But in the worst worst-case scenario, we don’t have any control. Instead, the station will crack through the atmosphere. Sure, many pieces will likely end up in the ocean, but some might hit people, possibly in a town or a city. The station could break apart across thousands of miles and multiple continents. This would be exceedingly hard to anticipate. As NASA puts it, “Calculating the probability of this penetration cascading into loss of deorbit capability has a very large range of variables, making predictions ineffective.”

This almost certainly won’t happen to the ISS. At the same time, it’s a far more extreme version of the only way an American space station has ever come down. In 1979, after years spent vacant in orbit, Skylab, the US’s first space station, started sinking toward the atmosphere, where it threatened to fall and drop molten spacecraft parts on Earth. At that point, NASA officials had to remotely wake up its computers and, with only limited control of the station, direct it over a location that would endanger the fewest humans.

In the months before, space agency officials were in frequent contact with the State Department, which disseminated the latest predicted trajectories to embassies across the world. In these situations, oops doesn’t cut it: When one of the Salyuts, a Soviet space station model, was deorbited a few decades ago, flaming bits were littered across Argentina, scaring people and requiring the deployment of at least a few firefighters, according to local newspaper reports.

The ISS is far bigger than either the Salyuts or Skylab. In an uncontrolled deorbit, pieces of debris “up to car and train size,” say experts on the official ISS space station advisory committee, will rain down from the sky. NASA confirms this would pose “a significant risk to the public worldwide.”

OK—the nightmare is over. Thus concludes my anxiety-ridden spiral. Here are the facts as they stand in 2026:

As far as WIRED can tell, no one has ever died because a piece of space station hit them. Some pieces of Skylab did fall on a remote part of Western Australia, and Jimmy Carter formally apologized, but no one was hurt. The odds of a piece hitting a populated area are low. Most of the world is ocean, and most land is uninhabited. In 2024, a piece of space trash that was ejected from the ISS survived atmospheric burn-up, fell through the sky, and crashed through the roof of a home belonging to a very real, and rightfully perturbed, Florida man. He tweeted about it and then sued NASA, but he wasn’t injured.

For this story, WIRED reviewed dozens of NASA documents, including backup plans and contingencies for emergencies, and spoke to more than a dozen people, including three astronauts who’ve visited the ISS, and no one seemed that freaked out. One astronaut said the most worrisome scenario that actively crossed his mind in orbit was getting a toothache. The ISS has had some emergencies, including a first-ever medical evacuation in January, but generally things have been remarkably stable. In fact, one of the most impressive things about the ISS is that nothing very dramatic has ever happened to it. No experiment has gone too haywire. It hasn’t been hit by an asteroid.

A unique BMX frame tests the limits of an electric bike’s capabilities. Sam Barker and Tom Stanton, two friends who enjoy tackling weekend projects, transformed a standard BMX frame into a speed machine. What they created is a beast that feels more like a dragster than a pedal assist bike, a tiny BMX frame with enough power to raise the front wheel and outperform more standard e-bikes.

The project began by simply plugging a 20-inch BMX wheel equipped with a 3kW hub motor into an existing bike in the garage, powered by a 72 volt, 20 amp-hour battery. Initially, some quick spins around the block revealed some potential acceleration, but pushing the throttle wide was all it took to send the back wheel spinning into the air and the front end flying off completely due to the narrow wheelbase.

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They knew they needed to solve the handling issues, so they brought out the welder and cut the frame, adding a meter of 12mm mild steel tubing to give it some significant stability. They added some reinforced brackets to make the whole thing feel sturdy, almost like scaffolding. The longer frame kept the front wheel on the ground during those violent launches, and it also allowed them to finally tuck the battery inside the bike. They also changed the handlebars to a unique design to give them better control, and they adjusted the pedals to make them exactly perfect.

Stopping was accomplished with a borrowed rim brake caliper from a penny-farthing cycle. To be honest, it sort of works, but don’t expect to be able to stop on a dime soon. The machine overheats a lot under severe braking, and it won’t slow you down enough to be safe at the speeds it can reach. They did identify a workaround by shunting the motor wires to enable regenerative braking, but the main brakes remain marginal.

