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Leonid Ksanfomaliti, an astronomer at Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, claims to have detected signs of life in 30-year-old photographs of Venus. Of course, that's completely ludicrous... isn't it? More »
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We can see Venus pass in front of the sun once every one hundred and twenty years. Ever since it's been observed, a strange thing has been happening. Instead of appearing as a dark circle moving across the sun, Venus formed a tear drop shape that slowly oozed onto the solar disc. It took three hundred years for scientists to understand the Black Drop Effect. More »
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Back in the Forties, the science fiction rag Planet Comics published the ongoing feature "Life On Other Worlds." This section peppered scientific know-how amongst whatever gonzo shit the writer happened to make up. Here's a tour of our Solar System using old issues of Planet Comics. Did you know that Mars is occupied by gargantuan Romans?

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Venus flytraps can't hurt you, even if you leave your fingers in there for a long time. But what if you were a particularly creative mafioso who needed to dispose of a body? Is there a particular circumstance in which they could digest human flesh? Well, the answer is... More »
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We've just learned that there's strong evidence that saltwater flows on the surface of Mars. It's another reminder that water is everywhere in our solar system, whether it's ice, vapor, or liquid. Here's a handy guide to where all the water can be found. More »
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Last week saw Neptune Day, the first anniversary - in Neptune years - of the planet's discovery on September 23, 1846. That got us thinking: what are the "birthdays" for all the other planets? Here's a handy, mildly insane guide. More »
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This photo shows four of the five planets visible to the naked eye, all lined up one on top of the other in the morning sky to create the most impressive planetary configuration in over a decade. More »
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NASA's Messenger probe is currently orbiting close around the Sun in preparation for its mission to Mercury. While making its lonely orbit, Messenger snapped this amazing photo that shows all the planets (plus our Moon) in one big family photo. More »
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What would would the night sky look like if our planet was orbited by Mars, Jupiter, or a even a parallel Earth? Brad Goodspeed has created this nifty video imagining such a scenario. More »
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A recent proposal to control global warming is to release sulfur droplets into the atmosphere, which would hopefully block out some of the Sun's rays. Venus has been running an eons-long simulation of just that plan...and it doesn't look good. More »
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The great challenge for any climber is to conquer each continent's tallest mountain. But tomorrow's climbers can consider a far more extreme challenge: leaving Earth to climb the tallest peaks of the solar system. Here's how they'll do it. More »
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Venus's atmosphere is 93 times heaver than Earth's, the air is mostly carbon dioxide, the planet is covered in sulfur dioxide clouds,and ground temperatures reach 860 degrees. And yet lightning works exactly the same way on both planets. More »
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While other space programs are sending probes to explore the surface of Mars or the moon, Russian scientists have their eyes on another target: Venus, a planet last explored by Soviet scientists over two decades ago. More »
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The Japanese space agency, JAXA, is sending an orbiter to Venus in a few years to scan the surface of our nearest planetary neighbor. The PLANET C orbiter (it even sounds like a secret weapon straight out of a Godzilla movie) will use million-pixel cameras to peer through the dense cloudcover and see what lies on Venus' surface. Of course, kaiju fans know what they're likely to find with their super-advanced UV and infrared digital cameras - a giant, three-headed, lightning spewing dragon named King Ghidora. More »
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If the 800-degree heat or crushing atmospheric pressure doesn't get you, you might want to watch out for spewing plumes of sulfur dioxide and liquid lava flows on your next visit to Venus. We've long known that our neighboring planet has lots of volcanoes, but no one is sure if any of them are currently active. It's impossible to see through Venus' dense CO2 atmosphere, but the European Space Agency's Venus Express orbiter has found evidence of drastic, sudden chemical changes at high altitudes. An active volcano might be the culprit. More »
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Elegant, leggy Lili St. Cyr ruled the burlesque stage from the 1940s to the 1960s. She was known for her innovative routines (one involving a flying G string), six marriages, and the mail order lingerie store she operated after her retirement from the stage. She also believed in UFOs. In this clip from October 1957, St. Cyr discusses the advanced emotions of Venusian men with interviewer Mike Wallace on The Mike Wallace Interview, a smoky precursor to 60 Minutes that ran from 1957 to 1960. More »
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A new web TV show could pick up where Firefly left off, telling gritty stories of class warfare on human colonies. Venus Rises is filming now in New Jersey. Four episodes will be available next year on national video-on-demand cable channel Illusion TV as well the show's own site. One glance at the first episode's synopsis shows how deeply Firefly is in Venus Rising's DNA. More »
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Science isn't all about sex, pollution, cutting up brains, and going to outer space, but given today's headlines we can just pretend that it is. More »
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