Why James Talarico is trending  CNN

What’s Trending Online: Punch the Monkey, Prom Dresses, More  TODAY.com

House Ethics Committee to investigate Rep. Tony Gonzales amidst affair allegations | TRENDING  The Hill

SF Giants observations: Who’s trending up, down through 10 Cactus League games?  The Mercury News

Husker247 Daily: How Husker Basketball is trending after West Coast swing  247Sports

1. Tech stocks today: Apple unveils low-cost MacBook Neo, CoreWeave inks deal with Perplexity  Yahoo Finance
2. MacBook Neo  Apple
3. Apple Is in Its Affordable Era. Sort Of.  The New York Times
4. Apple announces MacBook Neo, its most affordable laptop ever  CNBC
5. MacBook Neo versus an old MacBook Air: good luck  The Verge

1. MacBook Neo, iPhone 17e, and everything else Apple announced this week  TechCrunch
2. Apple introduces iPhone 17e  Apple
3. Everything you need to know about Apple’s ‘big week’ of product launches  Chicago Tribune
4. Apple Debuts iPhone 17e and M4 iPad Air, Starting Product Wave  Bloomberg
5. Everything Apple just announced: iPhone 17e, MacBook Neo, Studio Displays  Mashable

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2. Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra's Screen Isn’t as Good as First Claimed  PCMag
3. Samsung Galaxy S26 Display Specs: 8-Bit Not 10-Bit  Gadget Hacks
4. The Galaxy S26 series doesn't feature 10-bit displays  SamMobile
5. Galaxy S28 Ultra Tipped for 10-bit Display Upgrade  findarticles.com

1. Google Pixel 10a review: Better than you’ve heard  9to5Google
2. Google Pixel 10a review: The sidegrade  Ars Technica
3. Google’s Pixel 10a Is Too Iterative to Recommend Even at $499  Bloomberg
4. My Pixel 10A Review: An Entry Point to Android for iPhone Owners  CNET
5. Best preorder deal: Pre-order Google Pixel 10a and get a free $100 Amazon gift card  Mashable

1. Google’s latest Pixel drop allows Gemini to order groceries for you and more  The Verge
2. Let Gemini handle your multi-step daily tasks on Android.  blog.google
3. AI is making waves everywhere, except where you’d expect it most. Two giant tech companies are working to change that  CNN
4. [MWC 2026] Galaxy AI Expands Across the Ecosystem at Samsung’s Booth  Samsung Global Newsroom
5. Perplexity will be integrated as an AI agent in the new Galaxy devices  The Jerusalem Post

NASA’s Advanced Air Vehicles Program (AAVP) studies, evaluates, and develops technologies and capabilities for new aircraft systems and explores far-future concepts for revolutionary air travel improvements. AAVP develops technologies for all flight regimes from hover to hypersonic to enable safe, new aircraft that are faster, quieter, and more fuel efficient.

AAVP develops a broad range of technologies that maintain U.S. leadership in aerospace, benefitting the nation’s economy and quality of life. AAVP’s research primes the technology pipeline, bolstering U.S. competitiveness.

For subsonic transport aircraft, AAVP accelerates development of key technologies to ensure they will be ready by the late 2020s to transition into U.S. industry’s next-generation single-aisle transport aircraft. AAVP also explores high-risk, high-payoff concepts for future generations of aircraft. The program engages with partners from industry, academia, and other government agencies to maintain a broad perspective on technology solutions to aviation’s challenges, to pursue mutually beneficial collaborations, and to leverage opportunities for effective technology transition.

AAVP Projects

High Speed Flight (HSF)

Hi-Rate Composite Aircraft Manufacturing (HiCAM)

Subsonic Vehicles Technologies and Tools (SVTT)

Legacy AAVP Projects

Advanced Composites (ACP)

Advanced Air Transport Technology (AATT)

Commercial Supersonic Technology (CST)

Hybrid Thermally Efficient Core (HyTEC)

Hypersonic Technology (HT)

Revolutionary Vertical Lift Technology (RVLT)

For the first time, a young, Sun-like star has been caught red-handed blowing bubbles in the galaxy, by astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The bubble – called an “astrosphere” – completely surrounds the juvenile star in this image released on Feb. 23, 2026. Winds from the star’s surface are blowing up the bubble and filling it with hot gas as it expands into much cooler galactic gas and dust surrounding the star. The Sun has a similar bubble around it, which scientists call the heliosphere, created by the solar wind. It extends far beyond the planets in our solar system and protects Earth from cosmic radiation.

