‘A.I. Literacy’ Is Trending in Schools. Here’s Why.  The New York Times

Trending tickers: Rolls-Royce, Fresnillo, JD Sports, Vanda Pharmaceuticals and IDFC First Bank  Yahoo Finance UK

Five 2027 targets Florida is trending upward with from Under Armour Orlando  247Sports

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Trending Up: Five recruits with rising interest in Auburn  On3

1. Someone bought a Galaxy S26 Ultra early, showing Privacy Display in action, more [Gallery]  9to5Google
2. How Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra Will Change Smartphones Forever  Forbes
3. Samsung Galaxy S26 Is About to Launch, Pre-Reservations Closing Soon With Best-Ever Pricing and Exclusive Credits  Gizmodo
4. Samsung Galaxy Unpacked: 6 Upgrades That Would Make the S26 Unbeatable  PCMag
5. Samsung's shameless AI ads aren't going down well  Creative Bloq

1. The Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen Switch re-release is already topping the eShop charts, even as Nintendo mysteriously removes mention of Home compatibility  Eurogamer
2. Pokémon FireRed Version and Pokémon LeafGreen coming to Nintendo Switch - News  nintendo.com
3. The Pokémon Company Group Reveals 2026 Pokémon Day Plans, Including Pokémon Presents Video Presentation Celebrating 30 Years of the Brand  Pokemon Press
4. The Pokémon Company Announces 30th Anniversary Pokémon Day Plans and New Releases  hypebeast.com
5. Pokémon FireRed And LeafGreen Are Coming To Switch, Switch 2 Digitally Next Week  Game Informer

1. Apple's first event of the year will reportedly bring at least five products over a 'three-day blitz'  Engadget
2. Report: Apple to launch ‘at least five products’ leading into March 4 event  9to5Mac
3. Apple’s next Macs will finally check every box  Macworld
4. Apple's rumored new MacBook sounds like a nightmare for budget Windows laptops — here's why  Tom's Guide
5. Apple might take a new approach to announcing its next products  TechCrunch

1. Galaxy Buds 4 Pro and Buds 4 price leak brings good news  SamMobile
2. Leaked Galaxy Buds 4 and 4 Pro prices hold steady in US  9to5Google
3. Yet more images of Samsung's Galaxy Buds 4 have surfaced, and at this point it's like reading a love letter to AirPods  TechRadar
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5. Samsung’s new Galaxy Buds might support gestures.  The Verge

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3. OpenAI developing AI devices including smart speaker, The Information reports  Reuters
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Safety and quality management are integral to every program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and across the entire agency. That gives team members like Regina Senegal, acting chief of the Safety and Mission Assurance Directorate’s (SMA) Quality and Flight Equipment Division, a unique opportunity to collaborate with diverse organizations and personnel.

“I’m responsible for managing safety and quality teams for about 13 customers,” Senegal said, noting that these customers include the Orion and Gateway Programs, the Human Landing System, and the Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program. Senegal’s teams work at several levels to implement agency, program, and center SMA requirements, in addition to assisting with monitoring Johnson’s Quality Management System to identify concerns for SMA leadership.

Some teams operate at the program level, helping to write program requirements, establishing assurance programs, and identifying and characterizing risk. Other teams work on a developmental level and focus on ensuring that a piece of hardware, software, and other components meet requirements and are safe. One team is dedicated to extravehicular activity, or EVA, operations, making sure that both crew members and equipment are prepared for safe and successful spacewalks. Senegal’s division is also responsible for calibration, safety, and quality for government-furnished equipment at Johnson, procurement quality, and the Receiving, Inspection and Test Facility.

“This division is probably the most diverse at Johnson because we do a multitude of things and have a multitude of disciplines,” Senegal said. “That’s why I enjoy it.”

Senegal was introduced to quality management as a manufacturing engineer for General Motors, where she worked for seven years before becoming a NASA contractor. She said it was always her goal to work at NASA, but there were no opportunities available at Johnson when she graduated from Prairie View A&M University with a degree in electrical and electronics engineering. “I just kept applying to anything that had to do with NASA, and then SAIC hired me,” she said. SAIC, or Science Applications International Corp., is a subcontractor of NASA.

