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  • Romola Garai, Shaun Evans Commence ITV Spy Thriller ‘Betrayal’

    Romola Garai, Shaun Evans Commence ITV Spy Thriller ‘Betrayal’

    SPY SAGA

    The U.K.’s ITV and Mammoth Screen have commenced production on “Betrayal,” a four-part espionage thriller exploring the psychological toll of modern intelligence work. BAFTA and Emmy-nominated director Julian Jarrold (“A Very Royal Scandal,” “This England”) helms the project, currently filming in Manchester and Liverpool.

    Shaun Evans (“Endeavour,” “Vigil”) stars as John Hughes, an MI5 operative struggling with contemporary intelligence demands while his personal life crumbles. Olivier Award winner Romola Garai plays his partner Claire, a GP whose trust erodes under the strain of his secretive profession.

    The ensemble includes Zahra Ahmadi, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Gamba Cole, and Omid Djalili, alongside television newcomers. Award-winning playwright David Eldridge penned the series. Eldridge has upcoming adaptations including John le Carré’s “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” at Soho Place.

    Produced by Irma Inniss (“Mr Loverman”), the drama follows Hughes’ investigation of a British-Iranian informant that turns deadly, triggering scrutiny from superiors. Executive producers include Mammoth’s Damien Timmer and Shaun Evans himself. “Betrayal” premieres on ITV1 and ITVX in 2026, with ITV Studios handling international distribution.

    ***

    Meanwhile, ITV Studios and Sri Lanka’s Sirasa TV have strengthened their partnership with renewed “Voice” franchise deals and the first-ever Asian commission of physical game show “Catchpoint.” Sirasa TV will produce third and fourth seasons of “The Voice Sri Lanka” and “The Voice Teens” respectively, airing this year. The format has become a cultural phenomenon since 2019, consistently delivering strong ratings.

    “Sirasa Catchpoint” launches mid-July 2025, marking the show’s Asian debut. The U.K. version attracted 3 million viewers and 20.2% share on BBC One. The format combines quiz questions with physical action as contestants position themselves to catch falling balls for cash prizes. “The expansion of our partnership with Sirasa TV is a testament to the strength and versatility of our formats,” said Augustus Dulgaro, executive VP Asia Pacific at ITV Studios.

    REALITY REVIVAL

    Disney+ has commissioned a trio of U.K. unscripted series including a contemporary reimagining of dating format “Blind Date.” The 10×45′ series, executive produced by Matthew Worthy and Kieran Doherty for Stellify Media and Graham Stuart for SO TV, features contestants choosing from hidden suitors behind the legendary wall with new format twists.

    The slate includes “The Rooneys” (10×40′), following Coleen and Wayne Rooney‘s family life as she pursues entrepreneurial ventures while he handles school runs. Lorton Entertainment and Blast Films produce the observational series.

    “Jamie and Sophie: Raising Chelsea” tracks “Made in Chelsea” alumni Jamie Laing and Sophie Habboo navigating impending parenthood. Dorothy St Pictures produces in association with Jampot Productions. Sean Doyle, Executive Director Unscripted, commissioned all three series focusing on “female-skewed factual” programming.

    STAGE SWEETHEARTS

    The new London West End stage musical “50 First Dates” has announced its full cast for The Other Palace run from Sept. 14-Nov. 16. Georgina Castle (“Mean Girls”) stars as Lucy Whitmore, an artist with short-term memory loss, opposite Josh St. Clair (“Ghost”) as commitment-phobe Henry Roth in roles originated by Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler in the 2004 film.

    The ensemble includes Georgia Arron (“Mean Girls”) as Sharon, John Marquez (“The Birthday Party”) as Marlin Whitmore, and Ricky Rojas (“Moulin Rouge!”) as Marco, among others. Multi-Tony winner Casey Nicholaw (“Mean Girls,” “The Book of Mormon”) directs the adaptation by David Rossmer and Steve Rosen (“The Other Josh Cohen”), featuring original songs exploring love and second chances. ATG Productions, Bad Robot Live, and Gavin Kalin Productions produce the romantic comedy about a man falling for a woman who forgets him nightly.

