Halloween costumes for families: Matching picks trending this year  Good Morning America

Patriots mailbag: Rookie pass catcher trending for significant role?  Boston Herald

8 Players Trending Up & Down (2026 Fantasy Football)  FantasyPros

These 16 Trending Nail Colors for August Are Late Summer Perfection  byrdie.com

Drop-Waist Maxi Dresses Are Trending For Summer 2026  Yahoo

1. Google’s Tensor G6 in Pixel 11 isn’t the first 2nm smartphone chip after all  9to5Google
2. The Pixel 11 series: Your most personal Pixel yet  blog.google
3. Google becomes latest company to raise prices thanks to memory shortage  Yahoo Finance
4. Google’s new Pixel 11 puts Gemini at center of AI phone battle with Apple  CNBC
5. Google reveals 2026 hardware lineup: Pixel 11, Pixel Watch 5, and Pixel Tag  Ars Technica

1. iPhone 18 Pro Event Tipped As Apple Shifts Key Release Schedule Date  Forbes
2. Apple Already Increased the Price of iPhones Up to $300. Their Price Hikes Might Be Just Starting.  Yahoo Finance
3. Three new iPhones launch next month, here’s what’s coming  9to5mac.com
4. Base iPhone 18 Tipped to Get These Two Pro-Level Upgrades  MacRumors
5. It looks like Apple’s iPhone 18 really will skip the fall launch this year  The Verge

1. 'iPhone Ultra' Could Face Staggered Market Rollout, US Only at Launch  MacRumors
2. Apple's iPhone Ultra might have a staggered, country-by-country rollout  Mashable
3. ‘Everyone’ at Apple is already calling the folding iPhone ‘Ultra’  Macworld
4. Leaks Reveal Internal Debate Surrounding Apple’s Reported “iPhone Ultra” Branding  Hypebeast
5. EXCLUSIVE: Apple To Show iPhone Fold But Won’t Ship, Australia Faces Months-Long Wait  channelnews.com.au

1. Free Play Days – Gears of War: E-Day Open Beta, Sunderfolk and Asdivine Cross  XBOX Wire
2. Gears of War: E-Day Multiplayer Beta Opens To All, No More Room In Hell 2 and Hell Let Loose: Vietnam Launch This Week With DLSS 4.5  NVIDIA
3. The Gears of War: E-Day Beta Shows UE5 Visuals at Their Best, Despite Sometimes Shaky Performance on Series X/S  Digital Foundry
4. Digital Foundry Shares 'Highly Impressive' Analysis From Gears Of War: E-Day's Beta On Xbox  Pure Xbox
5. Gears of War: E-Day Details Major Tweaks and Improvements Ahead of Beta Weekend 2  VICE

1. Google Pixel 11 cases finally let the phone colors shine through  Android Authority
2. New accessories for Pixel 11 phones are here.  blog.google
3. Google Pixel 11 announced: Price, specs, colors  Mashable
4. I'm More Excited About Smartphone Colors Than Any Actual New Features In 2026  Engadget
5. Best Google Pixel 11 and Pixel 11 Pro cases  Android Central

The constellation Orion is framed by two Perseid meteors in this photo from Aug. 12, 2018, in Cedar Breaks National Monument, Utah.

The Perseids – one of the year’s brightest and most popular meteor showers – has been ramping up since early July and will sparkle in the skies through the end of August. The shower reached its peak on the night of Aug. 12 into the early morning of Aug. 13.

Rewatch the Aug. 13 meteor shower.

Image credit: NASA/Bill Dunford

In a contrast of fire and ice, smoke from wildland fires mingled with several of the Cascade Range’s prominent, glaciated volcanoes in summer 2026. Astronauts on the International Space Station photographed the scene while orbiting over the U.S. West in late July and early August.

Mount Hood, Oregon’s tallest peak at 11,249 feet (3,429 meters), is pictured above, near a thick plume of smoke pouring from the Grasshopper fire. Thunderstorms passed over the forest in the preceding weeks, and a lightning strike on July 23 ignited the blaze pictured in this July 31 photo. The fire, burning east of the mountain, spread quickly north and east across Mount Hood National Forest amid hot, dry conditions, according to InciWeb.

As of August 12, it had burned nearly 84,000 acres (34,000 hectares) and spread beyond national forest boundaries. Several communities in Wasco County were under “go now” evacuation orders, and the nearby town of Dufur was advised to prepare for immediate evacuation.