Senegal has worked at Johnson for 28 years, becoming a civil servant in 2004. In that time, she has been involved in the development and implementation of space and life science experiments, the Human Research Facility, and crew exercise hardware, among other projects. She said her most memorable experience was working to transition crew health equipment from the Space Shuttle Program to the International Space Station. Senegal explained that while the hardware worked well on shuttle missions, it had to be redesigned to support longer missions and larger crews on station. She was not responsible for the redesign, but she had to ensure the equipment worked and was safe. “I really enjoyed that because it was a challenge, and you had all of these great ideas coming together from engineers, doctors, and the crew,” she said. “We became a strong, close team. Everyone was there trying to achieve the same goal.”

Her career in SMA has touched nearly every program at Johnson and some agency-level initiatives. Along the way, she has progressed from group lead to branch chief, deputy division chief, and now division chief—a role she calls her most challenging yet.

“As deputy, you manage parts of the business. As chief, you own it all—mission outcomes, safety posture, budget, culture, and external optics,” Senegal explains. Decisions once offered as advice now carry her endorsement and reputation. The shift means setting direction, allocating resources, and making tough calls, even when every request feels mission-critical. She also shapes how the division recruits, rotates, and grows talent, while tackling challenges like refreshing skill sets and building succession depth in critical disciplines.

In today’s evolving risk environment, Senegal must balance mission risk with project, program, and agency priorities, while keeping programs on schedule. “The chief’s message has to be clear, repeatable, and behavior-shaping,” she says. Building rhythms like staff syncs and risk reviews keeps the team aligned amid competing agendas.

Looking ahead, Senegal sees the team focusing on supporting NASA’s acquisition strategy and improving the speed and quality of organizational decision-making. “We need to define when issues go to the chief, deputy, or branch chiefs—and protect strategic time by saying ‘no’ when ‘yes’ isn’t the right answer.” Her leadership philosophy centers on connection: “Know your team’s strengths and care about them—even small gestures matter,” she says. “When people know you care, it makes coming to work easier.”

Senegal emphasized the importance of sharing SMA lessons learned with early career team members and future agency employees. “They need to know the safety and quality policies, but they also need to understand why we have them in place,” she said. “If you teach them the history behind it, they’re less likely to repeat it, and it helps them understand how and when to accept risk.”

Senegal also encourages the next generation to ask people for their opinions. “Be honest if you don’t know something and say you want to learn more. Never be afraid to speak up.”

For the first time in more than 150 years, giant tortoises are returning to the wild on Floreana Island in the Galápagos — guided by NASA satellite data that helps scientists discover where the animals can find food, water, and nesting habitat.

The effort, a collaboration between the Galápagos National Park Directorate and Galápagos Conservancy, marks a key milestone in restoring tortoise populations to one of the most ecologically distinctive archipelagos on Earth.

On Floreana Island, tortoises disappeared in the mid-1800s after heavy hunting by whalers and the introduction of new predators like pigs and rats, which consumed tortoise eggs and hatchlings. Without the tortoises, the island began to change. Across the Galápagos, giant tortoises historically helped shape the landscape by grazing vegetation, opening pathways through dense plant growth, and carrying seeds across islands.

“This is exactly the kind of project where NASA Earth observations make a difference,” said Keith Gaddis, the manager for NASA Earth Action’s Biological Diversity and Ecological Forecasting program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We’re helping partners answer a practical question: Where will these animals have the best chance to survive — not just today, but decades from now?”

Matching Tortoises to Landscape

On Feb. 20, the Galápagos National Park Directorate and conservation partners released 158 giant tortoises at two sites on Floreana.

“It’s a huge deal to have these tortoises back on this island. Charles Darwin was one of the last people to see them there,” said James Gibbs, the Galápagos Conservancy’s Vice President of Science and Conservation and a co-principal investigator of the project.

In 2000, scientists made an unexpected discovery. Gibbs and other researchers found unusual tortoises on northern Isabela Island’s Wolf Volcano, the tallest peak in the Galápagos, that did not look like any other known living tortoises. About a decade later, DNA extracted from bones of the extinct Floreana tortoises — found in caves on the island and in museum collections — confirmed the tortoises carried Floreana ancestry, launching a breeding program that has since produced hundreds of offspring expected to return to the island. Researchers believe that whalers likely moved tortoises between the islands more than a century earlier.

The Galápagos National Park Directorate has raised and released across the Galápagos more than 10,000 tortoises over the last 60 years, one of the largest rewilding efforts ever attempted. But each island presents a different puzzle.