    CHAT CHAMPIONS

    Screen Players Film Club launches today on major podcast platforms, bringing film industry creatives into intimate conversation about beloved movies. Created by The Script Factory in partnership with Soho Square Studios and Olympic Studios, the PODSSS production features host Charlotte Bogard Macleod interviewing acclaimed talents like Sam Taylor-Johnson and Simon Beaufoy.

    Most episodes record live at The Cinema in Selfridges before movie-loving audiences. Season One’s five episodes explore behind-the-scenes stories from “Nowhere Boy,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Conclave,” “Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love,” and “Drive.” Bastille’s Dan Smith composed the jingle and appears in episode four discussing his documentary-inspired tribute single “Leonard and Marianne.” The weekly series aims to offer insights into filmmaking processes from initial concept to screen realization.

     

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  • Israel in ‘advanced talks’ for deal to end hostilities with Syria, says senior official – The Times of Israel

    1. Israel in ‘advanced talks’ for deal to end hostilities with Syria, says senior official  The Times of Israel
    2. Sharaa–Netanyahu meeting in the works for upcoming UN session: Report  thecradle.co
    3. Trump Lifts Sanctions on Syria as It Holds Talks On Diplomatic Ties With Israel  MSN
    4. Israel wants peace with Lebanon, Syria but vows to keep occupied Golan Heights  TRT Global
    5. Israel eyes ties with Syria and Lebanon after Iran war  Reuters

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  • Operational readiness key to success in modern warfare: Naval Chief – RADIO PAKISTAN

    1. Operational readiness key to success in modern warfare: Naval Chief  RADIO PAKISTAN
    2. Admiral Naveed Ashraf underscores joint preparedness and technological innovation during visit to PAF Air War College  Ptv.com.pk
    3. Naval Chief highlights Pakistan’s maritime challenges, response options  Pakistan Observer
    4. Pakistan naval chief calls for tech-driven forces to tackle future conflicts  Arab News
    5. Naval chief visits PAF Air War College, underscores joint preparedness  Dunya News

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  • Govee Goes Big On Design For New Smart Lamp Line-Up

    Govee Goes Big On Design For New Smart Lamp Line-Up

    Govee has taken the covers off of a trio of unique new smart lamps, with the Chinese brand’s new floor lamp series comprised of three distinct models built to do more than just glow in a corner.

    The Tree, Uplighter, and Torchiere Floor Lamps – which have just been revealed for the German market – aim to turn your walls and ceilings into mood-setting light shows.

    Starting with the Tree Floor Lamp, and it’s got a sculptural three-head design that looks more like modern decor than traditional lighting.

    Each lamp head can swivel 350° side-to-side and tilt 90° up or down, with beam angles that go from narrow spotlighting to wide ambient wash. That means it should be good for both highlighting a bookshelf as it is mood-lighting a Netflix night.

    It packs Govee’s RGBWW tech, with LuminBlend smooth transitions, 16 million colors, and brightness up to 1500 lumens. It’s tunable from 2700K to 6500K and comes with 64 scene presets, app control, voice support, and full Matter compatibility.

    The Uplighter is a triple-threat, with a ceiling-facing ripple light at the top, a decorative RGBIC strip in the middle, and a lower lamp that beams out 1000 lumens for actual task lighting.

    It’s looks to be the most ‘routine-ready’ of the bunch, with circadian lighting and automation features built in.

    The Torchiere keeps things a little more relaxed, but still has plenty of smarts. It focuses on ambient glow with triple-zone RGB control, a soft output that’s easy on the eyes, and a built-in music sync mode for your chill-out playlists or party nights.

    As with the rest of Govee’s ecosystem, all three lamps play nicely with Alexa, Google Assistant, and they are all Matter compatible.

    Everything’s manageable via the, much improved, Govee app, where you’ll get all the usual features such as timers, DIY scenes, and routines.

