Mars rovers, indigenous language preservation, and safer cities

Good morning {{name!|reader}},

It’s human nature to compare ourselves. That includes comparisons to one another as well as to what’s been done before us. Often, that framing leads us to see previous achievements as limits on what we can accomplish. However, that limit is often nothing more than an artificial ceiling that we treat as a permanent boundary.

A relevant one that comes to mind: the sub-two-hour marathon limit. The belief traced back over 100 years to 1925 work on human performance. The first sub-2:10 marathon was in 1967. 2:06:50 was achieved in 1988 and stood for a decade. Through the early 2010s, ensuing records took baby steps toward the two-hour mark at a painfully slow pace. It looked like the curve was flattening against a wall.

Experts were predicting that if the wall fell, it wouldn’t be until 2041. Meanwhile, the record inched down: 2:01:39 in 2018, 2:00:35 in 2023. Then, in London on April 26, 2026, Sabastian Sawe ran a 1:59:30, a ridiculous 65 second improvement over the standing record. Second place finished eleven seconds back (also sub two hours) in his first marathon ever! Third place got 2:00:28, also breaking the old record. When the shoes, pacing, course selection, and talent pool all aligned, the limit turned out to be where the last person left it.

On that note, we’re bringing you three stories this week that turned out to have artificial ceilings where breaking through them represented a meaningful societal improvement: On Mars, a rover's reach was supposedly capped by the speed of a signal from Earth, until it stopped waiting for us. It was widely believed that languages were thought to die when children stopped learning them at home, until second-language speakers achieved proficiency and started teaching others. In Philadelphia, the government assumed that neighborhood gun violence was unfixable, until researchers tried something almost insultingly cheap and ran the numbers properly.

With gratitude,

Brenner, Jordan, and Zac

Standing 7 feet tall, 9 feet wide, and 2,260 pounds, in its sixth season on Mars, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory – Perseverance. The latest Mars rover is living up to its name: in a few short days, it will hold the record for furthest distance traveled by a vehicle on another planet. The current mark belongs to Opportunity, the solar-powered rover that took fourteen years to reach 45.16km before going quiet in a dust storm in 2018 (different era, different physicality – Perseverance is nuclear). For context that’s 28 miles or 1.5 years of non-stop travel for a snail.

So what makes the 5.5-year feat so monumental for Perseverance? It was never supposed to reach this far. The rover was certified for 20km to scan the floor of the crater where new rock worth sampling could take months to find. These days, Perseverance is speed-running scientific discoveries on the rim of the Jezero crater, ground no rover has touched. The rock there is nearly 4 billion years old, the oldest terrain we’ve ever meaningfully studied.

That’s largely thanks to the exponential leap in its self-driving capabilities: 90% of the distance traveled by Perseverance has been autonomous vs. just 6% by its predecessor, Curiosity, launched in 2011. The leap was driven by a dual-computer system, enabling the rover to both study the terrain and move at the same time (lesson: patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time is a valuable skill after all).

Perseverance holds more than 30 sealed tubes, including one rock with markings that on Earth are usually left by bacteria. After a year of peer review, no one has found a good explanation that doesn’t involve life. Despite all the hard work and perseverance, every one of the rover’s findings is still sitting on Mars.

Back on Earth: the retrieval mission ran so far overbudget that Congress cut it. The January spending bill declined to support Mars Sample Return, but some senators are pushing to restore funding for the technology in next year’s budget. Bringing the samples home would be the closest we’ve come to knowing whether life happened anywhere but here. Meanwhile, the tubes have a 50-year life, and the rover is cleared for ~34 more miles and hopefully some more world-changing discoveries along the way.

We’ve long held the belief that once a language stops being taught to children at home, it’s boarded a one-way train to extinction. However, indigenous groups are flipping that narrative on its head and restoring proficiency, one story at a time. Motorola and Lenovo just launched Indigenous Collections, a free app built through a year of oral histories with Ojibwe elders. The goal was to make learning more accessible for youth through smartphones. However, the app is the latest layer of a much bigger effort.