This is the first image of an astrosphere astronomers have obtained around a star similar to the Sun. It shows slightly extended emission, rather than a single point of light as seen for other such stars.

Read more about this discovery.

Text credit: Lee Mohon

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/John Hopkins Univ./C.M. Lisse et al.; Infrared: NASA/ESA/STIS; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk

Listen to this audio excerpt from Paul Boehm, Orion crew support and thermal systems functional area manager:

As the Artemis II astronauts fly around the Moon, they’ll rely on systems inside the Orion spacecraft to live, work, and keep them safe during their mission. At NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Paul Boehm, crew support and thermal systems functional area manager in the Orion Crew and Service Module Office, leads this work.

Boehm oversees life support systems, flight equipment, and Orion Crew Survival System suits worn during launch and re-entry. Developed, designed, and built by Boehm’s team, these systems are set to fly for the first time with crew aboard Orion on Artemis II.

Sustaining the crew in the harsh environment of deep space is no simple task, especially when it comes to a complex system like the environmental control and life support system (ECLSS).

Developing these systems for Orion’s deep space missions to the Moon poses special challenges, such as mass and volume requirements faced when launching heavy spacecraft, and a need for systems that operate reliably without resupply.

“Orion’s ECLSS is unique for Artemis missions because we’re going into deep space,” said Boehm. “It’s a lot longer of a trip that you cannot return quickly from, like a mission on the International Space Station, which is only a couple hours away. Therefore, we try to make a lot of the life support systems regenerative, so you don’t have to carry a lot of consumables, and we also try to make them simpler.”

The system also needs hardware to handle a range of variables that may come its way during the mission, according to Boehm.

“You’re dealing with fluids, you’re dealing with electrical, electronic, and electromechanical components — and you’re also dealing with the human variable of different metabolic situations. Everybody’s different. The ECLSS takes all that into account.”

It’s a challenge that Boehm welcomes and has worked toward throughout his career at NASA. Since starting at NASA Johnson 37 years ago, he has served in disciplines that work directly with crew members, including supporting the astronaut office, extravehicular activities for the space shuttle and space station, and the Orion Program since 2011.

“And so, when I had the opportunity to work on Orion, ECLSS, and crew systems, I said that’s where I want to go, because that way I’ll still be able to help and be directly involved with supporting the crew,” Boehm said. “I’ve thoroughly enjoyed that.”

As NASA prepares to send crew members around the Moon on Artemis II, seeing Orion and its systems carry the crew will be the marker of a career that’s contributed to moving the future of human spaceflight forward.

“I think that’s why everybody is here working toward this mission — we know it’s for the betterment of humanity,” Boehm said. “Moving things forward for the next generation is something that we all take to heart, and that’s what we’re trying to really do here. We are taking the first step in making history with sending the crew back to the Moon.”

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and NASA announced NASA Force on Wednesday, a dedicated talent track within the US Tech Force initiative designed to recruit and deploy the nation’s top engineers and technologists to support America’s space program.

NASA Force will identify and place high-impact technical talent into mission-critical roles supporting NASA’s exploration, research, and advanced technology priorities, ensuring the agency has the cutting-edge expertise needed to maintain U.S. leadership in space.

Tech Force, led by OPM, was established to recruit elite technical professionals into federal service, embed them at partner agencies to modernize systems, accelerate innovation, and strengthen mission delivery. NASA Force represents a focused expansion of that effort, tailored to the unique technical demands of space exploration and aerospace research.

“America’s leadership in space depends on extraordinary talent,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “NASA Force will help us attract the next generation of innovators and technical experts who are ready to solve the toughest challenges in exploration, science, and aerospace technology. This partnership strengthens our workforce and helps ensure the United States remains the global leader in space.”

“NASA represents the pinnacle of American innovation,” said OPM Director Scott Kupor. “Through NASA Force, we are ensuring the world’s premier space agency has access to the very best engineers and technologists in the country. If you want to work on the most consequential technical challenges anywhere in the world, this is your call to serve.”

The launch of NASA Force builds on the growing momentum of the US Tech Force initiative, which has attracted strong interest from early- and mid-career technologists eager to apply their skills to public service.

Applications will be live soon and those interested are encouraged to follow @USTechForce on X for updates.

