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Why has Venus obsessed so many astronomers?
Every 122 years, Venus crosses the Sun as a black and fleeting teardrop, kindling the awe of all those who dare to know
Venus May Have Devoured Its Moon, Scientists Find
Scientists suggest that Venus did indeed once have a moon, which spiraled inwards until it crashed into the planet's surface.
Astronomers Looking Through Forgotten Observations Find Bizarre And Beautiful Planet-Wide Rings On Venus
Looking at Venus, captured accidentally in old observations, the team found a truly odd feature that can only be seen in polarized light.
Slow spin could explain why planets become hellish
Hundreds of Venus-like planets could soon help determine why some worlds become sweltering greenhouse hellscapes, but to fully understand that, scientists first need to know how fast those planets are spinning.
Venus ate its moon
If it ever had a moon, new research shows Venus would have consumed it.
NASA’s DAVINCI Beats Heat in Preparation for Blistering Venus Descent
An engineering model of NASA’s DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) descent probe passed a key test that ran
Scientists Thought Venus Was Too Acidic for Complex Chemistry. It May Actually Be Weirdly Hospitable
MIT researchers recreated a Venus-like stew of 98% sulfuric acid to test complex signaling molecules, like peptides, in the lab. Looks like they passed.
Mutants and Mutagen in Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Learn the secrets of the ooze (and Mutagen tokens) with these behind-the-scenes stories from Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Serena and Venus Williams handed Wimbledon doubles wildcard
watch the ATP and WTA Tours live on Sky Sports Tennis and Sky Sports+, streaming service NOW and the Sky Sports app
Scientists Decode Giant Venus Cloud, Say "Hydraulic Jump" Is Behind It
This happens when a fast-moving, shallow flow suddenly slows down and becomes deeper.
Saturday Sports: Congress' plan for college sports; the Red Sox; Venus and Serena
NPR's Scott Simon and sportswriter Howard Bryant discuss Congress' plan to "protect" college sports and the hottest team in Major League Baseball.
Venus ate its own moon | BBC Sky at Night Magazine
Study says that if Venus ever did have a moon, the planet's spin and gravity would cause the moon to be swallowed by it.
If Venus Has Life It May Have Come From Earth, Scientists Say
Could it be?
Northwest Earth and Space Science Pathways Project Celebrates Student Innovation Through ROADS from Earth to Venus National Challenge
The Northwest Earth and Space Science Pathways (NESSP) project recently concluded its 2025–2026 ROADS (Rover Observation And Discoveries in Space) from Earth
John Isner, Venus Williams take on expanded roles as TNT Sports reveals 2026 Roland-Garros broadcast team
TNT Sports is giving John Isner and Venus Williams significantly more to do at this year’s Roland-Garros, the network announced Thursday. Isner and Williams are both taking on expanded roles for the 2026 tournament, which kicks off May 24 across TNT, truTV, and HBO Max. Williams, a seven-time Grand Slam singles champion who spent years…
How 'Ray Gunn's Venus Nova, pop star of the (retro) future, evolved
Meet the alluring pop star at the heart of "Ray Gunn."
NICK STROBEL: Lunar eclipse on tap for Aug. 27
Venus now begins its slow descent back toward the sun as it catches up to Earth in its faster inner orbit. Because Venus' orbit is so close to Earth's, Venus'
Serena Williams leaves door open for playing singles at Wimbledon
Serena Williams and Venus Williams will compete in doubles together for the first time in four years at Wimbledon.
Starwatch: Venus to meet Saturn in evening twilight
Look west after sunset this week to see the pair converge in the dusk, closing in on a near-conjunction on 8 March
Met Gala 2026: Venus and Serena Williams, Angel Reese, A'ja Wilson, Dwyane Wade among athletes to hit red carpet at annual costume gala
Met Gala co-chair Venus Williams and fellow tennis star Naomi Osaka hit the red carpet for the annual event on Monday.
Serena, Venus Williams fall in Cincinnati Open doubles
Making her first Cincinnati Open appearance since 2022, Serena Williams and sister, Venus, rallied for doubles victory over on Monday, Aug. 17.
Venus Williams Returns to French Open After Five Years
At 45, Venus Williams is heading back to Roland Garros. The 14-time Grand Slam doubles champion will team up with Hailey Baptiste in the doubles draw, entering directly on their combined rankings without needing a wildcard.
Venus Williams, 45, gets Australian Open wildcard
Venus Williams, 45, is set to play at the Australian Open for the first time in five years after receiving the final women's wildcard for the tournament.
Scientists have now made the most comprehensive tally yet of deep-sea exploration — 43,681 dive records dating back to 1958 — and found that humans have directly seen less than 0.001% of the deep ocean floor, an area roughly the size of Rhode Island, leaving the vast seafloor across 66% of Earth’s surface essentially unobserved.
