desire for unique, rewarding experiences, and interest in contributing to NASA’s work to prepare for extended stays on the lunar surface and the first crewed mission to Mars.
 
The Moon and Mars Exploration Analog evolves elements of the agency’s HERA (Human Exploration Research Analog) and CHAPEA (Crew Health And Performance Exploration Analog) missions into a single, integrated mission to streamline how researchers evaluate astronaut adaptation across the full range of potential mission scenarios. Using the HERA habitat as a spacecraft and the CHAPEA habitat as a base, the volunteers will live and work in confined, isolated environments that simulate months-long flights to and from other planetary surfaces. They also will mimic surface operations, including mock Mars walks and using a rover to travel to exploration sites located beyond the main habitat.
 
Throughout the Moon and Mars Exploration Analog mission, researchers will study crew health and performance under resource limitations and mission demands. These missions also help NASA assess and validate hardware, technologies, protocols, requirements, and other systems designed to support crew health and performance on long-duration deep space missions, all without leaving Earth. The effort will provide valuable data for NASA’s Human Research Program, which innovates ways to keep astronauts healthy and mission-ready.
 
To apply, visit:

 NASA Analogs Recruiting

As part of the Golden Age of innovation and exploration, NASA will send astronauts on increasingly difficult missions to explore more of the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, establish an enduring human presence on the lunar surface, and to build on the foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.
 
For more about NASA’s Human Research Program, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/

A first-of-its-kind mission to raise the orbit of NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is poised for launch no earlier than Thursday, July 2, 5:09 a.m. EDT (9:09 p.m. UTC+12), from Kwajalein Atoll, part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. A robotic servicing spacecraft called LINK, built by Katalyst Space, will blast into orbit on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket attached to the belly of the company’s Stargazer aircraft, shown here in this photograph from the evening of Tuesday, June 16, 2026. 

After launch, LINK will attempt to rendezvous with, grapple, and slowly raise Swift’s altitude over several months, preventing it from re-entering Earth’s atmosphere later this year. If this daring mission is successful, it will be the first time a commercial robotic mission has captured a NASA spacecraft that is both uncrewed and not originally designed to be serviced in space.

Follow the Swift blog to learn more about the mission.

Image credit: NASA/Ron Beard

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is giving us new insight into the far-future of solar systems like our own, as the agency continues to reveal the secrets of the universe and our place in it. Billions of years ago, a Sun-like star nearing the end of its life swelled tremendously in size to become a red giant before ejecting its outer layers, leaving a hot, remnant core known as a white dwarf. As a red giant, the star should have engulfed and destroyed any nearby planets. Yet astronomers have found a Jupiter-sized exoplanet orbiting the white dwarf every 34 hours at a separation of less than 2 million miles (3 million kilometers).

To solve the mystery of how this exoplanet survived, an international team of astronomers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to watch the Jupiter-sized exoplanet WD 1856 b transit its host star, measuring the planet’s temperature and detecting molecules in its atmosphere. They found the planet is significantly warmer than expected and determined how it most likely reached its very tight orbit around the white dwarf star. The results are a window into the future of planets like Jupiter after the death of the Sun, billions of years into the future.

The results published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

WD 1856 b was discovered in 2020 by scientists using NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and the retired Spitzer Space Telescope. It orbits the white dwarf WD 1856+534, which is located about 80 light-years from Earth. “The planet is about the size of Jupiter, but the white dwarf it orbits is the size of Earth, so the planet is seven times larger than its star,” said lead author Ryan MacDonald of the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom.

WD 1856 b orbits extremely close to its host star, a distance 50 times closer than Earth orbits the Sun. If WD 1856 b had originally been orbiting at that distance, it would have been obliterated while the star was a red giant. How did it survive the death of its host star and end up in its current position?

Image: Exoplanet WD 1856 b (Artist’s Concept)

How big, how hot

The new study used Webb to watch the planet passing in front of its star. This transit yielded unique information about the planet’s mass, which is between four and eleven times the mass of Jupiter.

The team also was able to determine the planet’s temperature. During the transit, light from the star was partly blocked, but infrared light was reduced less than other wavelengths. The difference was infrared light emitted by the planet from its own heat. The data indicated that the planet has a temperature of about 260 degrees Fahrenheit (126 degrees Celsius) — significantly hotter than it would be if its only source of heat was the light from the white dwarf. This puzzling discovery turned out to be the key fact that proved how the planet must have reached its current orbit.

Christopher O’Connor of Northwestern University in Illinois, a co-author on the paper, was responsible for tracing the temperature of the planet back in time. O’Connor said, “The big question is how WD 1856 b ended up where it is today, and there are two theories. One is that the planet was swallowed by the host star as it was dying, and managed to survive on the inside. The other is that migration took place due to the gravitational effect of other objects in the system. The white dwarf is part of a triple star system, and the companion stars could have influenced WD 1856 b’s orbit.”

