‘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

SMU trending for 4-star prospects with new RPM predictions  On3

Travis Kelce Retirement Decision Trending in Clear Direction: NFL Insider  Newsweek

1. Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2026: The Galaxy S26 series, AI and other products we might see on February 25  Engadget
2. Samsung is on slop watch at Unpacked  The Verge
3. Leak: Samsung Galaxy S26 batteries include a surprising downgrade  Mashable
4. How Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra Will Change Smartphones Forever  Forbes
5. Coming Soon: A Seamless Galaxy Camera Experience for Easy Content Creation  samsung.com

1. Here are the PC specs for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach  Eurogamer
2. Death Stranding 2 PC specs detailed, out March 19  PlayStation.Blog
3. Death Stranding 2 will get a 21:9 ultrawide mode on PS5, not just on PC.  The Verge
4. Death Stranding 2: On The Beach PC Requirements Skip The AI Hardware Arms Race  GameSpot
5. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach PC Minimum Specifications Revealed Alongside Graphics Enhancements  TechPowerUp

1. New M6 MacBook Pro details revealed, including Dynamic Island, touch, more  9to5Mac
2. Apple’s Touch-Screen MacBook Pro to Have Dynamic Island, New Interface  Bloomberg
3. Touchscreen OLED MacBook Pro Coming in 2026 With Dynamic Island and Redesigned macOS Controls  MacRumors
4. Touchscreen MacBook Pro to feature Dynamic Island and big macOS changes  Macworld
5. Apple's 2026 MacBook Pro Refresh Brings Dynamic Island, OLED Screens, and New Touch Gestures  TechPowerUp

1. T-Mobile hopes free offer will restore customer loyalty  thestreet.com
2. T-Mobile rolls out new 'trade' offer in last-ditch plea to keep 75.9m customers - but users slapped with $35 fee  the-sun.com
3. The iPhone 17 Pro is a business powerhouse with this T-Mobile deal  TechRadar
4. T-Mobile is trying to win back customers with free phones  Android Headlines
5. Let T-Mobile Pick Up the Tab. Get a Free iPhone 17 With a New Line  CNET

1. ‘ARC Raiders’ Answers Marathon’s One-Strike Cheater Ban Policy  Forbes
2. 'No Second Chances' — Bungie Issues Warning to Would-Be Cheaters Ahead of Marathon Launch  IGN
3. Marathon Is Already Improving On Arc Raiders In One Key Area  Kotaku
4. Bungie Details Anti-Cheat Plans for Its Extraction Shooter Marathon  The Outerhaven
5. Bungie’s plan to secure Marathon from Day One  htxt.co.za

Written by Diana Hayes, Graduate student at York University, Toronto

Earth planning date: Friday, Feb. 20, 2026

This has been a pretty routine week for Curiosity. As was mentioned last week, we’re now in the final phase of the boxwork exploration campaign. We’re currently making our way toward the eastern contact of the boxwork formation with the surrounding geology, which we plan to drive along before turning our attention to the southern contact. That will likely be our last opportunity to directly interrogate the boxwork area before we continue our adventure up the slopes of Mount Sharp.

Along the way, we’ve been performing our usual investigations of the geology that we encounter at our parking locations. As always, this includes contact science on bedrock targets close to the rover, ChemCam LIBS observations of targets slightly further afield, and a number of ChemCam RMI and Mastcam mosaics. These mosaics include observations deeper into the “Tapiche” hollow where we’re parked and the “Los Flamencos” ridge to its south, which we plan on investigating closer in the coming week.

Mars continues to move deeper into its dusty season, so the environmental science group filled this week’s plan with a typical assortment of atmospheric monitoring activities to track dust devils and the amount of dust in the atmosphere, as well as several Navcam cloud movies. So far this dusty season the atmosphere over Gale Crater appears to be behaving much like it does most years, with no signs of imminent dust storms. It’s now been almost eight years (four Mars years) since the last time that a global dust storm swept across the planet, so we’re keeping a close eye on the possibility of another one occurring this year.

On April 8, 2024, volunteers participating in NASA’s Eclipse Megamovie citizen science project all around the United States hurried to photograph the solar eclipse with the latest, greatest equipment, capturing groundbreaking images of the Sun’s corona.

Now, the Eclipse Megamovie team has released the remarkable new dataset that resulted from this effort — the first-ever, white-light eclipse dataset with calibration frames, spanning more than a cumulative hour and a half of observations of the solar corona. This data, which includes 52,469 total photographs uploaded by project volunteers, is now live: https://eclipsemegamovie.org/database. The data include contributions from 143 unique, mobile, volunteer-led “observatories” – people with cameras charged with taking precise images of the eclipse, taking extra steps to allow the painstaking calibration required to reveal how the corona evolves from one person’s view to the next. Researchers around the world can now use these observations to identify solar jets leaving the Sun’s surface and study how solar plumes grow and develop. The public can also peruse and download all of this data, which is highly accessible and searchable by observatory name and location.

