Fundamental science from Japanese universities and national research institutes.
Researchers landing on Nishinoshima must first wade into the sea, gear and all, so no seed comes ashore. Two 2026 studies show why: seabirds, not people, brought the plants.
In 200 colorectal cancer patients from Tokyo and Osaka, 44.8 percent of tumours carried a gut bacterium's mutational signature, rising to about 70 percent under 40. The damage may predate the age of ten.
A rock punched through a New Jersey ceiling on July 16, 2024. The homeowner sealed the pieces in jars within minutes, letting a team with the Institute of Science Tokyo and JAMSTEC read traces of ancient asteroid brine.
A German team had 50 students play Super Monkey Ball on a Wii and then work an arthroscopy box trainer. The game scores tracked surgical scores. Splatoon 2 did not, and gamer status predicted nothing.
Tohoku University, JAMSTEC and Fuji Electric filmed droplets on a geothermal turbine blade spinning at 430 m/s, and what held on stationary walls did not hold here. Japan itself runs just 607 MW of geothermal.
Japanese researchers held 1.58 tesla inside a 20 mm model in a 7 km/s hypersonic flow, about 2.1 times what a comparable neodymium magnet gives. Heat flux itself, though, was not among the measurements.
The hat, found in 2023, tiles the plane forever without repeating. A Japanese team etched 372,100 of its points into a silicon nitride film, fired a laser, and got back a pinwheel of light with no mirror image.
PET scans of 37 patients whose hallucinations began after age 40 found tau, the protein behind Alzheimer's, in 64.9% of them against 14.9% of controls. They split into three near-equal groups.
Glassy radioactive particles called cesium balls were thought to stay in Fukushima's topsoil. A Kyoto University team found them inside 39 of 52 earthworms, and one 15.5 centimeters down.
Sensitive teeth affect roughly a third of adults in some surveys, and the usual fix is to seal the surface over. A Tokyo Dental College team has shown that 6-MSITC, a compound in Japanese wasabi, pushes dentin-building cells to lay down new tissue instead. It began with a question asked at a sushi counter in Kanda.
A terbium-doped AlGaN LED from the University of Osaka and Ritsumeikan University emits four colors from a single spot, with wavelengths that barely move as the current rises.