Fundamental science from Japanese universities and national research institutes.
Kyoto University's deep foam photolithography makes white out of air instead of titanium dioxide, prints it at about 20,000 dpi and repels water without PFAS. Why the timing is European, and what Japan tried before.
A Hokkaido University-led study says rough terrain hides Mercury's own tectonic wrinkles, and that past estimates missed up to 30 percent of the contraction. BepiColombo arrives to test it on November 21.
The 2026 Lasker Basic Medical Research Award went to Masashi Yanagisawa and Emmanuel Mignot for orexin. It explained narcolepsy, but the industry built sleeping pills first. The narcolepsy drug arrived 28 years later.
An experiment at Japan's SPring-8 finds davemaoite holds 0.08 wt% water at most, a tenth of past estimates, and points Earth's deep water to subducted crust instead.
A Japanese team found ammonium, nitriles and sodium nitrate clustered around the salt veins in Hayabusa2's Ryugu grains, which reframes the 75-fold gap between Bennu's water-extractable ammonia and Ryugu's.
Yamanashi and Riken researchers cut out the whole Y chromosome to make female clones of male mice. Read next to the same university's finding that cloning dies at 58 generations, and Osaka's eggs from male cells.
A 10 mm jellyfish rewound itself ten times in two years. A genome paper on about 1,000 genes cast it as nature's Yamanaka reprogramming; a US researcher attacked that premise with Japanese data it never cited.
A PNAS study rebuilt the songs of 9 extinct species from 20 fossils in Inner Mongolia. The 5 to 7 kHz result lands in the same band as Japan's 4.5 kHz bell cricket, listened to for 1,000 years.
A team from Osaka, Okayama and Tokyo has found why IgG antibodies outlast IgM. After mRNA vaccination, spike-specific cells were 0.14% of the long-lived bone marrow compartment, against 7.3% for influenza.
Three fossils, two of them picked up by amateurs more than twenty years ago, sat in a Hokkaido museum drawer until a CT scan added ten million years to a family of ammonites long thought extinct.
Japan's NIES has made iPS cells from four endangered birds. The flightless Okinawa rail has lost one of the two genes birds use to spot a virus. Inside the minus-160°C cell bank and the brain organoids grown from it.