    They’re on sale in Germany now, I’d expect a US launch to follow soon.

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  • When the Transition Goes Wrong: A Rare Case of Diabetic Ketoalkalosis After Transitioning to Tirzepatide in Insulin-dependent Type 2 Diabetes


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  • Carnival Cruise Line and The Coca-Cola Company Are Getting Back Together!

    Carnival Cruise Line and The Coca-Cola Company Are Getting Back Together!

    “We’re thrilled to be back on board with Carnival, literally! From an ice-cold Coca-Cola with lunch, a Topo Chico by the pool, or a Powerade after exploring a destination, we’ll have the perfect drink for every moment of the journey,” said Dagmar Boggs, president, Foodservice & On-Premise, The Coca-Cola Company, North American Operating Unit. “This partnership is all about enhancing the guest experience, and we’re thrilled to offer a beverage lineup as diverse and exciting as the adventures Carnival guests embark on.”

    Carnival anticipates the partnership will be fully integrated across its North American fleet by the end of September 2025. Carnival ships in Australia already serve Coca-Cola beverages.

    For additional information on Carnival Cruise Line and to book a cruise vacation on Carnival, call 1-800-CARNIVAL, visit http://www.carnival.com, or contact your favorite travel advisor or online travel site.

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  • New Book Explores Past to Inform on Climate Change

    New Book Explores Past to Inform on Climate Change

    In today’s state of overwhelm, it’s easy to spend more time consumed with the present and the future than contemplating the events of the past. This constant forward motion can, at times, become exhausting and disorienting. We lose our grounding. We miss out on the context and insights that history can provide, and the lessons that may guide us through the tumult of the present. This holds true not just for national history and global history, but also geological history. That is, even events that unfolded millions or billions of years ago can offer insights that remain relevant to our lives and national policies today. 

    I wrote Strata: Stories from Deep Time to share this geologic lens with readers, and to spotlight the researchers working to untangle some of our planet’s oldest stories. This excerpt explores how scientists first began recognizing that oxygen didn’t billow up into the atmosphere until roughly halfway through Earth‘s existence — and how the arrival of this highly reactive gas fundamentally changed the planet from the seafloor to the stratosphere. By learning how and why oxygen showed up when it did, and how the planet responded to this period of intense global environmental change, we can gain context for the environmental crises unfolding across our planet today — and become better equipped to set ourselves on a more stable path forward.

    ***

    As you read this line, the oxygen you are pulling inside your body makes your body possible. It is allowing you to digest your most recent meal, move your eyes across these words, and think your thoughts. It is the single most important gas to your survival. You share this in common with every other animal on Earth, save for one lone parasite of Chinook salmon that somehow doesn’t need it. Well done, Henneguya salminicola.

    Throughout a given day, you fill your lungs with oxygen some 20,000 times. Most of us probably don’t give it much thought. Maybe we assume that this gas has always been here, a given on this highly habitable pale blue dot.

    But it turns out that this dot has not always been highly habitable, nor, for that matter, has it always been blue. The early Earth’s young magma surface sat gooey and cloaked in steam, too hot to hold liquid seas. It took a long time for continents to rise up and for ocean basins to fill in, and far longer still for oxygen to pool up in the atmosphere.

    “And so,” writes Rachel Carson in The Sea Around Us, “the rough outlines of the continents and the empty ocean basins were sculptured out of the surface of the earth in darkness, in a Stygian world of heated rock and swirling clouds and gloom.”

    Even in those earliest of gloomy days, oxygen — the element O — was all over the place, bound up in molecules like water vapor and quartz and carbon dioxide. It’s the third most abundant element in the universe, and it has been present on Earth since the beginning. But free oxygen — two atoms of O bound together by a pair of shared electrons, liberated from any other material but itself — didn’t emerge as a gas until more than halfway through Earth’s existence.

    If you reach out your arms and imagine Earth’s 4.54-billion-year history as a timeline that extends from the tip of your right hand to the tip of your left, the arrival of oxygen gas falls around your heart, at about 2.4 billion years ago, give or take a couple hundred million years.