The researchers realized that there was no source of energy present to generate that heat today, so it must be residual energy from an earlier time when the planet was heated. Using models of how sub-stellar objects like WD 1856 b cool down over time, coupled with the new data from Webb, the team was able to project its temperature back in time and deduce how long ago the heating must have happened. The timing is key to determining whether the heating was from being engulfed by the red giant or occurred during an inward migration

They concluded that the heating most likely happened between 3 and 5.5 billion years after the star became a white dwarf. In this scenario, the planet was on a wide orbit that kept it safe from the star during its destructive red giant phase, and only migrated to its present location later on. “As the planet moved inward, its interactions with the strong gravity of the white dwarf will have caused it to warm up considerably, and it has been cooling ever since,” said O’Connor.

Light from the star passing through the planet’s atmosphere also picked up information about its chemical composition. “We saw the telltale signatures of small cloud particles and hydrocarbons, most likely methane, which is the first time we have seen an atmosphere on a planet transiting a dead star,” said co-author Victoria Boehm of Cornell University. “We recently observed four more transits of WD 1856 b with Webb to take a deeper look into its atmospheric chemistry and can’t wait to see the results.”

Image: Exoplanet WD 1856 b (Transmission Spectrum)

Solar system’s possible future

In approximately five billion years, the Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel in its core and swell up more than 100 times larger than it is now into a red giant star. It will then shed its outer layers and end its life as a white dwarf star. Mercury, Venus, and possibly the Earth will be destroyed by the red giant. However, the fate of the more distant planets, particularly the gas giants, is unclear. Finding and studying planets in orbit around the remnants of Sun-like stars after their death is a means of learning what might happen in our own solar system in the far future.

“We’re used to looking back in time when we use telescopes, but this is the first time we have been able to look forward to what might happen to the outer planets around the remnant of a Sun-like star,” said MacDonald. “It’s like using a time machine to peer into the distant future of our solar system.”

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

To learn more about Webb, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/webb

Downloads & Related Information

The following sections contain links to download this article’s images and videos in all available resolutions followed by related information links, media contacts, and if available, research paper and Spanish translation links.

Related Links

Read more: Webb’s Impact on Exoplanet Research

Explore more: ViewSpace | Exoplanet Variety: Atmosphere

Explore more: How to Study Exoplanets: Webb and Challenges

Watch: Giant World Circles a Tiny Star

Explore more: ViewSpace | Star Death: Helix Nebula

More Webb: News | Images | Science | Home Page

Written by William Farrand, Senior Research Scientist, Space Science Institute

Earth planning date: Friday, June 26, 2026

There were two planning cycles over this span of sols. The Monday planning took place with Curiosity situated within a unit that from orbital imagery appeared light-toned, and from earlier rover positions appeared smooth. Reaching this unit, the rover team was surprised to see the unit covered with polygonal structures like the top of a giant Martian honeycomb. Driving further into the unit, the polygonal ridges were more eroded. Littered about this unit are pebble to cobble-sized dark-toned rocks. A still-to-be-resolved question is whether these are bits of Mars that “floated” down from higher in the stratigraphy, were ejected from distant impacts outside of Gale crater, or are meteorites from beyond Mars altogether. Examination of some previous dark “float” rocks indicated the presence of nickel, common in meteorites but less so in Martian rocks, but are all of the dark-toned pebbles and cobbles meteorites? Further investigations should help in answering this question.

Monday’s four-sol plan had APXS and MAHLI investigations looking at the ridges and centers of the polygons. The plan also included ChemCam Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) views of the “Miraflores” small knob and of the “Cordillera” mesa. Similar to the contact science activities, ChemCam LIBS measurements were focused on the polygons, with two measurements on different ridges and one on a polygon center. A ChemCam passive reflectance measurement of one of the aforementioned dark cobbles was also carried out. Environmental activities included a Navcam dust-devil search and atmospheric opacity (“tau”) measurements.

After driving further towards the upper boundary of the light-toned, polygon-covered unit, the three-sol Friday plan included APXS and MAHLI measurements of another polygon ridge and one of the dark-toned cobbles, “Cortadera.” ChemCam LIBS was also targeted on “Cortadera” and on a polygon ridge. ChemCam RMI was targeted on the top and base of the “Cordillera” mesa. Mastcam mosaics were planned of “Cordillera,” nearby troughs, part of the nearby “Valle Grande” channel, and documentation of LIBS targets and the Mastcam calibration target.

In the coming week, Curiosity will cross over into another band of materials which appear darker-toned in orbital images and rougher-textured, as viewed currently by the rover.

