Matt Clarke

Those wheels you’re looking at are 0.75 millimeters thick. That’s half the thickness of a US dime. Each one was carved from a single block of aluminum, and NASA sent six of them to Mars knowing they’d eventually shred. Curiosity was built for a 2-year mission. It landed in August 2012, and by December that year NASA had already extended the mission indefinitely. Thirteen years and 35.5 kilometers later, the rover is still going, but the wheels started cracking just 14 months in. The damage came faster than anyone at JPL predicted. Sharp embedded rocks were punching straight through the skin between the treads. So NASA assembled a Wheel Wear Tiger Team (a crisis problem-solving tradition that goes back to Apollo 13) and got to work. In 2017, they uploaded a traction control algorithm from Earth that adjusts each wheel’s speed in real time based on the terrain, reducing force on the front wheels by 20%. They rerouted the rover to softer ground and started driving backward when possible, because pulling wheels over rocks produces less force than pushing them into rocks. The wildest part: if enough treads snap off, Curiosity is designed to find a sharp rock on Mars and use it to deliberately rip out the damaged inner section of its own wheel. JPL tested this on a replica rover and found Curiosity can keep driving on just the outer third. They predict this won’t be needed until around 2034. Every 1,000 meters, the rover pulls over and uses the camera on its robotic arm to photograph its own wheels so engineers on Earth can count every crack. Each wheel also has tiny holes that spell “JPL” in Morse code, which Curiosity uses to measure distance by photographing its own tracks in the dirt. These photos directly changed the next rover. When NASA built Perseverance, engineers 3D-printed about 70 different tread designs before landing on 48 curved treads instead of Curiosity’s 24, with thicker skin. They tested the new wheels over 60 kilometers and got zero damage by Curiosity’s original failure definition. “A boring graph with no data on it,” as one JPL engineer put it. A $2.5 billion machine doing self-surgery with rocks on another planet because the mission outlasted its design by 6x.

Optimus+PV will be the first Von Neumann probe, a machine fully capable of replicating itself using raw materials found in space

It took 9 years and 3 billion miles to get this shot. Pluto’s icy Mountains.

The number of 🇳🇿 high-school students learning French hit a record low of 11,700 in 2025 - down from 50,000 in 1974 and 58% lower than in 2008. In contrast, enrolments in Spanish hit an all-time high of 13,100 in 2025, up from just 268 in 1990.

The motion of the tele-operator taking his headset off 😭😭😭 omg

🧹 Discord is finally "fixing" memory leaks! /s The client is testing a feature that monitors its own RAM usage and performs an intentional restart to clear resources if it reaches 4 GB while you're AFK. No restarts occur if you're currently in a call.

It's great that the share of 🇳🇿 kids being treated for asthma has fallen meaningfully over the past decade.

When you watch stuff like this as a parent, you realise how truly empty and meaningless all of those things are.

Advice to men in their 20s: 1. Get better at speaking. Do embarrassing stuff like record yourself, Toastmasters, study good speakers and try to emulate them to try out their verbal techniques and see how they fit you. Charisma is the omni-skill. 2. Drink less, or not at all. It will force you to become a better conversationalist. 3. Buy art that your friends make and hang it on your walls. 4. Never lend money to family or close friends. Instead gift it to them, and if they pay you back, consider it a pleasant surprise. 5. Spend most of your money on experiences, not things. 6. Make sure your spending scales sublinearly compared to your income, and you will always feel rich. 7. Take a lot of risks. More risks that you think you should. When you're young, the downsides are never as big as you think, and other people's memories are short. 8. Every man is cobbled together from people they surround themselves with, both physically and mentally. Surround yourself with people you respect. If you never lose friends or never try to acquire better ones, you're doing it wrong. 9. Whenever you feel comfortable that you've made something of yourself, it's time to move on. Move to a bigger city. Try for a more prestigious company. Find the biggest games, and try your hand at them. 10. Say yes to every adventure, at least once. Your 20s are the only time you'll get to do that.