The longest amount of time that a spacecraft has survived on the surface of Venus is 127 minutes. On March 1, 1982, the USSR's Venera 13 probe parachuted to a gentle landing and managed to keep operating for just over two hours by hiding all of its computers inside of a hermetically sealed titanium pressure vessel that was pre-cooled in orbit. The surface temperature on Venus averages 464 C (867 F), which is hotter than the surface of Mercury (the closest planet to the sun), and hot enough that conventional electronics simply will not work. It's not just the temperature that makes Venus a particularly nasty place for computers--the pressure at the surface is around 90 atmospheres, equivalent to the pressure 3,000 feet down in Earth's ocean. And while you can be relieved that the sulfuric acid rain that you'll find in Venus' upper atmosphere doesn't reach the surface, it's also so dark down there (equivalent to a heavily overcast day here on Earth) that solar power is horrendously inefficient.

Here's the latest for Friday, July 28th: Senate rejects Republican'Skinny Repeal' of health care law; Foxconn agrees to build massive plant in Wisconsin; Amusement ride-maker tells fairs worldwide not to use Ohio accident ride; Train crash in Barcelona. A Foxconn recruitment office in Shenzhen, China is seen on Feb. 22, 2013. More: Foxconn plans '8K 5G' displays at new U.S. plant In a phone interview from Shanghai, where he was concluding a nine-day trade trip in China, Snyder said Monday night there is a "strong possibility" for Foxconn to still locate in the state after the company in recent weeks picked neighboring Wisconsin for a $10 billion display panel plant with 3,000 employees that could grow to 13,000. Snyder told The Associated Press that Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou invited him for dinner, meetings and a tour of the company's sprawling factory in Shenzhen near Hong Kong that employs some 200,000 workers. They discussed the autonomous vehicle industry and advanced manufacturing, Snyder said.

Passengers with limited mobility will soon be able to navigate airports more easily thanks to Panasonic's robotic electric wheelchair. Developed as part of a wider program to make Japan's Haneda Airport more accessible to all, the wheelchair utilizes autonomous mobility technology: after users input their destination via smartphone the wheelchair will identify its position and select the best route to get there. Multiple chairs can move in tandem which means families or groups can travel together, and after use, the chairs will'regroup' automatically, reducing the workload for airport staff. The chairs also use sensors to stop automatically if they detect a potential collision. The chairs will be tested between now and March 2018 alongside a number of other initiatives devised by Panasonic and NTT.

In March, Intel announced the acquisition of Mobileye, a company it has partnered with to develop self-driving automobile technology. And as of today, the $15.3 billion deal is officially complete. Intel purchased 84 percent of Mobileye's outstanding ordinary shares and the company is now an Intel subsidiary. Mobileye is an Israel-based company and it will remain headquartered in Jerusalem under the leadership of co-founder Amnon Shashua. A follow-up offer period for the remaining outstanding stock has commenced and will expire on August 21st.

President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on immigration reform. Entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa says the RAISE Act could be good for the country. Editor's note: Silicon Valley entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa has appeared frequently on this page, most recently here. I was shooting with him just last week in and around his home in Palo Alto for a story on his new book, "The Driver in the Driverless Car," and his forecast of an imminent job crisis caused by high technology and what we as a society should do about it. And more to the point, high tech in the form his Tesla, which can already do a lot of the driverless driving, including parking itself in Vivek's garage by remote control -- somewhat haltingly -- as this brief 1:33 video clip demonstrates: An immigrant from India, Vivek has been a staunch -- some would say "strident" -- supporter of diversity, especially in high tech, where he has found it lamentably lacking with regard to both gender and race.

Infants growing up bilingual have the capability to differentiate between the two languages, even when they are as young as 20 months old, a new study published Tuesday by Princeton University found. Researchers at Princeton Baby Lab studied how babies and young children learn to see, talk and comprehend the world. International researchers teamed up with researchers from Princeton University and found infants as young as 20 months of age could accurately and efficiently process two languages separately. "By 20 months, bilingual babies already know something about the differences between words in their two languages," Casey Lew-Williams, an assistant professor of psychology and co-director of the Princeton Baby Lab, said. "They do not think that'dog' and'chien' [French] are just two versions of the same thing," he added.

Imagine that tomorrow, some smart kid invented a technology that let people or physical goods pass through walls, and posted instructions for how to build it cheaply from common household materials. Lots of industries would probably become more productive. Being able to walk through walls instead of being forced to use doors would make it easier to navigate offices, move goods in and out of warehouses and accomplish any number of mundane tasks. That would give the economy a boost. But the negative might well outweigh the positive.

Machine Learning is one of the most exciting fields in the world. Every week we discover something new, something amazing, something revolutionary. That's why we created This Week in Machine Learning! Each week we publish a curated list of Machine Learning stories as a resource to help you keep pace with all these exciting developments. New posts will be published here first, and previous posts are archived on the Udacity blog.

Software is eating the world and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the heart of this takeover. Since we at Asgard are deeply involved in the European AI market, we thought we would share our insights. The United Kingdom takes the lead as the strongest AI ecosystem in Europe. We have counted 121 AI firms in the UK, with London clearly the largest hub. In second place is Germany (51), with Berlin as the main AI hub supporting 30 AI companies.

The US Army has increasingly used small consumer drones in the field, purchasing them as needed from consumer manufacturers like the well-known Chinese maker DJI. But documents indicate that the Army Aviation Directorate is now enforcing new orders, banning DJI drones "due to increased awareness of cyber vulnerabilities associated with DJI products." The documents, first obtained by Small UAS News, don't explain the Army's security concern, but refer to classified studies about DJI drones that first went out at the end of May. Previously, hackers have been able to jailbreak some DJI drones to control and modify things like safety features on the devices. Some reports have also indicated that DJI can gather location, audio, and even visual data from user flights. It's unclear what data DJI can access without customer consent, but location and media data from an Army drone could potentially reveal extensive information about US military operations.