A SpaceX rocket carried four astronauts into orbit Wednesday night, including the 600th person to reach space in 60 years.

The repeatedly delayed flight occurred just two days after SpaceX brought four other astronauts home from the International Space Station. They should have been up there to welcome the newcomers, but NASA and SpaceX decided to switch the order based on Monday's ideal recovery weather in the Gulf of Mexico and pulled it off.

What would it be like to walk around the ancient religious sanctuary of Olympia when the Olympic Games were held?

An unusual partnership between Microsoft and Greece's Ministry of Culture and Sport is offering visitors the answer, providing an immersive tour at one of the world's major archaeological sites that launched Wednesday.

Four astronauts returned to Earth on Monday, riding home with SpaceX to end a 200-day space station mission that began last spring.

Their capsule streaked through the late night sky like a dazzling meteor before parachuting into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. Recovery boats quickly moved in with spotlights.

When Mark Zuckerberg announced ambitious plans to build the "metaverse" — a virtual reality construct intended to supplant the internet, merge virtual life with real life and create endless new playgrounds for everyone — he promised that "you're going to able to do almost anything you can imagine."

That might not be such a great idea.

Wang Yaping has become the first Chinese woman to conduct a spacewalk as part of a six-month mission to the country's space station.

Wang and fellow astronaut Zhai Zhigang left the station's main module on Sunday evening, spending more than six hours outside installing equipment and carrying out tests alongside the station's robotic service arm, according to the China Manned Space agency.

A LGBT advocacy group in China that has spearheaded many of the country's legal cases pushing for greater rights is halting its work for the foreseeable future.

LGBT Rights Advocacy China announced it was ceasing all activities and shutting down its social media accounts in an announcement on social media Thursday.

U.S. authorities on Wednesday put the Israeli maker of the Pegasus spyware on a list of restricted companies, taking aim at software central to a scandal over surveillance of journalists and officials.

Yahoo Inc. is leaving the China market, suspending its services there as of Monday amid what it says is an "increasingly challenging" business and legal environment.

Foreign technology firms have been pulling out or downsizing their operations in mainland China as a strict data privacy law specifying how companies collect and store data takes effect.

Facebook said it will shut down its face-recognition system and delete the face prints of more than 1 billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.

"This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology's history," Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence for Facebook's new parent company, Meta, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.

Around 2,500 Amazon employees at seven sites across Germany were on strike Tuesday and unions warned stoppages could continue up to Christmas.