Trending stocks this week as chip selloff, earnings dominate Wall Street (SP500:)  Seeking Alpha

Penguins ticket prices reportedly trending down  Yahoo Sports

Lakers Trending Up, Trending Down: Summer League Risers and Fallers  Sports Illustrated

Michigan football trending for elite legacy recruit out of Ohio  Wolverines Wire

Zara's 'death pants' are trending because people keep tripping on them  CBC

1. "Honestly, it's still getting worse" - Valve Steam Machine engineer says component prices are still rising, potentially paving the way for a price increase  Eurogamer.net
2. Valve Reportedly Sells 12-15K Steam Machine Units Per Week  TechPowerUp
3. 'It's Still Getting Worse' — Steam Machine Engineers at Valve Aren't Optimistic About Where the AI-Driven Memory Crisis Will Be in 'Three to Six Months'  IGN
4. Valve’s Steam Machine Brings the Best and Worst of PC Gaming to the Living Room  WIRED
5. Valve expect component prices to continue getting worse  GamingOnLinux

1. iOS 27 makes your iPhone faster in 30+ ways  9to5Mac
2. Siri AI beta available now: 7 things to try  Mashable
3. Regretting iOS 27 Public Beta? How To Downgrade Your iPhone To iOS 26  Forbes
4. You can get Apple’s iOS 27 on your iPhone today. Try these 5 features first  Fast Company
5. Siri AI vs. Old Siri on Apple Watch: It Wasn’t Even Close  CNET

1. LG Monitors Fill PCs With Adware, and It’s Not Just Recent Displays  Gizmodo
2. LG’s monitors come with an unwanted addition for Windows: McAfee pop-up ads  The Verge
3. 'Pretty revolting': LG's TV and gaming monitors are getting huge backlash from users due to reportedly installing PC software without asking you, and insisting that you get consent from your guests so your TV may record their conversations  TechRadar
4. LG monitors are silently installing adware on your Windows PC  Android Authority
5. Your new LG monitor might come with unwanted adware  Phandroid

1. Samsung confirms 1,600-nit laptop OLED panels for Lenovo, ASUS, Dell and MSI  VideoCardz.com
2. Samsung Display Sets a New Brightness Standard for Premium Laptops with VESA DisplayHDR™ True Black 1400 Tandem OLED  Samsung Display Newsroom
3. Samsung now supplying new VESA DisplayHDR True Black 1400 laptop displays — Lenovo, Asus, Dell, and MSI set to launch portables with the first 1,600 nits tandem OLED panels  Tom's Hardware
4. Samsung Begins Supplying VESA DisplayHDR True Black 1400 OLED Panels For Laptops  Wccftech
5. Samsung Unveils 'OBLYX,' a New OLED Panel Brand for Gaming Laptops, in China  Inven Global

1. Here’s an Official Pixel 11 Pro From Google  Droid Life
2. Pixel 11 Series Specs: Storage, RAM, Displays, Battery, More  Droid Life
3. Google releases first Pixel 11 teaser and shows Pixel Glow [Video]  9to5Google
4. More deleted Pixel 11 Amazon listings reveal full US pricing and specs  Android Authority
5. Google Pixel 11 Specs Leak Ahead of Next Month’s Unveiling  IGN

Fifty years ago, NASA’s Viking 1 and 2 landers made the first successful landings on Mars, opening a new era in planetary exploration. Behind that achievement was a team at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, whose steady leadership and technical expertise helped turn an ambitious idea into a mission that reshaped how we explore other worlds.

Building the Blueprint for Mars

NASA selected Langley in 1968 to lead the massive Viking project, the first U.S. mission designed to land safely on Mars and search for signs of life. Project Manager James S. Martin Jr. set the tone from the start. He wanted clear priorities, tough engineering reviews, and the discipline to test every system until the team was confident it would perform on Mars.

Entry, Descent, and Landing

Langley engineers faced a challenge unlike anything attempted before: slowing a spacecraft plunging into the Martian atmosphere at more than 10,000 miles per hour. So they leaned into their expertise in atmospheric entry aerodynamics, heat shielding, and parachute technology. Their work produced the protective aeroshell and heat shield, as well as the supersonic parachute. These systems didn’t come from theory alone — they were shaped by years of wind‑tunnel tests, analysis, and problem‑solving. Langley still excels at entry, descent, and landing systems today.

Science and Safety, Hand in Hand

Langley also helped create a new approach to finding safe landing sites. Teams combined images from Viking’s orbiters with radar data from Earth‑based observatories to identify regions that balanced scientific value with engineering safety — a method now standard for Mars missions.

Viking also changed how mission teams operated. Engineers and scientists adopted the sol — a Martian day slightly longer than 24 hours — to keep daily work aligned with local time on Mars, a practice still used for surface missions.

A Mission Reborn: From Voyager to Viking

Viking grew out of a pivotal program shift. The earlier Voyager Mars lander concept was canceled because it was too costly and risky, relying on two large landers stacked on a single Saturn V rocket. Langley helped chart a more realistic path forward, pairing each lander with its own orbiter and using Titan IIIE‑Centaur rockets instead. The new design preserved scientific ambition while making the mission achievable.