Some hills and small mountains in the Galápagos intercept clouds and stay cool and damp with evergreen vegetation. Others are dry enough that green vegetation appears only briefly after rain. Where these zones occur on the same island, tortoises move between them, with some animals traveling miles each year between seasonal feeding and nesting areas.

“It’s difficult for the tortoises because they get introduced from captivity into this environment,” Gibbs said. “They don’t know where food is. They don’t know where water is. They don’t know where to nest. If you can place them where conditions are already right, you give them a much better chance.”

That’s where NASA satellite data comes in.

NASA Earth observations allow scientists to map environmental conditions across the islands and track how vegetation, moisture, and temperature shift over time — clues to where tortoises can find food and water.

Using those records, Gibbs and Giorgos Mountrakis, the project’s principal investigator, and their team built a decision tool that combines satellite measurements of habitat and climate conditions with millions of field observations of tortoise locations across the archipelago to guide where, and when, to release the animals.

“Habitat suitability models and environmental mapping are essential tools,” said Christian Sevilla, the Director of Ecosystems at the Galápagos National Park Directorate. “They allow us to integrate climate, topography, and vegetation data to make evidence-based decisions. We move from intuition to precision.”

The decision tool draws on multiple NASA and partner satellite missions. Landsat and European Sentinel satellites track vegetation conditions. The Global Precipitation Measurement mission provides rainfall data. The Terra satellite helps estimate land-surface temperature, and terrain data adds elevation and landscape features. In some cases, high-resolution commercial satellite images, acquired through NASA’s Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition Program, help teams evaluate potential release sites before field surveys begin.

With tortoise-environment relationships in hand, the team can map habitat suitability today and forecast how it may shift decades into the future as environmental conditions change.

“The forecasting part is critical,” said Mountrakis, of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. “This isn’t a one-year project. We’re looking at where tortoises will succeed 20, 40 years from now.”

Because the tortoises can live more than a century, habitat conditions decades from now matter as much as conditions today.

More Than Conservation

The tortoise release is part of the larger Floreana Ecological Restoration Project, which aims to remove invasive species like rats and feral cats and eventually return 12 native animal species to the island, with tortoises serving as the keystone for rebuilding the ecosystem.

The Galápagos Conservancy is also using NASA satellite data and the decision tool developed to help guide tortoise releases on other Galápagos islands and to plan future reintroductions across the archipelago.

If successful, Floreana Island could once again support a large tortoise population, helping restore relationships between animals, plants, and the landscape that shaped the island for thousands of years.

“For those of us who live and work in Galápagos, this [release] is deeply meaningful,” Sevilla said. “It demonstrates that large-scale ecological restoration is possible and that, with science and long-term commitment, we can recover an essential part of the archipelago’s natural heritage.”

NASA astronaut Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen take off on a T-38 training flight from Ellington Field on Feb. 11, 2026, as a waning crescent Moon hovers above. Koch and Hansen, along with NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover, are part of NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first crewed flight of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. Artemis II will fly around the Moon and back to test Orion’s systems and capabilities before returning the crew to a splashdown off the California coast.

As part of a Golden Age of innovation and exploration, Artemis will pave the way for new U.S. crewed missions on the lunar surface in preparation to send the first astronauts to Mars.

Image credit: NASA/Brendan Finnegan

High winds coupled with dry conditions fueled fast-spreading wildland fires in the U.S. southern Plains in winter 2026. On February 17, several large blazes broke out on the Oklahoma Panhandle and burned quickly through tens of thousands of acres of grasslands and shrublands. The winds also caused dust storms and low visibility throughout the wider region.

Smoke from multiple fires as well as wind-borne dust streamed across the Plains on the afternoon of February 17, when the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this image. The Ranger Road fire, the largest of the group, started that day shortly after noon near Beaver, Oklahoma, and spread rapidly throughout the afternoon. By the evening, it had burned into Kansas and consumed an estimated 145,000 acres (587,000 hectares), the Oklahoma Forestry Service reported. Combined with other fires nearby, including the Stevens and Side Road fires near Tyrone, Oklahoma, more than 155,000 acres burned that day, the agency said.

The Ranger Road fire exhibited features of a “fast fire,” a particularly dangerous and destructive type of fire characterized by rapid spread. These blazes usually burn in grasslands and shrublands rather than forests, often occur in autumn and winter when fuels are dry, and are propelled by strong winds. Wind gusts up to 70 miles (110 kilometers) per hour were measured across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles on February 17, the National Weather Service said.

