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Curiosity Marks Five Thousand Martian Days With a Postcard From Chocolatal

By Jackson Chung October 6, 2026

NASA’s Curiosity has spent so long inside Gale Crater that a round number now feels less like a party than a quiet check of the odometer. On August 30, 2026, at 9:56 a.m. local Mars time, the rover reached its 5,000th sol, a Martian day that runs about 39 minutes longer than one on Earth. Parked on a sandy ridge the team calls Chocolatal, in the lower foothills of Mount Sharp, it turned its black-and-white navigation cameras on the slope below and took the first half of what NASA later released as a postcard.

DOOM on the Vectrex Draws a Glowing Hell on a Forty Year Old Screen

By Bill Smith October 6, 2026

Milton Bradley shipped the Vectrex in 1982 as a complete arcade cabinet small enough for a coffee table. A screen, a speaker, a joystick, and a cartridge slot arrived in one case. Games showed up as bright strokes rather than blocks of color. Mine Storm, the pack-in, looked related to Asteroids because both were drawn the same way: an electron beam steered across phosphor, switched on for a line, switched off for the jump to the next point. Forty-four years later, footage of DOOM running on that same tube has been passing around, and the corridors of the first episode are still recognizable once the walls become thin glowing strokes.

Billet Labs Built a Fanless Gaming PC Until One Fan Made It Work

By Jackson Chung October 6, 2026

Felix at Billet Labs set out to park a real gaming PC in a living room and leave the fans off. A Ryzen 9 9800X3D and an RTX 5080 share a Gigabyte AORUS Pro B850 board, fed by a 600 watt Flex ATX supply, and the pair can pull well past 500 watts once a demanding game settles in. Air coolers handle that load by moving a lot of air. Moving a lot of air makes noise. An earlier attempt had hung the same idea on a cast iron radiator and ended near 100 kilograms, so this version started over on a hand-worked aluminum block that brings the finished machine down to about 15.7 kilograms once the loop holds roughly two liters of water.

Innovative ALBATROSS Robot Spins Like a Maple Seed Then Sails Off Across the Water

By Jackson Chung October 5, 2026

Researchers at the Singapore University of Technology and Design built a small robot that leaves a drone, spins on the way down, and keeps moving once it meets the water. They named it ALBATROSS, short for Airborne Lander with Buoyant AuToROtating Sailing Sensor. Lead author Shane Kyi Hla Win, working with professor Foong Shaohui, describes the machine in Science Robotics as a way to put sensors on a lake or a sheltered stretch of sea without sending a boat out to meet them.

Hand Crafted Aluminum Gives the Daytona Shooting Brake Hommage Its Auction Debut

By Bill Smith October 5, 2026

Broad Arrow will offer the only Daytona Shooting Brake Hommage this Friday at the Zoute Concours Auction in Belgium, lot 172, with an estimate of $450,000 to $650,000. Dutch studio Niels van Roij Design spent about 15,000 hours on the car, a one-off coachbuilt body on a 2009 Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano, chassis ZFFFD60B000160781, with 43,802 km recorded at cataloguing. Its public debut came July 8 on the lawn at the Royal Automobile Club, Woodcote Park, while the mechanical parts stayed as Ferrari delivered them.