A Legacy That Endures

Viking provided an early model for how NASA could explore the solar system: scout with orbiters, certify landing sites with real data, and land only with systems tested well beyond their limits. That “planetary playbook,” shaped heavily by Langley, provided a guide for future Mars missions like Curiosity and Perseverance.

The two landers returned thousands of images and groundbreaking data, revealing Mars as a world with weather, geologic history, and complexity that scientists are still studying today. And while no human has ever set foot on the Martian surface, Viking proved that reaching another planet — and working on it ­­— was within reach.

As the 50th anniversary of those landings arrives, Langley’s influence is unmistakable. The center continues to advance new entry, descent, and landing technologies, and explore concepts that will support future human explorers. The same spirit that guided Viking still drives the work happening in Hampton today — steady, curious, and always looking toward the next horizon.

“Touchdown, we have touchdown!” At 5:12 a.m. PDT, July 20, 1976, mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory erupted in cheers as they learned that the Viking 1 lander had survived its descent through the thin Martian atmosphere. Forty minutes later, the lander’s first image began to appear on their monitors, slowly forming line by line from left to right. For the first time, humans were able to see Mars’s rocky terrain from its surface.

Dr. Thomas Mutch, leader of the Viking lander imaging team, described the moment: “I studied the black screen, waiting for that narrow strip that will signal the first few lines of the first picture. And it appeared. A sliver of electronic magic. Areas of brightness and darkness. The picture begins to fill the screen. Rocks and sand are visible and — finally at the far right — one of the spacecraft foot pads, a symbolic artifact that stamps our accomplishment with the sign of reality. Time and time again I repeat, ‘It’s incredible.’”

Fifty years ago today, the Viking 1 lander became NASA’s first robot to explore Mars’s surface and begin the search for signs of life in our solar system. Viking 1 was joined six weeks later by its twin lander, Viking 2, which explored a different region of Mars, while two mission orbiters that delivered the landers to the Red Planet continued to collect data from space and helped relay communications to Earth.

Learn more about what Viking found and NASA’s legacy of discovery on Mars at Viking: 50 Years on Mars.

Image credit: NASA/JPL

Seattle, Washington—sometimes known as the “Emerald City”—was glimmering in the morning sunlight when an astronaut aboard the International Space Station took this photo on June 16, 2026. The city’s parks and tree-filled neighborhoods lend a lush, green look to the metropolis, while tall buildings downtown cast long shadows and ships navigate surrounding waterways.

The broad contours of the city’s landscape and the water around it owe their shape to the advance and retreat of glaciers during the last ice age. Between roughly 18,000 and 16,000 years ago, the Puget lobe of the Cordilleran ice sheet covered the area in a mass of ice up to 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) thick. The glacier scoured the basins now occupied by Puget Sound and the region’s lakes. 

The glacier left its mark above water, too. Several of Seattle’s notorious hills (of which there are seven or more, depending on who’s counting) are drumlins. These elongated mounds of glacial debris run north-south, parallel to the direction of the ice’s movement. East-west travelers in the city, facing challenging ups and downs, may attest to this topographic trend.

The ice also transported large boulders called glacial erratics from more northerly locations and deposited them around the region. A particularly large erratic, the Wedgwood Rock, stands about 20 feet (6 meters) tall and draws its name from the North Seattle neighborhood in which it rests.

In more recent times, humans have undertaken projects to rework the topography. Notable alterations include leveling Denny Hill north of downtown and filling in tideflats at the mouth of the Duwamish River south of downtown, which created around 1,300 acres of new land. Seattle’s professional sports stadiums sit atop this fill.

This photo was acquired after several development projects to update waterfront infrastructure downtown, initiated in 2010, were completed. These include a new ferry dock and terminal, a rebuilt seawall, and a tunnel to replace an above-ground highway and create more inviting public access to the waterfront.

Some replumbing of the region’s waterways is apparent from the astronaut’s perspective, as well. In the 1910s, the Army Corps of Engineers built canals on either side of Lake Union to connect Puget Sound (an inlet of the Pacific Ocean) with Lake Washington. Starting in 1916, the Montlake Cut connected Lake Washington to Lake Union, and the Ballard Locks, northwest of Lake Union, began raising and lowering watercraft between the freshwater lakes and tidal Puget Sound. As a result of this project, Lake Washington’s water level dropped about 9 feet (3 meters) and ceased draining from its natural outlet at its southern end.

Today, the waters in and around Seattle support many uses: container ships, cruise ships, car and passenger ferries, floatplanes, and recreational craft ply the sound and lakes. And as for Seattle’s emerald nickname, pockets of old-growth forest still exist within city limits, containing centuries-old trees such as Douglas fir, Western red cedar, and Western hemlock. Seattleites often spot wildlife such as bald eagles, coyotes, and sea lions in the city’s various habitats.

