Fundamental science from Japanese universities and national research institutes.
A white male orca first seen off Rausu in 2019 returned in thick fog in June 2026. About 1 in 1,000 orcas in the western North Pacific is white, and genetics hint at why.
Calicos are almost always female, so a male kitten in a Kumamoto rescue trap surprised the vet. Fearing resale, the group kept him. The orange gene was pinned down in 2025; "one in 30,000" has no cited source.
A University of Tokyo-led team finds Ryugu's sodium in clay and about 90% of its chlorine in serpentine, implying water a hundred times less salty than the sea. A Kyoto-led team had read a brine.
A butterfly wing kept in a 100-yen insect fossil museum in Hyogo is the oldest known fossil of a living species. It is not the oldest butterfly, and the same room has yielded three finds in about 18 months.
A Moon clock gains about 56 microseconds a day on Earth clocks, about 17 km of navigation error per day if uncorrected. The CGPM's lunar time draft seeks one reference scale and never mentions optical clocks.
An Osaka-led Japan-US team tells left- and right-handed amino acids apart one molecule at a time. Soai's Nobel shows a tilt can grow from chance, and asteroids Ryugu and Bennu show none, so detectors must read both.
Sukunaarchaeum has the smallest archaeal genome yet found: about 238,000 base pairs and 189 genes, with almost no metabolism. Smaller bacterial genomes exist, and the peer-reviewed abstract drops the cell-or-virus label.
Japanese researchers have read the genome of the potted cyclamen's wild ancestor: 1.48 billion base pairs, 83% of them repeats. Breeding scent back into the flower once took Saitama 21 years.
Zavacephale, now on show in Japan, pushed the pachycephalosaur dome record back at least 14 million years. It's billed as a head-butting dinosaur, but whether its kind fought that way has been argued since at least 1998.
About 30% of people with ADHD get limited benefit from methylphenidate. A Fukui mouse study found adding a D2 drug helped mice missing the protein NSF, but the same combo made normal mice more impulsive.
Cryo-electron microscopes flash-freeze proteins and build 3D models from millions of molecular images. What they see, what they do and what they cost, as a Kyoto university teaches undergraduates to use the data.