When they eventually took it out for a ride, they discovered the bike’s personality: it creates so much acceleration that the back wheel starts spinning before the rubber really has a chance to grip, and then you’re past 50 or 60 kph, feeling the speed wobble from the sharp steering angle. It’s not particularly stable, but it’s far superior to the original short version. While there is no fairing to protect you, and the low seat causes you to bounce around on the pegs, you must agree it’s a lot of fun.
[Source]

One way is to buy an optional $25 hardwire kit from Vantrue, which will connect the device directly to your fuse box. Note, however, that the camera draws about 25 to 35 milliamps while in parking mode (about 3 to 4 watts on a home outlet), and this will drain your car’s battery if hardwired. This isn’t a troublesome power draw, and should be fine for days or maybe weeks if your battery’s healthy.

But in general, I’d rather not drain my car battery while it’s parked. I’d instead nix the hardwire kit and invest in a good power bank. Even a $48 portable bank from Anker should be enough for about a week’s continuous operation while parked, without ever worrying about battery drain on your car.

Limitations and Faults

Vantrue app via Matthew Korfhage

For such a dinky device, the Vantrue does nonetheless offer a real-time screen. It’s doubtful you’ll use it to scroll through video, however. It’s most useful for verifying the framing on the cam when you stick it to your windshield. The screen is a bit busy with information, and lower resolution than the actual video.

If you’re reviewing footage, you’ll be doing so on your phone using the app. But the screen is still useful for adjusting settings manually, should you desperately need to—though controlling the phone via the on-camera interface will be a little fiddly and irritating. Again, you’re better off just connecting the camera to your phone to toggle settings.

There are, in fact, settings aplenty. Through the app, you’re able to track mileage, toggle GPS tracking, set the frame rate and resolution of the camera, and set whether you want the camera to use high-dynamic range settings or PlatePix. The former will be most useful when light is dim.

It’s also a simple, single-camera device. Vantrue has more elaborate (and more expensive, and larger) multi-camera options with similar camera specs that I’m in the process of testing, including a Nexus 4 Pro with a lower-resolution front-cabin and rear cam. A 4-channel N5 adds an extra rear-cabin channel for a wild amount of camera coverage, but at the expense of some image resolution.

PlatePix does indeed help in capturing license plates, but it will do so at the expense of contrast on the rest of the image. This is a compromise that’ll matter most at night. Which is to say, you’re choosing between marginal license plate capture on a dark image, or worse, license plate capture on crisper night footage.

On March 8, 2026, in honour of International Women’s Day, a new edition of SheBuilds on Lovable invited builders from around the world to a 24-hour global, powered by Anthropic. On top of that, participants in the SheBuilds campaign receive $100 in Anthropic API credits and $250 in Stripe fee credits to kickstart their builds and remove early-stage barriers to creation.

This isn’t just another hackathon; it’s a campaign that blends community, technology, and real output. It asks a simple question of the tech industry and its marketers: do we want participation, or just talk about it?

If I’m honest, I have mixed feelings. We need a stronger community and louder voices for women in tech not just on a specific international day, but every day. I’d like to believe we are beyond the stereotype of what jobs women can or cannot do, and what is left for men. Beyond any single campaign, we should advocate for women as builders in the tech world every day.

Still, every time I see a campaign like this, it sparks some hope inside me. It reminds me that we are not reduced to specific skills on a specific day, and that progress is possible.

Returning to SheBuilds, which is rooted in a longer tradition: the 48-hour virtual buildathons Lovable has run for women founders and builders, where ideas become real applications over an intense weekend of collaboration.

In October 2025, 60 women joined a remote, AI-enabled sprint to design, prototype, and launch working products in 48 hours, and the resonant element wasn’t speed, it was agency. 

In 2026, the campaign took this idea further. Instead of being constrained to a single track, it anchored itself to a global cultural moment where women’s participation in tech isn’t just acknowledged but activated, with free build credits, peer connection, live sessions, and an open invitation to anyone who wants to make rather than debate what innovation should look like. 

We have been talking in tech about inclusion and diversity for years. Many initiatives generate reports, webinars, and packs of aspirational slides. SheBuilds does something different: it creates the conditions for output. In the world of software, execution matters. A founder funded or a product launched is a literal piece of industry change, unlike any promise that never materialises.

SheBuilds lowers barriers in two ways. First, it reshapes access to execution. Participants don’t need traditional engineering skills; they need a laptop, an idea, and the willingness to build it. Second, by connecting creation to a broader cultural moment, International Women’s Day, it reframes participation as both a personal achievement and a public conversation about who gets to shape tech. 

There’s good evidence that this model matters. Across the Lovable community, builders report that the ritual of building, not discussing, changes how they see themselves in technology. For many, shipping a live prototype in 48 hours meant moving from being stuck in ideas to being recognized as a doer; more than that, it positioned them within a network that values rapid iteration and real product agency. 

