Basic Research & Academia

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.

INSOMNIA, an esports club in Tokyo's Sumida ward, has launched INS×LAB, a joint research project with the University of Tokyo and other institutions. It pairs gaze-tracking cognitive science with sleep-log and acupuncture-based conditioning to make winning scientifically repeatable.

Seven months after metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, where does the technology actually stand? A status check on Atoco's air-to-water devices, scaled-up carbon capture by Svante and Kobe Steel, China's lead in MOF research output, and why an Atomis executive says a Nobel does not lower the hurdles.

A meniscus regeneration technology developed at Japan's Institute of Science Tokyo has been approved as Seibiscus, the country's first regenerative medicine product for meniscus injury. We explain how it uses a patient's own stem cells to repair the knee, what the Phase III trial showed, and how it compares with regenerative medicine ventures in South Korea and the US.

Kumamoto University has built a world-first device that kills anisakis parasites in raw fish using a 30,000-volt pulse lasting one-millionth of a second, without freezing or cooking. A look at the food-safety tech behind Japan's sashimi culture.