    The fashionably late arrival of oxygen may sound like a planetary sigh of relief. Finally, the possibility for life larger than one cell, with lungs and lips and all the rest of it. But scientists familiar with oxygen’s highly reactive habits suggest its arrival was more like a nightmare.

    As is true of all elements, an atom of oxygen contains a cloud of negatively charged electrons that spin in an arrangement of “shells” around a positively charged nucleus. The outermost electron shell constantly seeks stability by filling to its capacity. In oxygen’s case, its outermost shell is two electrons short — comparatively fewer than other elements — and the configuration of those electrons contribute to oxygen’s high reactivity. Oxygen’s electron cloud is also relatively thin compared to other elements. Without much of a barrier between it and the outside world, the positive pull of the nucleus easily seeps out and lures in the negative charges of the two electrons it needs to stabilize. Two atoms of oxygen bound together as oxygen gas have a pull similarly as strong as a single atom on its own.

    When oxygen first appeared on Earth, it desperately rooted out and bonded with anything willing to share its electrons, fundamentally changing the materials it bonded with. It weaseled into microbial cells and mutilated their machinery. It sulked into currents and eddies and made arsenic more soluble, it spread hydrogen peroxide poisons into DNA. With all the havoc it wreaked, this gas might have initiated one of the worst mass extinctions in all of Earth history — though it’s hard to know this for sure, since the single-celled beings that would have gone extinct were too squishy to leave behind reliable fossils. Even so, some call this geologic moment the Oxygen Catastrophe.

    Over time, molecules from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the atmosphere grew to accept oxygen’s reactivity, and living things evolved ways to cope with this new gas. Their cells grew to tolerate it, and then to depend on it. They used it to break down food and generate energy that allowed them to grow larger and more complex, with multiple cells that communicated across newly sophisticated membranes. These oxygen-fueled innovations expanded and cascaded and eventually led to the evolution of eyeballs and brains and lungs and lips and, over billions of years, the possibility of us.

    So what, exactly, happened around 2.4 billion years ago? Why did oxygen arrive when it did? And how can we read this in the rock record?

    Courtesty of W. W. Norton & Company

    THE SEARCH FOR OXYGEN’S origin began with a problem. When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he agonized over the seeming absence of fossils in the planet’s oldest rocks. The ages of rocks at this time were known only in a relative sense — as in, what formed first and what followed. The scientific law of superposition, proposed by Danish geologist Nicolas Steno in the seventeenth century, helped clarify that younger strata always sit atop older strata, since that’s how sediments accumulate in lake beds and seafloors and so on.

    As hard as paleontologists of that time looked, they couldn’t find any remnants of ancient life in the oldest, bottom-most strata that they examined. Then bits and bobs appeared in what looked like an explosion of living things in strata above a certain age. This troubled Darwin deeply. Any such explosion of life undermined his theory of natural selection, a process of elimination that he argued should inherently take a very long time to unfold. By his estimations, it could never have taken place as instantaneously as those earliest fossils suggested.

    Halfway through On the Origin of Species, he gravely acknowledged the implications of this predicament. “The case at present must remain inexplicable[,]” he wrote, “and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.”

    But here we are, still entertaining Darwin’s views more than 150 years later. And that is thanks largely to rocks discovered not long after World War II.

    At the end of the war, a wave of mineral exploration arose across the world to meet the needs of rapidly expanding economies. Federal agencies hired geologists to scour continents for oil, gas, and coal to fuel those economies, along with metals like iron and uranium to build up arsenals of defense. This was of national interest, not just private economic interest.

    As geologists marched around the globe and sketched up their maps of these resources, they noticed other curious details about the planet’s history. That is, in their search for the materials that humans desired, they found inklings of how we got to be here desiring anything in the first place.