From the industry’s perspective, this matters because it accelerates user engagement in a genuinely participatory way. Rather than positioning a platform as something to use someday, the SheBuilds campaign positions it as something you use now. When marketers tie campaigns to output, not just signup counts, they create moments of meaningful interaction. That’s both a brand story and a user experience strategy.

Lovable’s move to embrace International Women’s Day isn’t a gesture; it’s a strategic campaign. By hosting SheBuilds events tied to a global calendar, the company amplifies its mission, and invites participation on a broader scale. It embodies a shift in how tech platforms engage builders: merging community activation with cultural moments, and showing that building isn’t reserved for a subset with coding degrees. 

If the tech industry wants to look past fancy words like diversity and equity, it needs campaigns that exchange words for workshops, panels for platforms, and theories for tools. That’s the real invitation SheBuilds extends to its participants, and the lesson it offers marketers who want to tell meaningful stories about making things.

The tech world still doesn’t reflect the people it serves. Women make up far less than half of technical roles and leadership positions, and the gap shows up in boardrooms, engineering teams, and the very products we use every day. Representation isn’t a nice-to-have statistic; it shapes what technology looks like and who gets to steer it. 

From where I stand, SheBuilds on Lovable isn’t just another event. It is a call to action that meets a long-standing need, a space where women are not only welcomed but empowered to create, ship, and be seen. It turns invisible potential into visible impact, inviting women to bring their solutions into the world rather than waiting for permission to do so. 

When women build, the whole industry becomes richer in ideas, perspective, and purpose. Moments like this, tied to real creative work, are not symbolic gestures. They are steps toward a tech ecosystem where women aren’t exceptions but equals. 

Let the world know the builder you are! Celebrate your voice here! Isn’t this lovable?

OPPO has started rolling out its February 2026 update for ColorOS 16, bringing the PopOut feature to more devices beyond the recently launched Reno 15 series. The update focuses on creative tools and productivity improvements, as well as refinements to AI-powered image editing.

PopOut Feature Expands to More OPPO Devices

Originally introduced with the OPPO Reno15 series, the PopOut feature is now available on a wider range of OPPO smartphones, including:

The PopOut feature creates a 3D-like depth effect by lifting the main subject forward from the background. The result is a more dynamic and eye-catching image that appears to extend beyond the frame. With this update, OPPO is making the creative tool accessible to more users across its premium and upper mid-range lineup.

Productivity and AI Enhancements

Alongside PopOut, the February update also introduces several system-level improvements.

PowerPoint Translation now allows users to translate presentations into multiple languages while preserving the original formatting. It also supports side-by-side comparison and easy export.

OPPO has further refined its AI Eraser tool, aiming for cleaner edits with fewer visible traces after object removal. The Reflection Removal feature has also been upgraded to reduce glare in document photos and portraits, including images where subjects are wearing glasses.

The Private Safe feature has also received performance improvements, with faster file transfers and a new option to add files directly under the “Other files” category.

Rollout Timeline

The ColorOS 16 February update is being rolled out in phases between February 6 and February 28, 2026. Users on eligible devices can check for the update via Settings once it becomes available in their region.

On Tuesday, Anthropic published tools that let Claude read, analyze and translate legacy COBOL into modern languages like Java and Python. By the end of the trading day, investors had wiped roughly $40 billion from IBM’s market cap — the company’s biggest single-day drop in 25 years — pricing the announcement as an existential threat to IBM’s mainframe business.

The reaction was swift. It was also built on a fundamental misreading of why enterprises run mainframes in the first place.

IBM’s COBOL is 66 years old. It was designed in 1959, runs on IBM mainframes, and continues to power transaction processing systems with an estimated 250 billion lines of COBOL in active production, according to the Open Mainframe Project.

The engineers who wrote it are retiring; the ones replacing them largely cannot read it. For decades, that skills gap has been one of enterprise IT’s most expensive unsolved problems — and one IBM has been working to fix with AI since at least 2023, when it launched watsonx Code Assistant for Z to help migrate COBOL to modern Java.

Claude Code, Anthropic says, can now analyze entire codebases, map hidden dependencies, and generate working translations of code that most engineers today cannot read. For enterprises running COBOL on distributed platforms — Windows, Linux and other non-mainframe environments — that capability is genuinely useful and increasingly practical.

The actual barrier was never technical

“Modernizing COBOL has been a technically solved problem for a while,” Matt Brasier, analyst at Gartner, told VentureBeat. “The real problem is that the costs of modernization are high and the ROI is low.”

