Lifeboat Foundation

From planet of love to scorching Hell planet—the image of Venus has changed considerably since ancient times, because it is no longer just the third brightest natural object in Earth’s skies. The ancients equated the mysterious third light with the goddess of love; in Greece that was Aphrodite, whom the Romans conflated with the goddess Venus. That’s where our closest planetary neighbor got its name and why Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus worked as a best-selling title, as recently as 1992, and still sells. But since the mid-20th century, we’ve known in detail why a paradise Venus is not. Average temperature on the surface is a scorching 462° Celsius (864° Fahrenheit) while atmospheric pressure is 90 times that of Earth at sea level, or equivalent to being at 900 meters depth in Earth’s oceans.

A handful of Russian landing probes have survived for several minutes on the planet’s surface before being cooked and crushed, but the conditions are unquestionably inhospitable for life forms. Consequently, you do not hear about astrobiologists searching for native microorganisms on the Venusian surface the way you hear about the search for microorganisms on Mars. Nevertheless, since the late 20th century, planetary scientists have speculated that Venus could have boasted a much more hospitable environment in the distant past, perhaps 2–3 billion years ago. That’s around the time that Earth was accumulating oxygen in its oceans and atmosphere. At that point in history, Venus and Earth may have had similar climates.

What’s been in the news lately is a study involving computer climate simulations in which data from NASA’s Magellan mission to Venus were found to support the idea of a once habitable Venus. The study involved researchers from NASA, Uppsala University in Sweden, Columbia University, and the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, AZ.

No-code — software that lets you accomplish tasks that previously required coding skills — is an increasingly hot space, even if the basic premise has been promised and not fully realised for many years. Related to this are companies like Airtable, which attempt to make building relational databases and interrogating them as easy as creating a spreadsheet. Now Softr, a startup out of Berlin, wants to push the no-code concept further by making it easy to build websites on top of Airtable without the need to write code.

Recently soft launched on Product Hunt, today the young company is disclosing $2.2 million in seed funding, having previously been bootstrapped by its two Armenian founders, CEO Mariam Hakobyan and CTO Artur Mkrtchyan. Leading the round is Atlantic Labs, along with Philipp Moehring (Tiny. VC) and founders from GitHub, SumUp, Zeitgold, EyeEm and Rows.

Started in 2019, Softr has built a no-code platform to enable anybody to build websites and web apps based on data housed in Airtable. The idea is to let Airtable do the database grunt work, combined with Softr’s relatively flexible but template-driven approach to website and web app creation.

This is the third installment in a three-part series. Read parts one and two.

In the third and final part of our series, Fusion Industry Association director Andrew Holland tells Asia Times’ correspondent Jonathan Tennenbaum how the private sector is leap-frogging government programs in the race to develop commercial fusion power plants.

Andrew Holland: So now the private sector is coming in. You mentioned high-temperature superconductors. That’s an important new thing. There’s a whole range of new developments that come from outside of the fusion space that are now being applied.

A friend recently asked me “what do we mean by civilian space development”.Such a question made me understand that, maybe, we were not clear enough about the title of our congress, the Civilian Space Development. Following such understanding, I tried to draw a better rationale, aware that what we wrote was not that self-explanatory as we thought.

It was observed that NASA is a civilian agency, not a military one. And that the commercial space effort is civilian process, not a military one.

Enhance!

If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze into you. Nietzsche could have been talking about Mars.

The far side of the moon is poised to become our newest and best window on the hidden history of the cosmos. Over the course of the next decade, astronomers are planning to perform unprecedented observations of the early universe from that unique lunar perch using radio telescopes deployed on a new generation of orbiters and robotic rovers.

These instruments will study the universe’s initial half-billion years—the first few hundred million or so of which make up the so-called cosmic “dark ages,” when stars and galaxies had yet to form. Bereft of starlight, this era is invisible to optical observations. Radio telescopes, however, can tune in to long-wavelength, low-frequency radio emissions produced by the gigantic clouds of neutral hydrogen that then filled the universe. But these emissions are difficult, if not downright impossible, to detect from Earth because they are either blocked or distorted by our planet’s atmosphere or swamped by human-generated radio noise.

Scientists have dreamed for decades of such studies that could take place on the moon’s far side, where they would be shielded from earthly transmissions and untroubled by any significant atmosphere to impede cosmic views. Now, with multiple space agencies pursuing lunar missions, those dreams are set to become reality.

NASA announced a new mission to Jupiter that would be extended through 2025.

Reviews.org Survey results state 51% of Americans would switch to SpaceX Starlink Internet.

🚙 🌊 From the street to underwater depths: The diving car by Switzerland’s Frank M. Rinderknecht is legendary! Every year he develops a vehicle prototype that has never been seen before.

Not all appears as it would seem in the Whirlpool galaxy. One of the best-studied spiral galaxies and a delight to amateur astronomers, Messier 51, as it’s officially named, is influenced by powerful, invisible forces.

Located 31 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici, the galaxy’s arms are strikingly visible as they reach out along the central spine structure, displaying swirling clouds of gas and dust that are massive star-making factories. But new observations by NASA ’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, presented at this week’s 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, shows a more complicated picture.

Radio telescopes previously detected neatly-drawn magnetic fields throughout the length of the galaxy’s massive arms. But under SOFIA’s infrared gaze for the first time those lines give way to a chaotic scene in the outer spiral arms. Using a far-infrared camera and imaging polarimeter instrument called the High-Resolution Airborne Wideband Camera, or HAWC+, researchers found that the magnetic fields in the outskirts of the galaxy no longer follow the spiral structure and are instead distorted.