Sony AI's autonomous robot Ace beat elite table tennis players and made the cover of Nature. From its Gran Turismo Sophy roots to the fast-ball wall that stumped DeepMind and a 20.2-millisecond reaction loop, here's how Sony's robot reached elite-competitive level in a real, physical sport.
Water beads up and rolls off a raincoat, so surely it slips along surfaces that repel it? A Kyushu University and University of Illinois team built a measurement 159 times more sensitive than before and found the opposite: water barely slips at all, regardless of wettability. Here's what that means for desalination and cooling tech.
Cold has killed living things since long before humans had fire. But what pulls the trigger inside the cell stayed murky. A Japanese team studying nematodes points to an unlikely suspect: copper.
ROHM and Quanmatic put quantum annealing to work on a chip fab's front-end process, lifting output about 3%. Here's why a number that sounds small is actually a big deal on a factory floor.
Terahertz promises jaw-dropping 6G speeds, yet a passing body can kill the link. NICT just demonstrated the world's first system that auto-switches between millimeter and terahertz waves. The real breakthrough isn't a speed record but knowing when to give up on speed.
In 2004, virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka titled a dialogue A Pandemic Will Definitely Come. COVID proved him right 16 years later, and the bird flu he truly feared, H5N1, is now spreading in cattle and people. A 20-year reckoning.
Researchers from Tokyo University of Science and Yokohama National University built a photocurable resin that hardens with light and melts back to liquid with heat. Using anthracene photodimerization, it recycles 10-plus times with no initiators or additives.
Akita Prefecture has adopted environmental DNA surveys that estimate whether bears passed within 1km upstream in the past 24 hours from a single glass of river water. We explain how it works, its limits, and how it compares with grizzly-detection efforts abroad.
How does the brain run on intuition when the evidence is murky, and how does it know when to stop trusting that hunch? RIKEN researchers traced the circuit that stores recent sensory experience and the tiny brain region that acts as a mismatch detector to rewrite it. The same wiring appeared in an AI model, too.
University of Tokyo scientists find that heat lingers for seconds inside living cells instead of escaping instantly. How non-diffusive heat dissipation settles the decade-old 10^5 gap problem and what it means for temperature signaling and disease research.
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.