The initiative comes at a time when UNESCO is prioritizing the “preservation, revitalization, and support of indigenous languages worldwide” with languages like Ojibwe classified as “severely endangered.” That’s largely because there aren’t any teachers. Mille Lacs, one of the six Minnesota Ojibwe bands, counted 145 first language speakers in 2005. Today? 19, not enough to fill an average high school class. And younger native speakers can’t be manufactured to replace them. A history of federally mandated boarding schools structured to punish children for speaking Ojibwe didn’t help either.

What’s changing: In 1984, despite the 90-year statewide ban, Hawaiian language teachers opened a Pūnana Leo, the first pre-school to teach Hawaiian. They modeled it after the New Zealand model where elders taught, and parents committed to only speaking the native language at home. Sitting in a room with a bunch of three-year-olds and letting the language transfer person-to-person maximized their reach. When the school opened, fewer than 50 children spoke Hawaiian. Now it’s over 5,000 – more than the total number of professional athletes across the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL combined.

That playbook is being copied and we’re starting to see payoff. A Wisconsin reservation opened a Hawaiian-modeled school in 2000, with no fluent Ojibwe students. Those students are now proficient adults and on staff at other schools, working as aides until they get licensed. Ultimately, elders are still aging faster than native speakers can be added. However, having a permanent, online resting spot for their stories beyond a digital dictionary is a significant stride towards shoring that gap. With the school model proven out and an app in place to further amplify the impact of elders, the next generation has an unparalleled opportunity to learn and reverse the decades long trend.

Five years ago marked the deadliest point in Philadelphia history. Now, the city of brotherly love is on track for its fewest homicides since the 1960s and everyone’s claiming credit. However, homicide coverage only ever told us about victims and perpetrators, never what was being done to prevent them. Meanwhile, an unsung hero has been hard at work: The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (the ones behind Philly’s famous Flower Show) have been cleaning and greening vacant lots for the last 20 years. Currently at one third of the city’s vacant land, the government contract for their work came only from a desire to clean up the relics of demolished buildings. Studies about its impact on violence came years later.

But could mowing lawns really stop a shooting? Physicians and epidemiologists ran a lottery on 541 vacant lots to find out. Some got grass, trees, and a low fence, some just got a trash pickup, and some got nothing for 18 months. In the poorest neighborhoods, gun violence around the treated lots fell nearly 30%. All that for just $2,500 per lot, less than 10% of a gunshot victim’s medical bill.

Connecting the dots: An emergency physician who had to treat those victims (many of whom were kids), started seeing repeat customers. She ran her own trial, strapping ambulatory heart rate monitors to people and walked them around their own neighborhoods. Heart rates were lower when green lots came into view, a clear indicator of lower stress. Separately, two ethnographers studying the open-air heroin and cocaine markets rented a Philadelphia apartment for six years. In one eight-week stretch, they witnessed sixteen shootings, three stabbings, and fourteen more aggravated assaults (more than one violent crime every other day). The only thing that stopped drug deals (or rather, moved them to more abandoned areas) was concerned mothers calling the police to act. And they only called because it was taking place right outside their homes.

There was simply no one paying attention to vacant lots. Once picnic tables showed up, everyone became a vested neighbor. The lots transformed into a space for family barbeques, playing children, and community activities. And it wasn’t just the cleanliness – another study was run in 2024 on 300 high-gun-violence streets. Biweekly trash removals, weeding, and sidewalk sweeping kept streets clean but produced a negligible difference in violent crimes.

Big picture: Before this experiment, everyone assumed that violent neighborhoods were a lost cause. The best solution governments could come up with? Vouchers to help families move out. More than half turned it down. Today, others are starting to recognize the role green lots can play in violence prevention. In June, the DA of Delaware County hired PHS to start mowing lots in Chester, a nearby city. Across American cities, 15% of land is classified as vacant. The fix is cheap, tested, and waiting to be mowed.