Amazon and Google have been offering AI-powered COBOL migration tools for years. AWS Transform and a comparable Google Cloud Platform service both targeted the same problem: reducing friction for customers looking to move mainframe workloads to the cloud.

“This is basically one more source of competition,” Raj Joshi, senior vice president at Moody’s Ratings, told VentureBeat. “IBM has always lived in a very competitive domain. On the margin, this thing is basically negative, no question about that. There’s one more powerful competitor. But IBM has coexisted with these threats.”

Steve McDowell, chief analyst at NAND Research, cuts to the structural argument: “Applications don’t run on mainframes because they’re written in COBOL,” he said. “They run on mainframes because mainframes deliver a class of determinism, scalable compute and reliability that general purpose servers can’t match.”

The issue runs deeper than market positioning. “GenAI tools are helpful, but their non-deterministic nature means the resulting code is not consistent — the same operation will be implemented in different ways in different parts of the code,” Brasier said. “Leading tools combine deterministic and non-deterministic approaches. None of this solves the ROI problem, though.”

What COBOL translation leaves unsolved

“Translating COBOL is the easy part,” IBM communications director Steven Tomasco told VentureBeat. “The real work is data architecture redesign, runtime replacement, transaction processing integrity, and hardware-accelerated performance built over decades of tight software and hardware coupling. That is the problem IBM has spent decades learning to solve, and AI is the most powerful tool we have ever had to do it.”

According to IBM, Royal Bank of Canada, the National Organization for Social Insurance and ANZ Bank have all used watsonx Code Assistant for Z to accelerate modernization of COBOL code without moving off IBM Z.

That does not mean Anthropic has no competitive foothold. For enterprises running COBOL outside the mainframe — on distributed systems, Windows and Linux environments — Claude Code enters a space where IBM’s vertical integration is less of an advantage. “IBM understands mainframe technology at a level that others can’t match. If I’m only looking at COBOL, I’m using IBM’s watsonx,” McDowell said. “Anthropic, however, has a broader footprint within a lot of development teams, where a single vendor makes it worthwhile.”

What enterprise buyers should actually do

Senior data and infrastructure engineers will spend the next few weeks fielding questions from executives who saw the headlines and assumed the hard problem just got solved. It did not.

“It’s COBOL, but there are numerous applications tied to it,” Joshi said. “It’s not like you transform millions of lines and somehow you are ready to go to cloud. It’s a massive risk assessment, dependencies and all those things.”

The more useful question for buyers is whether this week’s noise creates an opening. Braiser thinks it does.

“They should use the resulting board-level and shareholder discussions to review postponed modernization initiatives and see if any of them now have ROI,” Brasier said.

McDowell was blunt on the competitive question. “Will Anthropic take business from IBM’s tool? Yes, of course,” he said. “But I’d be surprised if that tool was making significant revenue for IBM.”

Chirag Mehta, analyst at Constellation Research, cautioned that IT leaders should not react emotionally or rewrite strategy overnight.

“Treat this as a reason to run a small, bounded pilot to measure outcomes, not as a reason to rip and replace vendors,” Mehta told VentureBeat.

Mehta suggests that enterprises pick one well-scoped application slice or workflow with clear inputs and outputs, and evaluate approaches apples-to-apples: quality of dependency mapping, quality of recovered business logic documentation, test coverage and equivalence checks, performance and reliability regressions.

In Mehta’s view, the bigger reminder is that modernization is more than converting code. The hard parts are extracting institutional knowledge, reworking processes and controls, change management, and containing operational risk in systems that cannot break. AI can compress the “analysis and translation” work, but it does not eliminate the governance and accountability burden.

“The teams that win will treat AI as an accelerator inside a disciplined modernization program, with measurable checkpoints and risk guardrails, not as a magic conversion button,” Mehta said.

“El Mencho” is dead.

This weekend, Mexican Army Special Forces killed Nemesio Rubén “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, the head of the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) in Tapalpa, Jalisco, Mexico. Following confirmation of El Mencho’s death by federal authorities, experts anticipate a profound reconfiguration of the global drug trafficking landscape, a scenario that could lead to a new and dangerous wave of violence.

The focus will turn to the CJNG’s mechanisms of control, intimidation, financing, and recruitment that granted the cartel unprecedented operational capacity. Much of its strength stemmed from the weakening of long-standing rivals through the sophisticated use of social media and artificial intelligence, state-of-the-art specialized weaponry, and a flexible internal structure.

