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.
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.
Rausu, Rishiri, hosome, ma-kombu: four kelps sold under four names and four price tiers. A Hokkaido University team read the DNA of 475 plants and found no genetic line between them.
In spring 2026 a meter-tall mat of watercress smothered a suburban river in Matsuyama. Japan calls it a priority-control invasive species, yet farms ship 362 tons a year. How New Zealand, Australia and the US see it.
Fish have no eyelids, yet pufferfish close their eyes. Shimonoseki's Kaikyokan aquarium dissected 51 species and traced the eye-closing muscle to the one that deflates a puffed-up puffer.
Warming seas pushed a pufferfish north across the Tsugaru Strait, and the hybrids do not fit Japan's 1983 table of edible species and parts. How the rulebook caught up, and why the Mediterranean has the same gap.
Murakami's salmon run fell from 55,000 fish to 1,400 in a decade. Now the town is spending about $32,000 to attempt what Norway and Chile have not: closing the life cycle of chum salmon entirely on land.
A paint maker in Imabari spent five years building a bear deterrent launcher called Kintaro. Its president fired it at his own body for a year and a half, and zoos refused to let him test it on a real bear.
A kawakawa hybrid made bluefin tuna sperm at eight months, and rainbow trout now spawn Chinook salmon yearly. Inside Japan's 20-year surrogate broodstock effort and Kindai's 32-year tuna project.
That blank, open-mouthed face your cat makes after a sniff may finally have an explanation: 13 branched-chain fatty acids in urine, blended to a ratio unique to each cat and stockpiled in the kidney.
Pacific fishing nations agreed on August 18, 2026 to raise the quota for bluefin tuna over 30 kilograms by 25 percent, to 14,836 tons in the western Pacific, and to cut the quota for juveniles by 6 percent.