Interesting article about Venus right here:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,334108,00.html

Venus is made of the same stuff of Earth, but is bone-dry, hot enough to melt lead and has a chokingly thick atmosphere. It even spins backwards.

Astronomers have spent decades trying to explain Venus' mysterious properties.

Now one scientist thinks the planet's formation may explain all: Two huge, protoplanetary bodies collided head-on and merged to form our planetary neighbor, but obliterated nearly all water in the process.

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"The probability that two protoplanets collided to form Venus is not at all implausible," said John Huw Davies, a geodynamicist at Cardiff University in Wales who developed the idea.

A majority of scientists think Earth's moon formed when a protoplanet about the size of Mars smacked into the planet at an angle. Davies thinks Venus was born of a far worse cosmic train wreck.

"What if the moon-Earth collision isn't that big in planetary terms?" Davies told SPACE.com. "A head-on blow between two similarly sized bodies would have been about twice as energetic."