A rock punched through a New Jersey ceiling on July 16, 2024. The homeowner sealed the pieces in jars within minutes, letting a team with the Institute of Science Tokyo and JAMSTEC read traces of ancient asteroid brine.
A German team had 50 students play Super Monkey Ball on a Wii and then work an arthroscopy box trainer. The game scores tracked surgical scores. Splatoon 2 did not, and gamer status predicted nothing.
KDDI's Buffmee and SoftBank's GaranAI launched in July 2026 on the same premise: use only licensed material, meter how much gets used, and pay publishers back. One sells to readers, the other to AI developers.
Tohoku University, JAMSTEC and Fuji Electric filmed droplets on a geothermal turbine blade spinning at 430 m/s, and what held on stationary walls did not hold here. Japan itself runs just 607 MW of geothermal.
Japanese researchers held 1.58 tesla inside a 20 mm model in a 7 km/s hypersonic flow, about 2.1 times what a comparable neodymium magnet gives. Heat flux itself, though, was not among the measurements.
Kioxia's XL1 module pulls flash memory into the memory hierarchy over CXL to ease the DRAM crunch in AI data centers. What it can and cannot do, and why it matters for a country that no longer makes DRAM.
ZEALS opened orders for D1, a 129.3 cm Japanese humanoid, from 5 million yen (about $32,000). Why the company calls it semi-domestic rather than fully Japanese, and why 100 units and 10,000 hours is a modest goal.
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.
Prelude, Supra, Primera, Pajero: Japanese carmakers keep reviving retired nameplates. Four forces explain it, from trademark law and the EV-era heritage premium to a 1988 US import rule still moving prices in Japan.
PET scans of 37 patients whose hallucinations began after age 40 found tau, the protein behind Alzheimer's, in 64.9% of them against 14.9% of controls. They split into three near-equal groups.
AIST and Tokyo startup OptQC have switched on MoQuren, a photonic quantum computer that needs no refrigerator and no vacuum chamber. What it can do now, and how Japan's bet differs from the US and China.