Advanced materials, chemicals, fibers and ceramics.
Desalination makes about 35 trillion liters of fresh water a year and discards roughly 50 trillion liters of brine. A Tokyo lab drips it onto molten tin and recovers magnesium oxide, 280 times concentrated.
Hafnium keeps advanced chips and jet engines running, yet the world makes about 71 tonnes a year, nearly all of it in France and the United States. An Osaka chemical maker now wants a share of it by 2028.
China's rare earth magnet shipments to Japan fell 52.2% in July 2026 while US-bound shipments rose 4.6%. Japan tells itself pressure breeds breakthroughs. Optical glass and neodymium magnets agree; aluminium does not.
Kanazawa Institute of Technology and sand maker Yamakawa Sangyo scatter sapphire grains across a warehouse floor and let the load slide instead of resisting. The grains cost a few hundred yen per square meter.
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.
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.
University of Toyama researchers crystallized an OLED's emitting layer inside a practical thin-film stack: up to 1,000 times the current density at 1 volt, and turn-on at 1.33 V.
Chemists at Nagoya University cut a bond inside a flat carbon molecule and rebuilt it, producing figure-eight, bathtub and double-helix nanocarbons that emit spiraling light and trap carbon dioxide. Published in Nature Communications.
A century-old Japanese packaging company will launch a flexible CIGS solar cell in early 2027, betting that proven, long-life thin-film tech can beat still-maturing perovskite to Japan's weak roofs and walls. The contrarian logic, and the catches.
Researchers at the Institute of Science Tokyo have created a surface electrene: a crystal whose outermost layer is a sheet of loose electrons, with a work function lower than cesium. It survives open air because nitrogen caps it, then leaves as ammonia. Here is what it means for green fertilizer, and how it compares with the electrochemical routes pursued in China, Europe and the US.
Mitsubishi Gas Chemical has signed an MOU with Australia's Gold Hydrogen to study green methanol made from natural hydrogen in South Australia. Here is why a Tokyo chemical maker is going to the wellhead abroad, what the Toyota-ENEOS consortium is really buying, and how the global race for natural hydrogen is splitting along national lines.