Ray Jayawardhana begins his tenure today as the 10th president of the California Institute of Technology. His selection as Caltech’s president, and as the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of astronomy, was announced Jan. 6. Jayawardhana succeeds Thomas Rosenbaum, who had served as Caltech’s president since 2014.

Founded in 1891, Caltech manages the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA. The lab traces its origins to 1936, when a group of Caltech graduate students and other rocket enthusiasts began pioneering work in rocket propulsion. Once NASA was established in 1958, JPL became the space agency’s first and only federally funded research and development center.

“Today, I’m honored to begin my service as Caltech’s 10th president,” Jayawardhana wrote in his first message to the Caltech community. “Long before this day appeared on the horizon, Caltech and JPL have held a special place in my mind as beacons of humanity’s most ambitious acts of exploration and discovery.”

Looking ahead, Jayawardhana said he will be a fierce advocate for the Institute’s mission and the people who advance it, partnering with Caltech and JPL colleagues and other stakeholders to ensure the Institute will continue to have transformative impact on humanity. He also said he aims to pursue bold, catalytic investments in “blue-sky” ideas on campus, at JPL, and across the Institute’s suite of global observatories; enrich the educational experience of undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars; and expand the Institute’s engagement with the public.

“Dr. Jayawardhana steps into this role at a pivotal moment for Caltech, JPL, and NASA,” said Dave Gallagher, director of JPL. “We look forward to working closely with him on missions that will help define a new era of U.S. exploration — extending humanity’s reach into the solar system, unlocking extraordinary scientific discovery, and inspiring future generations to dare mighty things.”

Jayawardhana comes to Caltech from Johns Hopkins University, where as provost he oversaw the university’s 10 schools as well as an expansive portfolio of interdisciplinary programs, academic centers, and core administrative and operational units.

Prior to Johns Hopkins, he served as the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Hans A. Bethe Professor and professor of astronomy at Cornell University. Earlier in his career, he was on the faculty at the University of Toronto, where he held a Canada Research Chair and served as senior adviser on science engagement to the university’s president. Jayawardhana earned his Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University and a B.S. in astronomy and physics from Yale University.

A pioneering astrophysicist, Jayawardhana investigates the origin and evolution of planets and planetary systems, as well as the formation of stars and brown dwarfs. Using the largest telescopes on the ground (including the W. M. Keck Observatory, which Caltech co-manages with the University of California) and in space (especially NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope), he and his collaborators use remote sensing to characterize planets outside our solar system, or exoplanets, with an eye toward assessing the prospects for life beyond Earth. He is a core science team member for the Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph instrument aboard the Webb telescope, and his research group has led Gemini Observatory large programs on high-resolution spectroscopy of exoplanetary atmospheres.

Jayawardhana will continue his research alongside his presidential responsibilities as a Caltech professor of astronomy in the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy.

“Time and again, I’ve been struck not only by the audacity and brilliance of the work underway here, but also by this community of creative and original thinkers who seem constitutionally incapable of leaving the hardest questions unanswered,” Jayawardhana wrote in his note to the Caltech and JPL community.

The appointment marks a return to an early source of inspiration for the astrophysicist. Growing up as a self-described “space-obsessed kid” in Sri Lanka, Jayawardhana wrote to JPL asking for images from NASA’s Voyager and Viking missions (JPL manages Voyager and played a major role in Viking). A few weeks later, a package arrived at his childhood home.

“I still remember the thrill of finding the manila envelope waiting for me … with the unmistakable JPL logo,” he recalled in remarks to the JPL community in January. Inside was a viewbook filled with images of Jupiter and Saturn. “Holding it in my hands, I felt a rush of amazement, as if I were sharing in the grand quest to explore other worlds despite growing up in a remote corner of this one.”

Now, as Caltech’s president, that childhood inspiration has come full circle. “As an astrophysicist, I have the deepest respect for JPL’s enduring contributions to humanity’s quest to explore the solar system and beyond. And as Caltech’s president, I’m excited to work alongside you in that quest.”

Media Contact

Matthew Segal
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-8307
matthew.j.segal@jpl.nasa.gov

2026-041

Honda wants in on the lucrative energy storage market. This week it began producing batteries destined for data centers, not driveways.

The autonomous vehicle space is starting to feel like a repeat of the 2016 hype cycle. Travis Kalanick is back building a robotics company, and the talent wars and capital are heating up the same way they did the first time around. The money’s flowing back, and it’s the people who lived through that first […]

The nine-year-old scooter and bike-share company has said it needs the funds to help pay down around $1 billion in liabilities.

Venice AI is already profitable, with annualized run-rate revenues of over $70 million, CEO Erik Voorhees said.

Google's 24/7 agentic assistant, Gemini Spark, comes to Mac alongside other improvements, like real-time tracking and support for more apps.