Off the News: New lava flow simply out of this world

Kilauea and Earth’s other volcanoes that scientists are monitoring for eruption possibilities may have company — on Venus.

A study published this week in Science Advances, which credits University of Hawaii at Manoa planetary scientist David Trang as a co-author, shows lava flows on the neighbor planet may be only a few years old — apparently making it the only other planet in our solar system with recent eruptions.

While imaging from NASA’s Magellan spacecraft in the 1990s revealed Venus as a world of volcanoes and extensive lava flows, until recently, eruption ages were unclear. The study’s authors say a follow-up space mission could answer questions about the interior workings of both planets.

Tide could be coming in for surf village

Really? We need to create artificial surf in the place where surfing came to be? Well, maybe not, but it seems to be the wave of the future.

The Kalaeloa site proposed for a “surf village” with a lagoon generating perfect swells would be simply the latest in what could be shaping up as a worldwide trend. There’s one in Japan, in fact, that’s supposed to open just before the summer Olympiad in Tokyo — too late to train for the surfing gold in those games, but maybe for Team Japan in 2024?