On February 1, Robert Tinney, the illustrator whose airbrushed cover paintings defined the look and feel of pioneering computer magazine Byte for over a decade, died at age 78 in Baker, Louisiana, according to a memorial posted on his official website.

As the primary cover artist for Byte from 1975 to the late 1980s, Tinney became one of the first illustrators to give the abstract world of personal computing a coherent visual language, translating topics like artificial intelligence, networking, and programming into vivid, surrealist-influenced paintings that a generation of computer enthusiasts grew up with.

Tinney went on to paint more than 80 covers for Byte, working almost entirely in airbrushed Designers Gouache , a medium he chose for its opaque, intense colors and smooth finish. He said the process of creating each cover typically took about a week of painting once a design was approved, following phone conversations with editors about each issue's theme. He cited René Magritte and M.C. Escher as two of his favorite artists, and fans often noticed their influence in his work.

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A little more than two months ago, a Rocket Lab employee called the Stennis Space Center Fire Department from the nearby A3 test stand. There was a grass fire where Archimedes engines undergo testing. Could they please send personnel over?

According to the fire station's Nov. 30 dispatcher log, the employee said, "The fire started during a test when an anomaly caused an electrical box to catch fire."

Satellite imagery from before and after the anomaly appear to show that the roof had been blown off the left test cell, one of two at the test stand at the historic NASA facility in southern Mississippi. One person with knowledge of the anomaly said, "The characterization of this as an electrical fire doesn't reflect what actually occurred. This was a catastrophic engine explosion that resulted in significant infrastructure damage."

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The pre-Inca Chincha Kingdom (circa 1000-1400 CE), along Peru's southern coast, was one of the most wealthy and influential of its time before falling to the Inca and Spanish empires. Scientists have long puzzled over the foundation for that prosperity, and it seems one critical factor was bird poop, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

“Seabird guano may seem trivial, yet our study suggests this potent resource could have significantly contributed to sociopolitical and economic change in the Peruvian Andes,” said co-author Jacob Bongers , a digital archaeologist at the University of Sydney. “Guano dramatically boosted the production of maize (corn), and this agricultural surplus crucially helped fuel the Chincha Kingdom’s economy, driving their trade, wealth, population growth and regional influence, and shaped their strategic alliance with the Inca Empire. In ancient Andean cultures, fertiliser was power.”

Last November, Bongers co-authored a paper detailing evidence supporting the hypothesis that the mysterious "Band of Holes" on Mount Sierpe in the Andes might have been an ancient marketplace. Aerial photographs from the 1930s first revealed that long row of around 5,200 precisely aligned holes, seemingly organized into blocked sections, most likely constructed by the Chincha Kingdom. Scholars had suggested various hypotheses for what the site's purpose may have been: defense, storage, or accounting, perhaps, or maybe to collect water and capture fog for local gardens. But nobody had any strong evidence for those suggestions.

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On Wednesday, former OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig published a guest essay in The New York Times announcing that she resigned from the company on Monday, the same day OpenAI began testing advertisements inside ChatGPT. Hitzig, an economist and published poet who holds a junior fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows, spent two years at OpenAI helping shape how its AI models were built and priced. She wrote that OpenAI's advertising strategy risks repeating the same mistakes that Facebook made a decade ago.

"I once believed I could help the people building A.I. get ahead of the problems it would create," Hitzig wrote. "This week confirmed my slow realization that OpenAI seems to have stopped asking the questions I'd joined to help answer."

Hitzig did not call advertising itself immoral. Instead, she argued that the nature of the data at stake makes ChatGPT ads especially risky. Users have shared medical fears, relationship problems, and religious beliefs with the chatbot, she wrote, often "because people believed they were talking to something that had no ulterior agenda." She called this accumulated record of personal disclosures "an archive of human candor that has no precedent."

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Since its release in the fall of 2021 , Microsoft's Windows 11 has received an "annual feature update" in the second half of every year. These feature updates sometimes include new Windows features and other changes that are too large to roll out in a typical monthly Windows Update, and users need to upgrade to new ones to keep getting security patches and other features. The currently supported versions are Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 , released in the fall of 2024 and 2025, respectively.

This week, Microsoft disrupted that update cadence by announcing more information on Windows 11 26H1, which is best described not as an update to Windows 11 but as another version of the operating system entirely. That's because 26H1 is a "scoped" release intended exclusively for new PCs, starting with those based on Qualcomm's recently announced Snapdragon X2 Elite chips .

