Mars may not have been the warm, wet planet we thought it was

Mars today is a cold, dry wasteland—but things were likely much different billions of years ago. Since we started launching robotic missions to Mars in the 1970s, scientists have collected evidence that points to a warmer, wetter past for the Red Planet, where the surface was teeming with lakes and oceans that could have been home to life of some kind. It’s part of the reason NASA built and launched a new rover that launched last week to look for signs of ancient aliens.

But there’s no complete consensus on what Mars really looked like in the past. “The argument over the climate of early Mars is an old one” going back 40 years, says Anna Grau Galofre of Arizona State University. She’s the lead author of a new study published in Nature Geoscience that upends those dreams of a watery Mars, presenting new findings that suggest the planet’s

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by ASNF

The secret to becoming an open source project lead

Commentary: For developers who want to become leaders in their chosen open source communities, the process is easier (and more difficult) than you might think.

Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto

There are at least two ways to become an open source project maintainer. The first is perhaps the most straightforward, though hardly easy: Start a project. This is the path taken by Simon Willison (Datasette), Rich Felker (musl libc), Gerald Combs (Wireshark), and others. The other is to build up credibility with an existing project over time, eventually earning the maintainer mantle. In some ways, this might be the harder path, but it’s one that Lili Cosic (kube-state-metrics/Kubernetes), Madelyn Olson (Redis), and Whitequark (Solvespace) have taken.

Most of us will never start our own project. But with a significant percentage of developers contributing to open source projects (49% of women and 64% of men, according to a DigitalOcean survey), there’s a real

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by ASNF

Zergo Freedom review: An impressive ergonomic and programmable keyboard

Find out if Jack Wallen likes the Zergo Freedom ergonomic keyboard even more than the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard.

Figure A: The two halves of the Zergo Freedom keyboard.

Image: Jack Wallen/TechRepublic

Some ergonomic keyboards are full of gimmicks that do little to serve the purpose of protecting your wrists and digits from repetitive stress injuries, while others come seriously close to perfection. For me, the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard (UHK) is the perfect combination of form over function, and it would take a miracle of a keyboard to pull that UHK out of my hands. And although the Zergo Freedom keyboard didn’t quite achieve that seemingly unattainable goal, it did come pretty close.

The perfect keyboard is very subjective, and muscle memory tends to work against manufacturers and designers. When I first adopted the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard, it took a hot minute for my fingers and brain to get in sync

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by ASNF