“Thank you for all you do and have done for us,” said Eclipse Megamovie volunteer Jessi McKenna. “Everyone in the group has been amazingly supportive of each other. And those who are running things are always so obviously appreciative of everyone who has contributed to the project.” 

The files include data at three different levels of processing, from raw (level 1) data to calibrated (level 3) data, in a format called FITS, or Flexible Image Transport System. It is the standard astronomical data format used by NASA and the International Astronomical Union. Of the 143 unique observatories involved, 28 observatories had clear skies, sufficient calibration frames, and enough unique exposure times to create calibrated level 3 images.

The Eclipse Megamovie team at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley and collaborators at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center began working together long before the eclipse to construct this database, together with EdEon STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics) Learning programmer Troy Wilson. But crucially, Eclipse Megamovie 2024 was made possible because of hundreds of volunteers who journeyed into the path of the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse with their cameras, patience, and curiosity.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provided the first vertical view of Uranus’s ionosphere in this image released on Feb. 19, 2026, revealing auroras shaped by its tilted magnetic field.

Getting a look at the structure of the region where the atmosphere interacts strongly with the planet’s magnetic field is giving us the most detailed portrait yet of where its auroras form, how the magnetic field influences them, and also data on how Uranus’s atmosphere has continued to cool since the 1990s.

Uranus has the strangest magnetosphere in the Solar System. It is tilted and offset from the planet’s rotation axis (and this planet already rolls around the Sun nearly on its side), which means auroras move across the surface in complex ways. Better understanding Uranus will give us insight into ice-giant planets and help us better characterize giant planets outside our Solar System.

Read more about this image.

Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, STScI, P. Tiranti, H. Melin, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)

Groundbreaking “camera-on-a-chip” technology that was originally developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for use in space missions is currently employed in billions of devices like cell phones that are used daily by people worldwide.

In the 1980s, sensors used to produce high-quality images for space science (including the amazing images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope) and other applications employed charge coupled device (CCD) technology. Dr. Eric Fossum was originally hired at JPL in 1990 to advance CCD technology for use in interplanetary space missions, but he ended up advancing another technology called complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology for that purpose and much more. While at JPL, Fossum took advantage of a technique commonly used for CCDs and applied it to CMOS sensors to develop the first CMOS active pixel image sensor. This development began a chain of events that led to the present use of CMOS technology not only in space science missions, but also in billions of cameras in smartphones, webcams, automobiles, and medical devices used worldwide.

A new technology emerges…

In 1990, CCDs were the primary technology used to generate high-quality images. CCD sensors consist of arrays of pixels that convert light into electric charges. The charge from each pixel is transferred step-by-step to an output amplifier at the corner of the sensor and converted to a voltage that represents the brightness of the light received at the corresponding pixel. The data from all the pixels is then aggregated to generate an image. While CCD cameras can produce very high-quality images that are suitable for scientific use, they require a lot of power and an efficient charge transfer process to be effective.

CMOS sensors, on the other hand, have signal amplifiers within each pixel and signals can be read directly from each pixel instead of being transferred long distances to an amplifier for conversion. CMOS sensors therefore require less voltage to operate than CCDs and issues with the charge transfer process such as radiation susceptibility are greatly reduced. Although CMOS sensors existed in the 1990s, they produced too much noise to produce high-quality images required for science applications.

To reduce the signal noise typical of CMOS sensors at that time, Fossum applied a technique that was often used in CCD devices. This technique—called “intra-pixel charge transfer with correlated double sampling”—enables a double measurement of a pixel’s voltage without and with the light-generated charge. Subtracting the values of these two samples enables noise to be suppressed, improving the signal-to-noise ratio.

The next steps

Soon several companies signed Technology Cooperation Agreements with JPL and partnered with Fossum and his colleagues to develop the promising new technology. In 1995, Fossum and co-worker Dr. Sabrina Kemeny licensed the technology from CalTech and founded a company called Photobit to develop CMOS sensors. In 1996, Fossum left JPL to work at Photobit full time. The Photobit, team further refined the CMOS technology to get it closer to CCD capabilities, reduce power requirements, and make manufacturing cheaper.

Shortly thereafter, CMOS cameras started to be used in webcams, “pill cams” (small, swallowable devices that incorporate a tiny camera to take thousands of high-resolution images of the digestive tract), and other applications. In 2001 Photobit was acquired by Micron Technology, a larger company that devoted even more resources to development of CMOS technology. With the subsequent explosion of the cell phone industry, by 2013 more than a billion CMOS sensors were manufactured each year, and today that number has grown to about seven billion per year.

