Japan's Defense Ministry has quietly hired Space Compass to study a homegrown stratospheric platform. Roughly 20 km up, between airliners and satellites, the US, UK, China and India are already racing for a sensor that never blinks. Here is the military picture of the near-space contest.
Kyoto University's Takuji Hatakeyama and colleagues linked multiple-resonance units to reach a 5.5nm emission band in solution, pushing spontaneous emission toward laser-like color purity. Published in Science, it points to purer, more efficient next-gen displays.
A Japanese biotech threaded a catheter into a failing heart and delivered iPS-derived muscle without opening the chest. Inside the world's first trial of its kind.
In 1998, Akira Furusawa achieved the world's first unconditional quantum teleportation at Caltech. For two decades, no one knew what it was for. By 2024, that same trick was running an optical quantum computer on the cloud. From the teleportation misconception to the reframe that turned it into a processor, and the startup OptQC's push for a homegrown machine.
When Artemis II passed behind the Moon, the crew went 40 minutes without a signal. A sustained lunar presence needs always-on infrastructure, not one-shot mission links. We trace what KDDI, the carrier that once relayed Japan's international calls, is building with laser comms and multi-hop relays, and ask how close it really is.
A Japanese radiative cooling film that stays below air temperature in direct sun, with zero electricity. How SPACECOOL dumps heat into space, its 29% energy cut in Saudi trials, and why passive cooling matters as the planet warms.
The pygmy sweeper glows blue from its belly, yet a full read of its 625-million-letter genome turns up no gene for the light-making enzyme. A Japanese team has now confirmed, at the genome level, that the fish runs entirely on a protein stolen from its prey, the only known case of its kind, with possible payoffs for oral protein drugs.
In 2004, Japanese cosmologist Katsuhiko Sato said 96% of the universe was a mystery. Twenty years and billions of galaxies later, it still is, and DESI's latest data suggests the mystery just got deeper. Here's why that's not a failure.
On July 5, 2026, at 6:30 p.m. Japan time, JAXA's Hayabusa2 passed asteroid Torifune at roughly 5.3 km per second, crossing the 500-meter body in about 0.1 seconds. Here's why this ultra-fast flyby was so hard, how a body-fixed camera caught it, and why it matters for planetary defense after NASA's DART.
In 2004, a University of Tokyo brain scientist said humans are born wired for grammar. In 2022, ChatGPT learned language without any such wiring. The half-century debate Chomsky started is wide open again.
Over 100 researchers across six Asian countries, led by the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology and including Japanese institutions such as RIKEN and Waseda, have published a 10-year roadmap to build a synthetic cell from scratch. Their two-stage ProtoCell-to-AutoCell plan and AI-driven central biofoundry mark a new approach to a question Europe and the US have chased for 20 years.