Tuesday, February 17, 2026

Samsung Electronics has become the first company to begin mass production and commercial shipment of HBM4 memory chips, achieving data transfer speeds of 11.7Gbps and memory bandwidth of up to 3.3TB/s per stack—a 2.7x improvement over the previous generation.^[1]

A Cornell physicist has calculated that the universe may end in a 'big crunch' approximately 20 billion years from now, based on new data from major dark-energy observatories suggesting the cosmos will reach its maximum size in about 11 billion years before beginning to contract.^[2]

South Korea's Choi Gaon, 17, won the women's snowboard halfpipe at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, becoming the first Korean athlete to win an Olympic gold medal in snow sports and the youngest snowboarding Olympic champion in history after recovering from a dramatic first-run crash.^[3]

Scientists at HKUST have developed a new calcium-ion battery design that delivers high performance without lithium, potentially opening the door to safer, more sustainable energy storage for renewable power grids and electric vehicles.^[4]

NASA's SpaceX Crew-12 mission has docked with the International Space Station, delivering NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev for a long-duration mission aboard the orbiting laboratory.^[5]

NASA is targeting February 19 for the second wet dress rehearsal of the Artemis II rocket ahead of the agency's mission to send astronauts around the Moon, following repairs to ground support equipment after a partial fueling test on February 12.^[6]

Researchers at Auburn University using NASA's Swift Observatory have detected water for the first time from an interstellar comet, finding that 3I/ATLAS is releasing water at about 40 kilograms per second—at a distance where most comets would normally remain inactive.^[7]

Korean scientists have successfully recreated ancient 'sea silk,' a legendary golden fabric prized since Roman times, using clams from modern coastal waters, and discovered its glow comes from microscopic structures that bend light rather than dyes.^[8]

Researchers have proposed a mission concept that could intercept interstellar object 3I/ATLAS by launching in 2035 using a Solar Oberth maneuver, offering a viable method for studying the comet with current technology and a flight time of about 50 years.^[9]

NASA's EXCITE mission, a balloon-borne telescope that floats above most of Earth's atmosphere, has demonstrated capabilities to study exoplanet atmospheres through days-long observations at a fraction of the cost of flagship space telescopes like JWST.^[10]