Where are these sensors now?

The CMOS technology Dr. Fossum originally developed has not only enabled space science, it has been infused into devices we depend on every day, dramatically and positively transforming many aspects of our lives. Virtually all digital still and video cameras, including those on cell phones, employ them. In addition, CMOS technology is used in automotive electronics, webcams, sports cameras, industrial equipment, security cameras including doorbells, and cinematography cameras, and for medical and dental imaging, among many other applications.

In addition to dominating the commercial and consumer market, CMOS imagers have been used as engineering cameras to enable the entry, descent, and landing of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, in the camera onboard the OCO-3 (Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3) mission that monitors the distribution of carbon dioxide on Earth, and as scientific imagers on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission that is revolutionizing our understanding of the Sun. CMOS imagers are on their way to Jupiter’s moon, Europa, on the agency’s Europa Clipper mission, and a delta-doped ultraviolet version with tailored response is under development for use on the upcoming UVEX (UltraViolet EXplorer) mission that will provide insight into how galaxies and stars evolve.

CMOS imagers are routinely used in monitoring the launch and deployment of CubeSats and SmallSats. They were recently used to monitor the deployment of Pandora, a small satellite that will characterize exoplanet atmospheres and their host stars; BLACKCAT (the Black Hole Coded Aperture Telescope), a small X-ray telescope; and the SPARCS (Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat) mission designed to monitor and characterize the stellar flares of low-mass stars in ultraviolet to provide context for the habitability of exoplanets in their system. NASA is also developing descendants of this technology for use in missions that will search for life beyond Earth like its Habitable Worlds Observatory.

In recognition of the impact this CMOS technology has had, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has named Dr. Fossum the recipient of the 2026 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering “for innovation, development, and commercialization of the complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) active pixel image sensor ‘camera-on-a-chip.’” The NAE bestows this award biennially to honor an engineer “whose accomplishment has significantly impacted society by improving the quality of life, providing the ability to live freely and comfortably, and/or permitting the access to information.”

Sponsoring Organizations: The original efforts at JPL to develop this CMOS technology were funded by JPL and NASA.

The tallest point in South Korea is not located in the Taebaek Mountains that run along the country’s eastern coast. Rather, it is found atop a volcanic peak on Jeju Island, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of the Korean Peninsula. In winter 2026, winds blew past the island in just the right way to send clouds spinning in its wake.

The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image of swirling clouds—and colorful, turbulent water—near Jeju Island on February 19, 2026. The island rises about 1,950 meters (6,400 feet) above the sea surface. At its center is Hallasan, a shield volcano that last erupted in the 11th century and contains a notable network of lava tubes.

The trailing, staggered spirals, called von Kármán vortex streets, form when a fluid passes a tall, isolated, stationary object. If winds are too weak, clouds simply flow smoothly past, and if winds are too strong, vortices cannot maintain their shape. In the sweet spot, with winds between 18 and 54 kilometers (11 and 34 miles) per hour, clouds trace the airflow in patterns of counterrotating vortices. Though the underlying physics is the same, the appearance of the vortices can vary: sometimes they look wispy, as they do here, and other times they form more sharply defined, parallel rows, as they did at the same location the previous day.

The seas, as well as the atmosphere, were turbulent near Jeju Island in mid-February. To the west, a large plume of sediment coming off the coast of China’s Jiangsu province turned waters murky. While brown, sediment-laden water is present in the shallow nearshore area year-round, expansive plumes like this one are common during winter. Research suggests that seasonal changes in currents and vertical mixing of the water column may account for the large winter plumes.

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

References & Resources

• Global Volcanism Program, Halla. Accessed February 23, 2026.
• NASA Earth Observatory (2024, February 24) Sediment Fans Out Over the Yangtze Bank. Accessed February 23, 2026.
• NASA Earth Observatory (2008, November 16) Cheju Island, South Korea. Accessed February 23, 2026.
• UNESCO World Heritage Convention (2018) Jeju Volcanic Island and Lava Tubes. Accessed February 23, 2026.
• Weather Underground (2019, December) Whirls, Curls, and Little Swirls: The Science Behind Von Karman Vortices. Accessed February 23, 2026.

Spanish startup Multiverse Computing has released a new version of its HyperNova 60B model on Hugging Face that, it says, bests Mistral's model.

Apple complies with new age assurance laws in the U.S. and abroad, including those that block users from downloading apps aimed at adults.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the company’s employees have gone all in on AI, going so far as to build a chatbot of him that they use to practice their pitches.

Stripe might be looking to buy PayPal, or parts of it, per early reports.

Peter Williams, the former head of U.S. hacking tools maker L3Harris Trenchant, was sentenced to seven years in prison for stealing and selling his former company’s hacking and surveillance tools to a Russian firm.