Humanity has sent cameras to the Moon, Mars, Venus and the outer planets, but on Earth itself there is still a larger frontier that has barely been looked at directly. A 2025 study in Science Advances has now put a number on that gap: since 1958, researchers have compiled 43,681 records of dives deep enough […]
Venus May Once Have Suffered A "Moon-Forming" Impact, But The Resulting Satellite Wouldn't Have Stuck Around For Long
It seems a large companion is difficult for a planet that size and distance from the Sun to hold on to, which might be bad news for life on Venus-like exoplanets.
What’s Up: March 2026 Skywatching Tips from NASA
What are some skywatching highlights in March 2026? A total lunar eclipse blood moon takes centre stage, Venus and Saturn cozy up for a conjunction, and we celebrate the vernal equinox.
Why is Venus so bright?
The "morning star" is bright because of several factors, including having an atmosphere filled with sulfuric acid.
'My daughters are fans of Venus, so it was tough'
Tatjana Maria beats Venus Williams in straight sets in the first round at the Hobart Internationa.
The Greatest List of Classic Christmas Movies, Internet Drags Claressa Shields Dragged Over Papoose, Inside Venus Williams’ Wedding and More Celeb News
Here’s the latest in entertainment news straight from The Root.
How to watch Jupiter and Venus as they join in the sky this week
You may have noticed two bright "stars" in the west after sunset. Those aren't stars but rather two planets: Jupiter and Venus. And they're on their way for a beautiful meet-up in the days ahead.
Federation Cup (Athletics) continues, Bhambri-Venus in Geneva Open final: Indian Sports LIVE, May 23
Here are all the updates from Indian sports on May 23, 2026.
Scientists Finally Discover How Venus Flytraps Snap Shut So Fast
Exceeding the plant 'speed limit'.
White House budget puts 54 NASA science missions on the chopping block
Experts found that the White House budget request for the upcoming fiscal year could defund 54 NASA science missions, including a spacecraft currently studying Jupiter and two planned Venus missions
Venus Williams-backed WeWard can now lock your apps until you hit your steps
With funding from tennis star and angel investor Venus Williams, the French app WeWard says that it increases walking time by almost 25%.
Venus de Milo passes surprise health inspection after food permit dispute
The Swansea Board of Health announced that Venus de Milo, a popular restaurant and event space, passed a surprise health inspection.
UCF College of Business to Honor Notable Alumni at 26th Annual Hall of Fame Ceremony
This year’s honorees include Ethereum co-founder, former VENUS Fashion Inc. CEO and the president of Nutriband Inc.
The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science
With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!
Filipina Physician-Scientist Named National Finalist for 2026 ASEAN–U.S. Science Prize for Women
Dr. Venus Oliva Cloma-Rosales, Founder of 101 Health Research, has been named the Philippine National Finalist in the Mid-Career category of the 2026 UL Research Institutes ASEAN–U.S. Science Prize for Women. Her work uses artificial intelligence and health data science to support inclusive, resilient healthcare and evidence-based decision-making in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. MANILA, […]
'Extreme' transistor can withstand heat of 1000-plus F — priming it for use in Venus-bound probes
The silicon carbide transistor is designed to avoid low controllability and current leakage, which typically become problems at high temperatures.
Australian Open 2026: Venus Williams makes history in loss, Carlos Alcaraz, Aryna Sabalenka win easily
A space shark, 'royal' auroras and a 'Venusian pearl': See the winners of the 2026 ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest
A Royal Observatory Greenwich contest showcased work from around the night sky and the solar system, with prize-winning photos spanning topics ranging from auroras to planets.
Williams sisters lose on doubles return
Serena and Venus Williams lose a thriller at the Cincinnati Open in their first doubles match together for four years.
Scientists Discover a Giant Hidden Lava Tunnel Beneath Venus
Scientists have uncovered evidence of a gigantic empty lava tunnel beneath Venus, revealing a hidden volcanic world on Earth’s mysterious twin.
Williams sisters fall in thrilling return to US Open doubles
Serena and Venus Williams electrified Arthur Ashe Stadium but fell to Chan Hao-ching and Maya Joint in three thrilling sets in their return to the US Open women's doubles on Friday.Venus, 46, and Serena, 44, hadn't played Grand Slam doubles since the 2022 US Open and last won a title together at Roland Garros in 2018.
Hell-World Venus May Have Once Had Oceans Across 90% of Its Hot, Dry Surface
The ghosts of oceans past.
Williams sisters set to play Cincinnati Open doubles
Serena Williams and Venus Williams are given a wildcard entry for the women's doubles at the Cincinnati Open.
Venus, Serena Williams' success backs science on younger siblings
As tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams prepare to take the court at the U.S. Open, their success backs research suggesting younger siblings thrive.
