Fundamental science from Japanese universities and national research institutes.
RIKEN and Enplas drill 1.1-micron, aspect-ratio-1,000 holes through glass in under a nanosecond, hitting 3,000 holes a second. As the chip race shifts from shrinking to packaging, here's why glass through-glass vias matter, and where Japan's materials and equipment makers fit.
A Japan-US team from Tohoku University and the US NIST built the first working spintronics probabilistic bit (P-bit) on a single silicon substrate using standard chip-fabrication processes. We explain the coin-flip idea, how it differs from quantum computing (room temperature, existing chip lines), and how far it really is from a product.
In 2002, Japan's Kindai University pulled off the world's first full-cycle bluefin tuna farming. Two decades on, the major seafood companies are walking away and commercial output is fading. The irony: the headwind is the recovery of wild tuna stocks. A look at the gap between sustainable and profitable.
Kyoto University's Takuji Hatakeyama and colleagues linked multiple-resonance units to reach a 5.5nm emission band in solution, pushing spontaneous emission toward laser-like color purity. Published in Science, it points to purer, more efficient next-gen displays.
In 1998, Akira Furusawa achieved the world's first unconditional quantum teleportation at Caltech. For two decades, no one knew what it was for. By 2024, that same trick was running an optical quantum computer on the cloud. From the teleportation misconception to the reframe that turned it into a processor, and the startup OptQC's push for a homegrown machine.
The pygmy sweeper glows blue from its belly, yet a full read of its 625-million-letter genome turns up no gene for the light-making enzyme. A Japanese team has now confirmed, at the genome level, that the fish runs entirely on a protein stolen from its prey, the only known case of its kind, with possible payoffs for oral protein drugs.
Sony Semiconductor Solutions is mass-producing the IMX711, a direct-conversion X-ray CMOS image sensor based on a pixel structure invented at Japan's RIKEN institute. With an industry-fastest 26,100fps and noise low enough to measure single X-ray photons, it ends a decades-old trade-off in X-ray imaging. Here's why battery makers, chip fabs and scientists are paying attention.
In 2004, a University of Tokyo brain scientist said humans are born wired for grammar. In 2022, ChatGPT learned language without any such wiring. The half-century debate Chomsky started is wide open again.
Over 100 researchers across six Asian countries, led by the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology and including Japanese institutions such as RIKEN and Waseda, have published a 10-year roadmap to build a synthetic cell from scratch. Their two-stage ProtoCell-to-AutoCell plan and AI-driven central biofoundry mark a new approach to a question Europe and the US have chased for 20 years.
For 15 years, donor cells vanished when grown across species. A Tokyo-Stanford team found why: the host embryo's first immune cells were eating them alive. The path to lab-grown organs, explained.
JAMSTEC's D-ARK project filmed the first bioluminescence ever recorded inside a deep-sea cave: a glowing new zoanthid, Corallizoanthus aureus, at 385 meters off Okinawa's Daito Islands. A look at the strange ecosystem hiding in unexplored submarine karst.