Most planetary scientists will tell you the heyday of Venus exploration was more than a generation ago. That is about to change.

Two NASA missions are on track to launch to Venus in the early 2030s. The first, known as the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI), is now scheduled for launch in December 2030, a year earlier than previously planned. DAVINCI will send a parachute-assisted descent probe through the atmosphere of Venus, returning the first direct images of the planet's surface since 1982. A second mission, Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography, And Spectroscopy (VERITAS), will follow with a launch in November 2032 to map the Venusian surface by radar from orbit.

The European Space Agency is building another orbiter, Envision, for launch to Venus in 2032. The Venus armada might get started as soon as next year, when Rocket Lab aims to launch a privately funded probe to search for signs of organic material in the planet's clouds.

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Discovery+ subscription prices went up today.

Ad-free plans for new subscribers went from $10 per month to $12/month. Ad-based plans went from $6 to $7.

The new prices take effect for new subscribers immediately. Current subscribers to the streaming service, which primarily features unscripted content, like reality shows and documentaries, will receive 30 days’ notice before the new prices take effect, starting with bills issued as of November 12.

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For a while, those hoping to avoid the difficulty and expense of dealing with Adobe's Creative Suite have been able to use several free and/or open source alternatives that replicate some or all of those capabilities. Now, one developer is using AI-powered reverse engineering to mimic the look, feel, and functionality of Adobe's well-known software with what he hopes will soon be perfect fidelity.

Artcraft got its start last year as a "controllable AI for artists" that allows for precise post-generation editing of AI-crafted images and videos. Over the weekend, though, the brand debuted its pivot to a suite of seven open source apps recreating the user interface and tools found in Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.

In announcing those new apps on Reddit earlier this week, software developer Brandon Thomas said he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to create "clean-room replacements" for Adobe's closed source software in Rust (with WebAssembly versions available for use in a browser). And while commenters on Hacker News and elsewhere have taken pains to point out the new software's many current shortcomings, Thomas makes the grandiose promise that the current "super early alpha" state will soon lead to something just as functional as anything Adobe has ever put out.

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After months of industry and customer speculation, Paramount Skydance has shed some light on the future of the HBO Max and Paramount+ streaming services.

Paramount Skydance completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) today, ending a monthslong saga that began when Netflix last year announced its own plans to buy WBD. Netflix scrapped those plans in February. Skydance is the name of the company created from the $111 billion merger.

In an announcement today, Skydance said that all of the direct-to-consumer streaming services it owns, including the Discovery+ service that Discovery Inc. (which merged with WarnerMedia in 2022 to create WBD) launched in 2021, “will unify into a single service over time.”

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A wild African black panther prowls for prey. An orphaned baby pangolin must learn how to climb on its own. And a green turtle struggles to make it back to the water after laying her eggs on a remote island, rescued by local humans who carry the exhausted turtle to the water's edge. These animals and many other species are featured in Africa: Earth's Wild Home, a new documentary series from National Geographic. It's meant to launch a new franchise, with separate series documenting the wildlife and environmental ecosystems of all seven continents in turn.

The seven-episode documentary series took four years to complete, with filming taking place across nearly 30 different African countries. Each episode focuses on a specific ecosystem, from the jungle and the desert, to the plains, mountains, and islands of Africa, and closes by spotlighting the various scientists, photographers, and NatGeo explorers whose work made the series possible. The final episode focuses on the local conservation leaders and researchers working to preserve Africa's rich biodiversity for future generations.

The producers found the perfect narrator in Wunmi Mosaku, who has delivered powerful performances in such works as Sinners, Loki, and Lovecraft Country. "I was incredibly honored that they even know my name at Nat Geo," Mosaku told Ars. "It was wonderful to be asked to narrate the series. It means so much to me. As someone who was born in Nigeria and raised in England, I'll take any opportunity I can to reconnect and celebrate this incredible continent where life is so diverse and so extreme and beautiful and relentless and peaceful. I wanted to be a part of that because it's a part of me."

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Venus is shrouded in a veil of mystery. The yellowish “lower haze” at the bottom of its atmosphere was discovered by the Venera and Pioneer Venus probes in the 1970s. These spacecraft were some of the first to successfully send images of the planet back to Earth, but the haze they saw went unexplained for decades. Now the mystery Venus was keeping has been unveiled.

What nobody knew then was that the haze is an accumulation of particles from meteorites. “Shooting stars” that burn up in the atmosphere leave behind cosmic dust particles, and after sulfuric acid interacts with these particles, it leaves behind a haze. Planetary scientist Hiroki Karyu and his research team at Tohoku University in Sendai City, Japan, finally figured out how the haze formed using a microphysical model. This type of model involves microphysics—the micro-scale processes that create clouds and precipitation on Earth and other bodies.

“The continuous influx of cosmic dust is sufficient to sustain this lower haze layer with the particle size distribution observed by the entry probes,” Karyu said in a study published in Nature Astronomy. “These haze particles of cosmic origin act as efficient condensation nuclei, promoting cloud formation in the main cloud deck even far from their initial source.”

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With its premiere just two weeks away, Marvel Studios has dropped one last trailer for the limited series, VisionQuest, which will complete the trilogy begun with WandaVision and Agatha All Along.

(Spoilers for WandaVision and Agatha All Along below.)

As previously reported, Marvel’s streaming TV portfolio has kind of been all over the place: a handful of hits, a few misses, and a bunch of middling offerings. One standout was WandaVision, followed by an excellent sequel (of sorts), Agatha All Along. VisionQuest will complete the trilogy. Vision (Paul Bettany) died in Infinity War, but WandaVision resurrected an all-white version whose memories were restored in the finale. We finally get to learn what happened afterward.

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