Why is Venus hotter than Mercury, when Mercury is closer to the sun?
Despite being farther from the sun, Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, and the reason has little to do with proximity to a star.
Utah Helicopter Flights Test NASA’s DAVINCI Mission to Venus
To prepare their spacecraft for Venus, NASA's DAVINCI scientists traveled to the most Venus-like place on Earth.
Australian Open 2026: Venus Williams, 45, receives wildcard for tournament
Venus Williams, 45, is set to play at the Australian Open for the first time in five years after receiving the final women's wildcard for the tournament.
Where might we find life in our solar system?
While life on Mars (and Venus) has long been an obsession for those wondering if we're alone, there are other places in our solar system that could support life in some form.
550 years later, scientists claim to have solved what killed Botticelli’s muse
Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli painted Simonetta Vespucci as Venus rising from the waves. Now, scientists think they’ve solved how she died
No Peeking: What Are These Two Objects Meeting In The June Twilight Sky?
Views like this do not happen every year.
Venus had a moon for nearly 2 billion years, scientists say
Venus had a moon a long time ago, scientists in the US and France say. It likely survived for nearly 2 billion years until Venus’ gravity tore it apart.
Venus' mysterious haze is actually cosmic dust
A physical model show that iron dust and sulfuric acid create the right properties.
Six planets due to parade across night sky in rare celestial spectacle
Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mercury, Neptune and Uranus will all be visible at same time in curved line across sky
Science can serve dark as well as light
I’m not sure how many of you are watching “Star City,” Apple TV’s spin-off of its “For All Mankind” program (2019-present), but it’s one of the better sci-fi series I’ve seen in a while, with an impressively dark political message. (Some light spoilers below.) For the uninitiated, “For All Mankind” presented a slightly tweaked history of the U.S. space program in which it was the USSR that landed on the Moon first in 1969, and shortly thereafter put a woman cosmonaut on the lunar surface. This sparks an ongoing space race that, in the original series, yields a lot of benefits for humanity. President Nixon’s insistence on a female astronaut corps to compete with the Soviets boosts the feminist movement of the 1970s and the ERA passes. New fuels generated for the space program create clean and cheap energy around Earth. There are also some darker changes — the USSR is thriving well into the 2000s, there are terrorist counter-technology movements around the globe, laborers on Mars work in nightmarish conditions and organize strikes and riots, etc. the @smotus report is a reader-supported publication. To support this work, please become a paid subscriber. Subscribe That show offers glimpses into the subtle ways this Earth is different. Teddy Kennedy never went to Chappaquidick because he was racing back to Washington to deal with the space program crisis; he gets elected President in 1972. John Lennon survives his early 1980s shooting but Pope John Paul II does not. The Apple Newton succeeded. Pretty much the whole of season 4 is a setup for an Al Gore joke. Again, mostly, the vision that “For All Mankind” presents is a positive one, with technology advancing many human interests. “Star City” goes in a very different direction. This spin-off show is about the same set of events but from the Soviet perspective. As we meet them, the team of scientists and cosmonauts responsible for the lunar landing are still basking in their hero status, but their program is embedded deep in the Soviet security state of the late 1960s. Everyone’s apartment is bugged. Whole teams of clerical staff spend their days transcribing recordings of people’s lives. People in the program, including respected cosmonauts, are regularly arrested. An incredibly menacing Colonel Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin) forces confessions and tortures and kills, expressing little more than annoyance in the process. Meanwhile, the space program’s highly respected Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans) has a vision for the program that he knows the government will not approve. He insists that they need to think past the Moon to focus on colonizing the solar system, starting with Venus. (This is a rough parallel to the Americans’ pivot to Mars in the original show.) He essentially builds a secret space program within the space program, calculating that the government will embrace the mission after it has succeeded. (As an aside, I’m not sure why the Venus obsession, as a successful mission can’t produce the biggest public relations payoff: a cosmonaut standing on the surface holding the Soviet flag. Anyone standing on Venus would be immediately crushed by the 92-bar atmosphere and then cremated in the 900°F temperatures. But in a country with no free press perhaps the visual payoff was less valued.) But the overall vision is that the technological advances have only amplified the most fearsome aspects of the Soviet system. The state is paranoid (but not incorrect) about American spies and does monstrous things to protect its secrets. People are terrified to trust each other. Classic banality-of-evil figures order people to harm those they care about; those people comply rather than get shot. Others are forced into criminal behavior to protect loved ones. We’re reminded all the time these days of what happens when a government despises science. It manifests in the defunding of schools, the elevation of fossil fuels as the rest of the world pivots to solar, outbreaks of measles and diarrhea, etc. But “Star City” offers a vision of a bad government that likes science. It’s not encouraging. It’s not yet clear if there will be a season two of this show. But I strongly recommend season one. It’s both thoughtful and gripping. Share
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