    In the summer of 1953, Wisconsin geologist Stanley Tyler was studying iron-rich rocks on the north shore of Lake Superior in Canada when he took a Sunday off to rent a boat and go fishing. While his lure bobbed in the water, he absently noted the shapes and colors along the shore, as any geologist might. One outcrop caught his eye, so he motored over to take a closer look.

    Tyler recognized the deposit as an extension of the Gunflint Chert, a rock formation with the texture of tightly packed brown sugar and the contents of ancient seafloor sediments. Cherts can take on a whole range of colors depending on the conditions they form within, from beige to red to green to other hues in between. Most of the chert that Tyler had found on that trip had been maroon, but this outcrop caught his eye for its striking shade of jet black. He knew that the color black in rocks was sometimes indicative of organic material, remnants of ancient life.

    He lopped off a chunk, stashed it in his boat, and motored on.

    Back at his lab in Madison he placed a sliver of that black chert under a microscope, and found shapes that did not speak the language of minerals. The rods, spheres, and squiggles he found did, as he suspected, look more lifelike than lithic.

    Based on geologic maps of the region, he knew these rocks had formed during the allegedly fossil-free epoch that had so troubled Darwin. Tyler’s gut told him he may have just found some of the earliest evidence of life ever discovered, but he was a mineralogist more than a paleontologist and so he needed a second opinion.

    That fall, he took photographs of his findings to a geology conference in Boston and shared them with a couple of colleagues. One among them, a Harvard paleobotanist named Elso Barghoorn, agreed that the samples looked rather lifelike, and the two published a short paper describing what they had found.

    This publication quadrupled the length of the fossil record. It was groundbreaking, but was brief and preliminary. They needed more time to study the fossils to do justice to the scope of their findings.

    For years, they didn’t make progress on a follow-up paper. A decade went by and, in 1963, Tyler passed away at the age of 57 from heart complications, without the satisfaction of sharing his discoveries more completely with the world. By 1965, an impatient colleague named Preston Cloud — a bantamweight boxing champion turned acclaimed Earth historian — threatened to beat Barghoorn to the punch with his own paper on the fossils. That was enough to push Barghoorn into gear. He rushed to complete a manuscript and published it in the journal Science a couple months before Cloud published his.

    “For all of time it will probably stand as the most important article ever written in the field . . . ,” writes William Schopf, a graduate student who helped Barghoorn pen that manuscript, but who humbly declined authorship himself because he didn’t feel he had contributed enough.

    Spurred by this new paper on the Gunflint Chert, geologists went searching for evidence of ancient life in black cherts around the world. Papers flooded out, claiming to have solved Darwin’s dilemma and showing how fossils had been in those seemingly lifeless rocks all along — they had simply been microscopic. The theory of natural selection persevered, and the lengthy record of our ancient roots began to fill out.

    But while those microscopic rods and squiggles resolved one nagging dilemma, they opened up a slew of other questions. What, exactly, were those fossils? What kind of world did they evolve into? And what kind of world did they create with their growth?

    Around the same time that these questions began bubbling up, another set of observations from the rock record thickened the plot of the squiggles. Geologists were compiling evidence that, before those lifeforms lived, the planet’s atmosphere had no oxygen gas in it at all. Minerals that disintegrate in the presence of oxygen were found locked up in ancient riverbeds older than a certain age. Then, around the time they believed those squiggles showed up on the scene, those riverbed minerals disappeared and the very first, rusty red fingerprints of oxygen began appearing in strata around the world.

    Trending Stories

    Perhaps, some reasoned, those squiggles were responsible for painting the world’s soil and seafloor sediments red, by ushering in the very first poofs of oxygen. And perhaps, in their delivery of this gas, they catapulted Earth out of its original barrenness and into the tangle of complex life we know today.

    Excerpted from Strata: Stories from Deep Time. Copyright © 2025 by Laura Poppick. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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  • IISc researchers develop simple paper-based sensor to detect liver cancer

    IISc researchers develop simple paper-based sensor to detect liver cancer

    Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a unique luminescent probe that uses terbium, a rare earth metal, to sense the presence of an enzyme called β-glucuronidase, which can potentially aid in the detection of liver cancer.