To learn more about NASA’s mission, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov

-end-

Bethany Stevens / Cheryl Warner 
Headquarters, Washington 
202-358-1600 
bethany.c.stevens@nasa.gov / cheryl.m.warner@nasa.gov  

In a first, a space mission led by NASA and France has tracked Earth’s rivers swelling and shrinking from month to month over the course of a year and found significantly less of a swing than previous model-based estimates. A record drought in the Amazon likely influenced the tally made by the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite. The findings also reveal new details about the underwater topography of the world’s river channels.

Launched in 2022, SWOT is a collaboration between NASA and the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales). It is the first satellite capable of surveying not only the ocean, but also nearly all the world’s lakes and rivers with ultraprecision. While SWOT does not measure the absolute volume of rivers, it can track their width, surface height, and slope changing over time.

Traditionally, hydrologists have relied on models to calculate river storage changes, or they multiplied altimeter estimates of height by optical or radar estimates of width. In contrast, SWOT measures both dimensions, height and width, at the same time using its sensitive Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) instrument to bounce microwaves off the water’s surface and time how long the signal takes to return. The new study, published Wednesday in Nature, analyzed nearly 1.6 million such observations.

The analysis paints a picture of some 127,000 river segments rising and falling between October 2023 and September 2024. In aggregate, river volumes varied by almost 83 trillion gallons (313 cubic kilometers). That’s about 28% less of a swing than the lowest previous estimates, a result likely skewed by extremely dry conditions during that period in the Amazon, home to Earth’s largest river by volume.

New way to map river channels 

Even gripped by drought, the Amazon River varied more than any other during the year, gaining and losing more than 45 trillion gallons (172 cubic kilometers) — enough to cover the entire state of California in more than a foot of water.

More surprisingly, the world’s longest river, the Nile, varied less than expected, with volumes changing by only 2.2 trillion gallons (8.5 cubic kilometers). Possible explanations include upstream damming and severe drought, along with challenges that come with learning to work with a new satellite instrument.

Cedric David, who leads the SWOT research team that conducted the work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said the findings are a first look and the role of large floodplain dynamics remain to be fully determined. Still, such an accounting has been elusive until now. River gauges are sparse in areas, and some channels too remote for boat and ground surveys. Longstanding questions, such as how fast do rivers flow and how much rainwater and snowmelt runs into them, have added to the uncertainty.

“We’re starting to untangle some of the really tough questions SWOT was built for,” David said. “This is just the beginning.”

Tracking rivers as they swell and shrink is also helping scientists visualize something that can be challenging to survey in person: the underlying shape of riverbanks and beds. Such contours influence everything from shipping to flooding but have remained largely unmapped in many places, noted Arnaud Cerbelaud, a postdoctoral research fellow at JPL who co-led the study.

The new SWOT data provides a window into river channels ranging from concave to convex, steep to gentle, and stable to highly variable. In the Amazon, Mississippi, Orinoco, Yangtze, Ganges, Mekong and Yenisei rivers, for example, observed water levels vary by more than 32 feet (10 meters) from peak to trough.

“The implications go far beyond hydrology and will help us understand how water moves through the global Earth system,” Cerbelaud said.

More about SWOT

Launched in December 2022 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, SWOT is now in its operations phase, collecting data that will be used for research and other purposes.

The SWOT satellite was jointly developed by NASA and CNES, with contributions from the CSA (Canadian Space Agency), and the UK Space Agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California, leads the U.S. component of the project. For the flight system payload, NASA provided the KaRIn instrument, a GPS science receiver, a laser retroreflector, a two-beam microwave radiometer, and NASA instrument operations. NASA partners at CNES provided the Doppler Orbitography and Radioposition Integrated by Satellite system, the dual frequency Poseidon altimeter (developed by Thales Alenia Space), the KaRIn radio-frequency subsystem (together with Thales Alenia Space and with support from the UK Space Agency), the satellite platform, and ground operations. The KaRIn high-power transmitter assembly was provided by CSA. NASA provided the launch vehicle and the agency’s Launch Services Program, based at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, managed the associated launch services.

To learn more about SWOT, visit:

https://swot.jpl.nasa.gov

News Media Contacts

Andrew Wang / Andrew Good 
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-379-6874 / 818-393-2433
andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov 

Written by Sally Younger 

2026-014

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