Roughly 100 miles to the north in Washington, Mount Rainier—the state’s tallest peak at 14,411 feet (4,392 meters)—was wreathed in smoke. No major fires burned nearby when this photo was taken on August 4. Instead, smoke drifted in from fires in central and eastern Washington, carried by winds blowing from the east due to a high-pressure system offshore. That day, the National Park Service reported that air quality in the park reached unhealthy levels due to elevated concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM_2.5).

Several days later, the Grand Park 2 fire was observed burning within park boundaries, about 3 miles north of the Sunrise Visitor Center. As of August 12, the fire had burned 223 acres (90 hectares) and was uncontained; the cause was yet undetermined.  

Above-normal fire potential was expected to persist across the Northwest through August, according to an outlook from the National Interagency Fire Center. Warm, dry weather—conditions influenced by El Niño—combined with cured fuels to set the stage for large, long-burning fires following lightning- or human-caused ignitions.

Astronaut photographs ISS075-E-1705 and ISS075-E-2221 were acquired on July 31, 2026, and August 4, 2026, respectively, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 400 millimeters. They are provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The images were taken by a member of the Expedition 75 crew. The images have 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 Kathryn Hansen.

References & Resources

• InciWeb (2026, August 12) Grand Park 2 Fire. Accessed August 12, 2026.
• InciWeb (2026, August 11) Grasshopper Fire. Accessed August 12, 2026.
• National Interagency Fire Center’s Predictive Services (2026, August 1) National Significant Wildland Fire Potential Outlook. Accessed August 12, 2026.
• OPB (2026, August 11) Fire growth near Mount Hood spurs fresh evacuations in Wasco, Clackamas counties. Accessed August 12, 2026.
• Washington Smoke Blog (2026, August 4) Smoke continues to build statewide, gradual improvement expected later this week. Accessed August 12, 2026.

The barren lunar landscape has some important resources, such as water and minerals like iron and titanium, but extracting and processing them will require special equipment. Where those resources can be found will dictate where to land and how to mine them. To help with that, Lunar Station Corp. is using a wealth of NASA data in multiple computer models.

“With 60 years of lunar data available to us, we help our clients understand the environmental factors for any given location on the Moon,” said Blair DeWitt, CEO of Lunar Station. Combining disparate data from different sensors used by NASA and other space agencies is a critical first step. One NASA resource the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company used to build terrain maps is the Ames Stereo Pipeline. The open-source code automatically processes images captured from satellites, robotic rovers, historical images, and more to create a 3D model revealing features such as rock placement and elevation.

But the availability of in-situ lunar water resources at any location is largely unknown, according to Gerry Sanders, in-situ resource utilization system capability lead at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. To begin to fill that gap, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite was designed to crash its uppers stage into the Moon’s South Pole in 2009. The examination of the resulting plume revealed the presence of water ice.

Lunar Station is building on that work and more to help commercial space companies with mission planning, which includes scientific research for mining operations. The MoonHacker program uses proprietary geospatial analytics platform and advanced algorithms to fuse all the lunar data in NASA’s Planetary Data System to help identify indicators for shallow pits of lunar water.

“We can find sites for landing pads, for cultivating the best paths for roving, and inform our clients about communications. If you can’t see Earth at a given location like in the polar regions or the far side of the Moon, you have to come up with a relay strategy,” said DeWitt. “We can do this in part thanks to NASA data.”

In MoonHacker’s Radiation Simulator, an electronic version of a company’s rover or satellite, called a digital twin, can be subjected to the radiation en route or at the mission site to determine the protection required.

These innovations exemplify the purpose of NASA’s Technology Transfer program within the Research and Technology Mission Directorate, which uses space-based solutions to improve life on Earth. For 50 years, NASA has documented the everyday benefits of space technology through the agency’s Spinoff publication. 

A total solar eclipse is seen from San Millán de los Caballeros, Spain, Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026. A total solar eclipse – the Moon passing between the Sun and Earth, completely blocking the face of the Sun – swept across parts of Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia, the Atlantic Ocean, Spain, and a small corner of Portugal. A partial eclipse was visible in parts of the U.S., most of Canada, much of Europe, and northwest Africa.

Relive the eclipse on NASA’s YouTube channel.

Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Dali Rajic will take over as OpenAI's top salesperson.

Ford expects to begin prototype builds of the Fathom EV in the first quarter of 2027.

X is expanding the open source code behind its 'For You' feed and launching new transparency tools that show users when its ranking systems have affected their accounts or posts.

The social media giant says it was time for a sharper and more modern look after a decade.

Microsoft is simplifying Copilot by combining its consumer and business apps, and dropping AI-generated podcasts, Group Chats, Deep Research, and its Mico character.