    According to IISc, β-glucuronidase is an evolutionarily conserved enzyme found across life forms – from microbes to plants and animals. Its core function is to break down a sugar acid called glucuronic acid.

    “Beyond its biological omnipresence, the enzyme also doubles as a critical biomarker for liver cancer. In fact, an upsurge in β-glucuronidase often accompanies colon, breast, and renal cancers, as well as infections of the urinary tract and AIDS,” IISc said.

    Conventional methods

    “Conventional methods of colorimetry and fluorescence for detecting such enzymes are often restricted by sensitivity or interference from background signals. The ability of rare earth metals to have long-lived excited states allows us to filter out short-lived background fluorescence, resulting in a much clearer signal,” said Ananya Biswas, former PhD student at IISc and co-first author of the paper published in Chemistry.

    The roots of the project trace back nearly a decade, beginning with the team’s experiments on metal ions and their gel-forming properties. The team found that terbium ions couched in a gel matrix derived from bile salts can emit green fluorescence.

    Within the same gel matrix, the team added an organic molecule called 2,3-DHN (2,3-Dihydroxynaphthalene) “masked” with glucuronic acid. When β-glucuronidase slices this modified molecule, 2,3-DHN gets released. The researchers then shined UV light on the sample.

    “The free 2,3-DHN acts as an ‘antenna’ – absorbing UV light and transferring the energy to the terbium ions nearby, greatly enhancing their green emission. The gel matrix ensures sufficient proximity between the ‘antenna’ and terbium ions, facilitating efficient energy transfer,” said Uday Maitra, honorary professor in the Department of Organic Chemistry, IISc, and corresponding author of the study.

    Ease of application

    For ease of application, the team designed this assay as a simple paper-based sensor by anchoring the gel matrix onto a paper disc. When β-glucuronidase pre-treated with modified 2,3-DHN is added, the disc exhibits a much stronger green glow under UV light.

    IISc said that the uniqueness of this technique is the analysis. “Unlike conventional high-end fluorescence detection systems, these sensors can be analysed using a UV lamp and ImageJ, an open source, freely accessible software, making this technique ideal for resource-limited settings,” it said.

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  • Quantum Science Information | AZoQuantum.com

    Quantum Science Information | AZoQuantum.com

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  • Meteorological satellites observe temperatures on Venus

    Meteorological satellites observe temperatures on Venus

    image: 

    A photo with magnified sections to show just how small Venus is in the field of view of the observation satellites. Despite this limitation, researchers can still gather useful data. ©2025 Nishiyama et al. CC-BY-ND


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    Credit: ©2025 Nishiyama et al. CC-BY-ND

    Imaging data from Japan’s Himawari-8 and -9 meteorological satellites have been successfully used to monitor temporal changes in Venus’ cloud-top temperature, revealing unseen patterns in the temperature structure of various waves. A team led by the University of Tokyo collated infrared images from 2015–25 to estimate brightness temperatures on day to year scales. The results demonstrate that meteorological satellites can serve as additional eyes to access the Venusian atmosphere from space and complement future observations from planetary missions and ground-based telescopes.

    The Himawari-8 and -9 satellites, launched in 2014 and 2016, respectively, were developed to monitor global atmospheric phenomena through use of their multispectral Advanced Himawari Imagers (AHIs). The University of Tokyo team led by visiting researcher Gaku Nishiyama saw the opportunity to use the cutting-edge sensor data for spaceborne observations of Venus, which is coincidentally captured by the AHIs near the Earth’s rim.

    Observing temporal temperature variations in the cloud tops of Venus is essential to understand its atmospheric dynamics and related phenomena, such as thermal tides and planetary-scale waves. Obtaining data for these phenomena presents multiple challenges, as Nishiyama explained. “The atmosphere of Venus has been known to exhibit year-scale variations in reflectance and wind speed; however, no planetary mission has succeeded in continuous observation for longer than 10 years due to their mission lifetimes,” he said. “Ground-based observations can also contribute to long-term monitoring, but their observations generally have limitations due to the Earth’s atmosphere and sunlight during the daytime.” 