The US State Department says that CJNG maintains a presence and contacts in “almost all of Mexico,” the American continent, and countries such as Australia, China, and various Southeast Asian nations. The agency underscores the cartel’s criminal versatility: In addition to fentanyl trafficking, it is involved in extortion, migrant smuggling, oil and mineral theft, and illicit arms trade.

How Was the CJNG Born?

The CJNG traces its roots to the Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquín Guzmán Loera, also known as “El Chapo.” Around 2007, this group formed an armed wing in Jalisco under the command of Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel Villarreal. This was the Milenio Cartel, also known as Los Valencia. During this period, Guzmán’s operatives were vying for control of Jalisco territories against Los Zetas, a splinter group of the Gulf Cartel.

In its early years, the CJNG presented itself as “Los Mata Zetas” (The Zeta Killers). According to the BBC, its first documented appearance occurred in September 2011, when it claimed responsibility, through a video circulated on social media, for the discovery of 35 bodies in Boca del Río, a municipality in the state of Veracruz.

By then, the alliance with the Sinaloa Cartel had already fractured after a confrontation with federal forces that culminated in 2010 with the death of Ignacio Coronel. Leadership fell to Oseguera Cervantes, who spearheaded a rapid expansion in methamphetamine production and trafficking.

Cartels Embracing Tech

In less than five years, the CJNG displaced the Knights Templar from southern Michoacán and expelled Los Zetas from northern Jalisco and parts of Zacatecas. After Guzmán Loera’s capture and extradition, the group strengthened its strategy by recruiting financial and chemical specialists to boost the manufacture of synthetic drugs and diversify its income through money-laundering schemes in sectors such as livestock, mining, agriculture, and construction, as well as expanding extortion of small- and medium-size businesses.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) notes that the CJNG operates in more than 40 countries and has a financial structure known as Los Cuinis, headed by Abigael González Valencia, Oseguera’s brother-in-law. This network coordinates money-laundering operations through international trade, cryptocurrencies, and links with Asian networks.

Several investigations have documented the use of digital tools for recruitment and fraud. In 2024, Interpol warned that groups like the CJNG were involved in large-scale financial scams supported by AI, natural language models, and cryptocurrencies. It also detected the expansion of human trafficking for forced criminal activity in scam compounds.

A study by El Colegio de México, in collaboration with the Civic AI Lab at Northeastern University in Boston, revealed that TikTok has become a recruitment tool for Mexican cartels, including CJNG. The research identified 100 active accounts linked to illicit organizations and categorized their content as recruitment, border crossings, illegal businesses, prostitution, propaganda, and arms sales. Forty-seven percent of the accounts promoted the recruitment of new members, and 31 percent disseminated propaganda messages. The report highlighted that the CJNG accounted for 54.3 percent of the detected accounts, followed by the Sinaloa Cartel and the Northeast Cartel.

Now that Apple has started blocking users under 18 in certain regions from downloading apps, the company has introduced new age verification tools. Those will help developers “meet their age assurance obligations under upcoming US and regional laws, including in Brazil, Australia, Singapore, Utah and Louisiana,” the company said in a news release on its Developer site.

As of February 24, 2026, users in Australia, Brazil and Singapore won’t be able to download apps rated 18+ unless their age is confirmed through “reasonable methods.” Apple noted that any apps distributed in Brazil that are declared to contain loot boxes will be updated to 18+. While the App Store can perform those checks automatically, “developers may have separate obligations to independently confirm that their users are adults,” Apple wrote. For that, developers can employ the company’s Declared Age Range API (on iOS, iPadOS and macOS) to get “helpful signals” about a user’s age.

In Utah as of May 6, 2026 and Louisiana on July 1, 2026, “age categories will be shared with the developer’s app when requested through the Declared Age Range API.” That API will also provide “new signals,” like whether age-related regulatory requirements apply to the user and if the user must share their age range. “The API will also let you know if you need to get a parent or guardian’s permission for significant app updates for a child,” Apple says.

Under Utah’s new law, users must be over 18 to make a new account with an app store, while underage uses will need to link their account to a parent’s in order to get permission to use certain apps. Louisiana and Texas also passed similar laws and California plans to enact age-based rules for app stores in 2027.

Those rules are designed to protect children from predators, financial harm and other problems. However, critics have described the laws as blunt tools that harm privacy and internet anonymity. “A poorly designed system might store this personal data, and even correlate it to the online content that we look at,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes. “In the hands of an adversary, and cross-referenced to other readily available information, this information can expose intimate details about us.”