Microsoft's support page explains why this release is strange: It won't be released broadly to other Windows 11 PCs, which should continue to use either 24H2 or 25H2. PCs running 24H2 or 25H2 will never be offered an update to version 26H1, though testers in the Windows Insider Program's early access Canary channel are able to install it to other PCs if they want. (Build numbers for Windows 11 26H1 start with 28000, compared to 26100 for 24H2 and 26200 for 25H2.)

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Like most cloud-enabled home security cameras, Google's Nest products don't provide long-term storage unless you pay a monthly fee. That video may not vanish into the digital aether right on time, though. Investigators involved with the high-profile abduction of Nancy Guthrie have released video from Guthrie's Nest doorbell camera—video that was believed to have been deleted because Guthrie wasn't paying for the service.

Google's cameras connect to the recently upgraded Home Premium subscription service. For $10 per month, you get 30 days of stored events, and $20 gets you 60 days of events with 10 days of the full video. If you don't pay anything, Google only saves three hours of event history. After that, the videos are deleted, at least as far as the user is concerned. Newer Nest cameras have limited local storage that can cache clips for a few hours in case connectivity drops out, but there is no option for true local storage. Guthrie's camera was reportedly destroyed by the perpetrators.

Expired videos are no longer available to the user, and Google won't restore them even if you later upgrade to a premium account. However, that doesn't mean the data is truly gone. Nancy Guthrie was abducted from her home in the early hours of February 1, and at first, investigators said there was no video of the crime because the doorbell camera was not on a paid account. Yet, video showing a masked individual fiddling with the camera was published on February 10 .

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The National Labor Relations Board abandoned a Biden-era complaint against SpaceX after a finding that the agency does not have jurisdiction over Elon Musk's space company. The US labor board said SpaceX should instead be regulated under the Railway Labor Act, which governs labor relations at railroad and airline companies.

The Railway Labor Act is enforced by a separate agency, the National Mediation Board, and has different rules than the National Labor Relations Act enforced by the NLRB. For example , the Railway Labor Act has an extensive dispute-resolution process that makes it difficult for railroad and airline employees to strike. Employers regulated under the Railway Labor Act are exempt from the National Labor Relations Act.

In January 2024, an NLRB regional director alleged in a complaint that SpaceX illegally fired eight employees who, in an open letter , criticized CEO Musk as a “frequent source of embarrassment." The complaint sought reinstatement of the employees, back pay, and letters of apology to the fired employees.

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Apple has just released the latest major updates for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26 Tahoe, and all the other operating systems it released back in September of 2025. The 26.3 updates for these operating systems are fairly mild, focusing mostly on bug fixes and security patches, but Apple is adding a handful of iPhone features designed to make it easier to use third-party devices in Apple's ecosystem.

The first is a "transfer to Android" feature that will facilitate switching away from Apple's phones into the Android ecosystem. Apple offers to transfer "photos, messages, notes, apps, and more," as well as the user's phone number, but won't transfer things like Bluetooth pairing information or sensitive data from the Health app.

Whether third-party apps can have their data transferred is likely tied to the AppMigrationKit developer framework that Apple added in iOS 26.1. Apps using this framework can import and export data to and from other devices and also access and download content the app has stored in the cloud. Apple notes that AppMigrationKit only functions for transfers from an Apple device to a non-Apple device; Apple already has several systems in place for preserving and transferring data and settings when upgrading from one iPhone to another.

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China's space program, striving to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030, carried out a test flight of a new reusable booster and crew capsule late Tuesday (US time), and the results were spectacular.

The demonstration "marks a significant breakthrough in the development of [China's] manned lunar exploration program," the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement. China and the United States are racing to accomplish the next human landing on the Moon in a competition for national prestige and lunar resources. The Long March 10 rocket and Mengzhou spacecraft, both tested Tuesday, are core elements of China's lunar architecture.

The launch of a subscale version of the Long March 10 rocket, still in development, provided engineers with an opportunity to verify the performance of an important part of the new Mengzhou capsule's safety system. The test began with liftoff of the Long March 10 booster from a new launch pad at Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan Island, China's southernmost province, at 10 pm EST Tuesday (03:00 UTC or 11 am Beijing time Wednesday).

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