The scariest jump in ice skating requires your shoulders, hips, knees and feet to be in perfect alignment.

All of your body weight must be concentrated because it’s the only way to build enough power to complete at least four full revolutions in the air and land backwards on one blade. Everything happens in less than a second.

“Your legs are on fire,” said Timothy Goebel, the first skater to land three quads in one program, which earned him an Olympic bronze in 2002.

“Your lungs are screaming at you, like your body is just wrecked,” Goebel said. “You have to have that jump so ingrained in your muscle memory, but it’s also a lot of mental fortitude.”

It’s called a quadruple jump, or quad for short, and while it’s still redefining women’s figure skating, it’s become a necessity in the men’s programs.

The more advanced sibling to the quad is a quad axel, which requires a forward-facing takeoff and a full four-and-a-half revolutions in the air. Ilia Malinin, who already helped to lead the U.S. to gold in the team event at the 2026 Winter Olympics, is the only skater ever to land a quad axel in competition when he stunned the 2022 crowd at the U.S. International Figure Skating Classic.

“I never thought I would see one in competition,” Goebel said. “The fact that he can do a quad axel almost every day in practice with relative ease is mind-blowing.”

Patrick Blackwell, a 2026 U.S. Junior Men’s National Champion, already performs multiple quads in competition. He uses a pole harness, like most skaters, to practice the quads he hasn’t yet mastered. It’s a lot of falling over and over again in the pursuit of greatness.

But Blackwell has one thing on his side that Goebel didn’t: analytics.

“What they do is measure your height, your rotational speed and variations in any patterns that they can see in the jumps,” Blackwell explained.

No matter how it’s achieved, the quad is now critical in men’s competition, and it will surely be on display during the Milano Cortina Games. 

Goebel said it was crucial to his bronze medal win. 

“For me, in 2002, it was no quad, no medal, full stop,” he said.

And now?

“No quad, no top ten!” Goebel laughed. “The standard has risen from 2002, and I think that’s overwhelmingly a positive.”

When asked how he feels about how far it could go, though, Goebel was measured.

“I think that’s the exciting part about sport and about the whole Olympic movement,” he said. “But I think we’re close to that bound of  like, tapping out the human ability.”

• Boat capsizes in Mediterranean Sea off the Libyan coast.
• Rescue teams provide emergency medical care to survivors.
• Ship taking migrants, refugees to Al-Zawiya from Africa.
  

The UN migration agency on Monday said 53 people were dead or missing after a boat capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the Libyan coast. Only two survivors were rescued.

The International Organisation for Migration said the boat overturned north of Zuwara on Friday.

“Only two Nigerian women were rescued during a search-and-rescue operation by Libyan authorities,” the IOM said in a statement, adding that one of the survivors said she lost her husband and the other said “she lost her two babies in the tragedy”.

The IOM said its teams provided the two survivors with emergency medical care upon disembarkation.

“According to survivor accounts, the boat, carrying migrants and refugees of African nationalities, departed from Al-Zawiya, Libya, at around 11:00 pm on February 5. Approximately six hours later, it capsized after taking on water,” the agency said.

“IOM mourns the loss of life in yet another deadly incident along the Central Mediterranean route.”

The Geneva-based agency said trafficking and smuggling networks were exploiting migrants along the route from north Africa to southern Europe, profiting from dangerous crossings in unseaworthy boats while exposing people to “severe abuse”.

It called for stronger international cooperation to tackle the networks, alongside safe and regular migration pathways to reduce risks and save lives.

Tech giant Apple is preparing to almost retire old-style text messaging in some of the most significant updates to its Messages app in years, with the upcoming iOS 26.4 this spring.

The new iOS update would expand Apple’s support for RCS (Rich Communication Services) in a move to ditch the limitations of traditional SMS.

The update aims to create a modern, cross-platform messaging experience that aligns with modern communication practices.

RCS is said to be the telecom industry’s long-awaited successor to SMS and MMS, offering features that users expect from modern messaging apps like WhatsApp. It facilitates high-quality media sharing, read receipts, typing indicators, and reliable delivery over Wi-Fi or mobile data.

A noteworthy point for iPhone users is that RCS reduces the gap between Apple’s iMessage ecosystem and Android devices, replacing the unreliable “green bubble” SMS experience with a native chat experience.

“End-to-end encryption is a powerful privacy and security technology that iMessage has supported since the beginning, and now we are pleased to have helped lead a cross-industry effort to bring end-to-end encryption to the RCS Universal Profile,” Apple stated.

This means that encrypted conversations, previously limited to iMessage-to-iMessage chats, will now be converted into iPhone-to-Android texts, with privacy protections ensured across platforms.

iOS 26.4 has been reported to bring a series of functional improvements that were missing in earlier RCS implementations. Features such as inline replies, message editing, unsending, and richer reactions will definitely boost user experience and bring Apple’s RCS offering in line with its competitors.

These developments point to a clear shift in Apple’s approach to cross-platform communication, as internal beta builds indicate active collaboration with mobile networks to support this transition.