The fires destroyed several structures, threatened farmland and livestock, and prompted evacuation orders for parts of western Oklahoma and southern Kansas, according to news reports. Oklahoma’s governor declared a disaster emergency for counties in the Panhandle.

Persistent winds and dry conditions led to further fire growth on February 18. The Ranger Road and Stevens fires approximately doubled in size that day, the Oklahoma Forestry Services reported. On February 19, a red flag warning remained in effect for the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, with forecasts calling for wind gusts up to 40 miles (64 kilometers) per hour and very low relative humidity.

Wind-blown dust created other serious hazards across the region. Near Pueblo, Colorado (west of this scene), poor visibility led to a deadly pileup of dozens of vehicles on Interstate 25, according to reports. And in southern New Mexico, officials warned travelers of dangerous conditions due to blowing dust.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Lindsey Doermann.

References & Resources

• AccuWeather (2026, February 18) Oklahoma, Kansas wildfire consumes area larger than New York City as new fires spark in Texas. Accessed February 19, 2026.
• AP News (2026, February 18) 5 dead in Colorado highway crashes after blowing dirt makes it hard to see. Accessed February 19, 2026.
• NASA Earth Observatory (2024, December 12) The Fast Fire Threat. Accessed February 19, 2026.
• Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry (2026) Forestry Services. Accessed February 19, 2026.
• Oklahoma Forestry Services, via Facebook (2026) Posts. Accessed February 19, 2026.
• The Oklahoman (2026) Oklahoma wildfire, smoke map: Track latest wildfires, red flag warnings. Accessed February 19, 2026.

New kinds of aircraft taking to the skies could mean unfamiliar sounds overhead — and where you’re hearing them might matter, according to new NASA research.

NASA aeronautics has worked for years to enable new air transportation options for people and goods, and to find ways to make sure they can be safely and effectively integrated into U.S. communities. That’s why the agency continues to study how people respond to aircraft noise.  

In this case, NASA’s work focused on air taxis, shorthand for a variety of aircraft intended to carry people short distances for everything from personal travel to medical treatment. Researchers investigated whether residents in loud cities would respond differently to air taxi sounds than those in quieter suburban settings.

From late August through September 2025, 359 participants in the Los Angeles, New York City, and Dallas-Fort Worth areas took part in NASA’s Varied Advanced Air Mobility Noise and Geographic Area Response Difference (VANGARD) test.

Researchers played 67 unique sounds simulating aircraft, including NASA-owned industry concept designs. To ensure unbiased feedback, the research team withheld aircraft manufacturer names. Participants were also not shown images of the aircraft they were hearing.

Initial results reveal that residents living in noisy areas reported being more bothered by the air taxi sounds than those in quieter areas. The VANGARD team members are currently analyzing the data to better understand these findings, but so far, they’re hypothesizing that people in loud environments may simply be more sensitive to additional noise. 

“With air taxis coming soon, we need to understand how people will react to a variety of future aircraft sounds,” said Sidd Krishnamurthy, lead researcher at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. “This test filled a critical gap, and its results will improve how we predict human reactions to noise, guiding the design and operation of future aircraft.”

During the study, participants listened to individual aircraft flyover sounds and rated their annoyance levels. The participants also provided their zip codes, allowing the researchers to sort their locations into high and low background noise levels.  “We wanted to know if people in low or high background noise zones would be more annoyed by the air taxi sounds, and to what extent, even without their usual background sounds present during the test,” Krishnamurthy said.

Most participants listened from their home locations, with their own audio devices. But to complement that testing, a control group of 20 people listened in-person at NASA Langley in June, using tablets and headphones with fixed audio settings.

Results showed that the control group responded similarly to those who tested from home.

Many factors influence how humans respond to aircraft noise. This study was not designed to answer every question — for example, it did not look at the potential effects of high background noise masking air taxi noise — but it provided the VANGARD team with initial insights.

The results from this study, and any follow-on efforts, will guide the design and operation of future advanced air mobility aircraft to help designers and regulators determine how and where these aircraft may fly.

This research was led under the Revolutionary Vertical Lift Technology project and contributes to NASA’s advanced air mobility research.  The project falls under the Advanced Air Vehicles Program within NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate.

5 days to save up to $680 on your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 ticket. These lowest rates of the year disappear on February 27 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Register here.

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