NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is finished. The LINK spacecraft, operated by Katalyst Space, developed attitude control failures weeks after launch and cannot safely dock with Swift to boost its orbit. Swift will reenter and burn up before the end of 2026. NASA has permitted a contactless rendezvous anyway: no docking, no rescue, just data collection from two spacecraft doing an orbital waltz until the situation resolves itself.
Two lawsuits and one patch define the rest of the week. Oura faces a class action over claims that its smart rings can detect sleep stages using only pulse and temperature sensors, with plaintiffs arguing that accurate sleep staging requires an EEG, not a finger. Oura is defending its methodology by citing comparisons to clinical sleep studies. Separately, Microsoft's August Windows update broke games on machines running RGB lighting software by modifying a system component called inpoutx64 that lighting drivers depend on. The registry-key workaround Microsoft published may disable the lights entirely.
On the less catastrophic end, the ASCII CITY project deserves your attention. It is a self-contained 3D cyberpunk city renderer built inside a single HTML file. Developer Grow Now! Games has released a playable prototype adding building interiors and elevation changes. The technical constraint, one file, one engine, one city, is the story worth reading about. The YouTube demo is linked in the original.
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