On this day in 1990, the Magellan spacecraft achieved orbit around Venus. It had two primary goals: map the surface and gravitational field of the toxic cloud covered planet. Venus is in many way like Earth. It is almost exactly the same size and density. They both seem to have a similar internal structures. They are both losing heat at the same rate. Yet, as Carl Sagan put it: earth is like heaven and Venus is like hell.
Venus’ surface pressure is almost a hundred times the surface pressure here on earth. Standing on the surface of Venus would be like being a half mile under the ocean. You know: deadly. But it’s worse than that, because it is also incredibly hot. It is 860°F, which is, you know, hotter than any regular kitchen oven. In fact, it is even hotter than the hottest pizza ovens. Venus is very, very hot. In fact, it is hotter than Mercury at noon, even though Venus only gets 25% as much energy from the sun.
The reason for this is because almost 97% of Venus’ atmosphere is composed of carbon-dioxide. This creates the mother of all greenhouse effects. Or it would, if the greenhouse effect weren’t a myth created by a conspiracy of Al Gore and James Hansen. Moving on. This fact (or myth) combines with two other aspects of Venus to create a very constant temperature: almost no axial tilt (just 3° compared to 23.5° for Earth) and almost a circular orbit around the sun (eccentricity of 0.007 compared to 0.017 for the Earth). So day, night, pole, or equator, Venus is just too hot even for cooking pizzas. But the temperature does decrease with altitude. So on top of Maxwell Montes — the highest point on Venus at 7 miles — it is only about 700°F. And you know what that means: great pizza oven temperature! (Fun fact: there may be lead sulfide “snow” on top of Maxwell Montes!)
The Magellan mission made a number of discoveries about Venus. For example, it found that the surface was young. It is covered with volcanic material. It appears to have river-like lava flows. It is also geologically active, but doesn’t seem to have plate tectonics. And there is little evidence of wind erosion. Now this is actually something I know a little bit about. First, Venus rotates very slowly (and in the wrong direction), so not much in the way of Coriolis effect. And there are no temperature gradients, so not much mixing due to that. So the atmosphere is very static.
Anyway, when all the world gets you down, NASA is there to cheer you up: humans are good at doing positive things. And that’s true, even if we ultimately learn that it is nasty out there!
It is a bit weird to go to the Wikipedia 
The frozen nitrogen is constantly sublimating (turning directly from solid to gaseous form) into Pluto’s atmosphere. But it is in equilibrium, so the atmosphere is depositing onto the surface at the same rate. The atmosphere is made up of the same three compounds found in the ice: Nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane. Of course, there isn’t much atmosphere: just 0.001% as much as we have here on the earth. But still: notable. Plus: because of the effect of methane, the atmosphere gets warmer as you go up in the atmosphere (like in the Earth’s stratosphere), so that 6 miles up, it is 65°F warmer.
As regular readers know, I don’t like football. I’m not that keen on professional sports, anyway; but football really does operate at a whole different level of boringness. If it weren’t for the fact that it is so explicitly violent, it never would have become America’s game. (Although I have noticed that Americans haven’t gotten into rugby — a game that makes American football players look like the masculine pretenders they are.) As a result, I’ve met the whole “deflategate” controversy with nothing but derision.
On this day in 1984, 
The susceptibility to positive framing is what scientists call an irrational bias, and it is very powerful. To better understand why our psyche responds so deeply, Christopher Krupenye, a Duke University graduate student in evolutionary anthropology, and his colleagues Alexandra Rosati of Yale University and Brian Hare of Duke gathered 40 of our closest living relatives — 23 chimpanzees and 17 bonobos — and offered them options for choosing food: either one or two fruits versus a constant number of peanuts. Sometimes the apes were shown one piece of fruit each time they made the selection, but half the time they were given two: positive framing. In other trials, the apes were initially presented two pieces of fruit, but half the time they got only one: negative framing. Regardless of the framing, the apes ended up with an identical quantity of fruit. Yet they were more likely to choose fruit when they were offered the single fruit with its frequent “bonus” than the double fruit with its frequent “loss.”
I always like it when I nail a story straight out. And that is certainly true of my article on Monday, 
On this day 20 years ago, 
It was 100°F Sunday — with very high humidity. So I really need to talk about Willis Carrier who built the first modern air conditioner on this day in 1902. He actually wrote down the plans four days earlier. His main innovation was to include humility control. That’s the thing: most of the heat in the air is contained in the water vapor. You get rid of that, and it gets cool — fast. In fact, if you want to defog your windows, put the hot air through the air conditioner, and the windows will clear shockingly fast.
Mick Fanning is a professional surfer. He’s a triple world champion. And I have to admit, I think surfing is cool. I love watching people surf — whether on television or when I’m down at the beach. It’s beautiful to watch. And also, it’s impressive that people do it. Also: good God, don’t they realize there are sharks in the ocean! Well, Fanning knows, and so do all the people watching the J-Bay Open, the most recent leg of the World Surf League Championship Tour. It’s being reported like this, 
On this date in 1969, 
Before New Horizon’s flyby of Pluto, I noted that the dwarf planet might have 
Another interesting aspect of the whole thing is that Pluto has more nitrogen in its atmosphere than it ought to, because the gas should reach escape velocity. Before this recent flyby, New Horizon’s chief scientist Alan Stern and a colleague predicted that if they saw steep water-ice mountains with a thin volatile gas veneer, it would indicate that there is some kind of geological process that is dredging up nitrogen from the interior. Well, as you can see in the image above, Pluto has very high (two mile), very steep ice mountains. And they have a “thin frosting of nitrogen and other volatiles.” They haven’t found any “geysers” or “cryovolcanoes.” But they only just started looking.