    Meteorological satellites on the other hand appear suited to fill this gap with their longer mission lifetimes (the Himawari-8 and -9 satellites are scheduled for operation until 2029). The AHIs allow multiband infrared coverage, which has been limited in planetary missions to date, essential for retrieving temperature information from different altitudes, along with low-noise and frequent observation. Aiming to demonstrate this potential to contribute to Venus science, the team investigated the observed temporal dynamics of the Venusian atmosphere and provided a comparative analysis with previous datasets. “We believe this method will provide precious data for Venus science because there might not be any other spacecraft orbiting around Venus until the next planetary missions around 2030,” said Nishiyama.

    The team first established a data archive by extracting all Venus images from the collected AHI datasets, identifying 437 occurrences in total. Taking into account background noise and apparent size of Venus in the captured images, they were able to track the temporal variation in cloud-top temperature during the periods where the geostationary satellite, Venus and the Earth lined up in a row.

    The retrieved temporal variations in brightness temperatures were then analyzed on both year and day scales and compared for all infrared bands to investigate variability of thermal tides and planetary-scale waves. Variation in thermal tide amplitude was confirmed from the obtained dataset. The results also confirmed change in amplitude of planetary waves in the atmosphere with time, appearing to decrease with altitude. While definitive conclusions on the physics behind the detected variations were challenging due to the limited temporal resolution of the AHI data, variations in the thermal tide amplitude appeared possibly linked to decadal variation in the Venus atmosphere structure.

    In addition to successfully applying the Himawari data to planetary observations, the team was further able to use the data to identify calibration discrepancies in data from previous planetary missions.

    Nishiyama is already looking at implications of the study beyond Venus’ horizon. “I think that our novel approach in this study successfully opened a new avenue for long-term and multiband monitoring of solar system bodies. This includes the moon and Mercury, which I also study at present. Their infrared spectra contain various information on physical and compositional properties of their surface, which are hints at how these rocky bodies have evolved until the present.” The prospect of accessing a range of geometric conditions untethered from the limitations of ground-based observations is clearly an exciting one. “We hope this study will enable us to assess physical and compositional properties, as well as atmospheric dynamics, and contribute to our further understanding of planetary evolution in general.”

    ###

    Journal article: Gaku Nishiyama, Yudai Suzuki, Shinsuke Uno, Shohei Aoki, Tatsuro Iwanaka, Takeshi Imamura, Yuka Fujii, Thomas G. Müller, Makoto Taguchi, Toru Kouyama, Océane Barraud, Mario D’Amore, Jörn Helbert, Solmaz Adeli, Harald Hiesinger, “Temporal variation in the cloud-top temperature of Venus revealed by meteorological satellites”, Earth, Planets and Space, DOI: 10.1186/s40623-025-02223-8

    Funding: This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP22K21344, 23H00150, and 23H01249, and JSPS Overseas Research Fellowship.

        
    Useful links:

    Department of Earth and Planetary Science – https://www.eps.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/
    Graduate School of Science – https://www.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/index.html

    Research contact:
    Dr. Gaku Nishiyama
    Department of Earth and Planetary Science, The University of Tokyo,
    7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-0033, Japan
    gaku.nishiyama@dlr.de

    Press contact:
    Mr. Rohan Mehra
    Public Relations Group, The University of Tokyo,
    7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-8656, Japan
    press-releases.adm@gs.mail.u-tokyo.ac.jp
     

    About The University of Tokyo:

    The University of Tokyo is Japan’s leading university and one of the world’s top research universities. The vast research output of some 6,000 researchers is published in the world’s top journals across the arts and sciences. Our vibrant student body of around 15,000 undergraduate and 15,000 graduate students includes over 5,000 international students. Find out more at www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/ or follow us on X (formerly Twitter) at @UTokyo_News_en.


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