Fundamental science from Japanese universities and national research institutes.
A University of Tokyo and RIKEN team has switched a magnet in just 40 picoseconds with almost no heat, using the antiferromagnet Mn3Sn. Published in Science, the result shatters the nanosecond speed limit that has held back chips for years. Here is why the wall stood, and how it fell.
A team in Japan re-engineered zinc oxide, the harmless powder in sunscreen, into a material that emits near-infrared light from a gentle fingertip press. No power, no rare earths. Here's why it matters for medicine, bridges, and the rare-earth standoff.
It has its own asteroid and is a prefectural symbol, yet for over 60 years the Musashi stickleback officially didn't exist. How an ice-age survivor near Tokyo finally became a named species, Pungitius nakamurai.
Researchers at Japan's Shinshu University and JST have built a hybrid nanosheet that folds all three of nature's color mechanisms — absorption, reflection and emission — into one self-assembling photonic crystal, with color switchable by magnet or light. It is also the story of a scientist chasing 'living materials' at a textile faculty whose roots reach back to a 1910 silkworm school.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo and Chiba University have developed ETE, a method that mass-produces hundreds of thousands of uniform cell-loaded capsules using only a bench-top vortex mixer and temperature control. A look at why it lowers the barrier for drug discovery and regenerative medicine, and how it compares with America's organoid industry.
Kyoto Institute of Technology and JST have demonstrated a spinor condensate at room temperature, a quantum state once confined to cryogenic cold. Here is what it means for light-based quantum devices and Japan's distinct path versus Google and USTC.
In the American South, kudzu is a notorious invasive weed. In Japan, its flower yields tectorigenin, a supplement compound. A RIKEN team has now decoded how the flower makes it and brewed it in yeast, with no kudzu required.
A team led by the Nagoya Institute of Technology has found that water vapor can accelerate bond exchange in vitrimers, a third class of plastic that could finally make 'unrecyclable' thermosets repairable and reusable.
Tokai University is chasing a world-first: land-based, full-cycle aquaculture of the common octopus, long considered one of the hardest animals to farm. We unpack the cannibalism and escape problems, the clever 'octopus apartment,' the global octopus shortage behind it, and the ethical fight that has already produced farming bans abroad.
When typhoons soak Mount Fuji, its summit rises a few centimeters and its base sinks. Hokkaido University researchers found this in satellite-positioning data, and it changes how Japan reads the volcano's eruption warning signs.
Waseda University and Fujitsu used quantum circuit learning (QCL) to predict the hardness of high-entropy alloys from only about 100 data points. We explain how a quantum approach tackles the small-data extrapolation problem that defeats conventional machine learning, where it sits against IBM and Google quantum efforts, and what it could mean for industrial materials discovery.