Astronaut photograph ISS074-E-723719 was acquired on June 16, 2026, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 560 millimeters. It is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 74 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Lindsey Doermann.

References & Resources

• Booth, D.B., et al. (2003) The cordilleran ice sheet. Development in Quaternary Science, 1, 17-43.
• Cascade PBS (2025, January 9) The Giant Ice Sheet That Shaped Seattle. Accessed July 17, 2026.
• City of Seattle (2026) Waterfront Seattle Program. Accessed July 17, 2026.
• HistoryLink.org (2017, February 5) Lake Washington Ship Canal (Seattle). Accessed July 17, 2026.
• HistoryLink.org (2016, December 30) Cedar-Sammamish Watershed. Accessed July 17, 2026.
• Williams, D.B. (2017) Too High and Too Steep. University of Washington Press.

NASA researchers recently put a new wing design, appearing long and thin with a lightweight structural design, through a series of grueling tests to find its structural limits. What they found left them encouraged about the wing’s potential, even when they pushed it past its intended limits.

The 15-foot Structural Wing Experiment Evaluating Truss-bracing (SWEET-15) test article is part of NASA’s research to develop future ultra-efficient aircraft. The design incorporates a long wing supported by an aerodynamic strut, based on NASA’s earlier Transonic Truss‑Braced Wing concept.

The research team is working to understand whether SWEET-15’s design and its new lightweight structural designs could help commercial airliners save fuel. But first, they need to understand how it behaves under the kinds of force wings experience in flight.

The SWEET-15 design originated with combining five different advanced composite manufacturing and assembly technologies that enabled the novel structural design. The 15-foot-long test article was then designed and fabricated at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, before traveling to NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, for testing.

Over several months, NASA engineers intentionally bent the test wing in the Flight Loads Laboratory at NASA Armstrong. Numerous strain and load sensors, including fiber-optic strain sensors, were placed throughout the structure to track how the wing responded as forces increased.

The data from the sensors confirmed the predictions made by NASA’s computer models. According to initial findings, the wing withstood the anticipated in-flight forces without issue. The results provided the team with confidence in the new manufacturing approaches and methods for connecting wing parts used in SWEET-15, which could support future efficient aircraft designs. The manufacturing approach, developed at NASA Langley used the Integrated Structural Assembly of Advanced Composites robot, aims to produce lighter and stronger composite structures for aerospace vehicles.

The test concluded with a deliberate test-to-failure, where engineers increased loads beyond the wing’s design limits to determine how and where it would fail. The structure ultimately failed at roughly 127% of its design limit load, with visible damage appearing near the back edge of the wing and in the upper wing cover. This element of testing provided valuable insight into how the joints connecting the wing to its main strut and a secondary one, called a jury strut, behave under forces beyond the expected flight envelope.

This marks the first time a representative composite truss-braced wing configuration has undergone this type of structural evaluation.  It was made possible only through NASA collaboration across centers and projects, with researchers utilizing agency resources such as the Fiber Optic Sensing System developed to gather data on both aircraft and spacecraft.

To prepare for the testing, engineers at NASA Langley designed, analyzed, and manufactured the wing and completed safety preparations and lab setup.

Researchers will now analyze the data collected during testing to inform future airframe designs and support NASA’s ongoing efforts to develop more efficient aviation technologies.

The work is being conducted through NASA’s Subsonic Flight Demonstrator project in the agency’s Research Technology Mission Directorate. The successful testing of multiple innovative components marks a milestone in NASA’s aeronautics research.

To learn more, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/aeronautics/

Description

This composite of images taken by NASA’s Psyche mission shows the crescent of Mars grow as the spacecraft approached the planet for a gravity assist from May 2 to May 15, 2026. The series begins with the smallest crescent at the center of the of the image as Mars is farthest from the spacecraft, and progressively grows as the spacecraft gets closer. After these views were captured by the spacecraft’s multispectral imager instrument, Mars began to overfill the field of view as Psyche made close approach with the planet and captured a series of high-resolution images of the surface.

Because Psyche approached Mars from a high phase angle, the planet appeared as a thin crescent in the days running up to the close approach, lit by sunlight reflecting off its surface. Using these views of the approach, close approach, and departure from Mars, the Psyche team compiled a stunning time-lapse of its entire Mars encounter.

For more information about NASA’s Psyche mission, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/psyche/

Adobe's Project Indigo can now remove all kinds of backgrounds from photos you snap using the app

Two critical security flaws in WordPress’ software have given hackers the chance to remotely take over tens of millions of websites, according to an estimate by a cybersecurity researcher.

YouTube has updated its monetization policies to more clearly define the kinds of AI-generated and low-quality videos that can’t earn ad revenue.

AI infrastructure company Infinity announced Monday a $15 million raise at a $100 million valuation from investors including Touring Capital, Principal VC, and researchers from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.  

Edinburgh-based tech firm Craneware said customer data was stolen during a cyberattack. The company makes software that thousands of U.S. hospitals, pharmacies, and clinics rely on for billing patients, potentially exposing health data.