Technology

NHK STRL and Institute of Science Tokyo have built the world's first transparent hologram that floats full-color 3D images in front of clear glass. A new amplitude-aware design cracks the two old walls of surface-relief holography in one move.

Yokohama National University spinoff LQUOM has closed a 1.23 billion yen ($7.7M) Series B to build quantum repeaters, the missing piece of the quantum internet. Here is what that means, and how it stacks up against Aliro in the US, USTC in China, and Japan's planned Tokyo-Osaka quantum backbone.

Fujitsu's new Kozuchi Physical OS isn't trying to build a smarter robot brain. It's trying to make the whole physical space intelligent. Here's how its edge-plus-sovereign-cloud design differs from NVIDIA Cosmos and Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics — and how it fits into Japan's $126B Physical AI ambition.

Kyoto University spinout Toregem Biopharma will begin Phase 2 trials of TRG035, the world's first tooth-regeneration drug, in summer 2026, dosing 24 children with congenital tooth agenesis. A pre-Series C round of ¥850 million brings cumulative funding, grants included, past ¥4.6 billion. A look at how Japan's university-biotech funding stack works, and why a super-aged society may produce this kind of innovation first.

For forty years a black clay layer in a remote Hokkaido stream was East Asia's only K-Pg boundary. In May 2026, a Tohoku University-led team reported it isn't the boundary at all, and that the real record lies about four kilometers northeast.

Kyoto University associate professor Mitsuaki Kaneko is commercializing SiC-based mixed-signal LSIs that work where silicon fails. His complementary JFET approach targets ADC samples in 2028-2029, opening a niche the big five SiC power players have largely ignored.

Akita Prefectural University students nicknamed the 'Avocado Squad' published a method that predicts avocado ripeness from skin reflectance and storage temperature, with no slicing required. The work is patent pending and the team is seeking commercial partners.

Yamada Suisan and Japan's fisheries research agency put fully farmed eel on public sale for the first time on May 29. After cutting glass-eel production cost from 40,000 to 1,800 yen, the country aims to end wild-juvenile dependence by 2050.

Why a Nissan deep in restructuring picked Red Hat for its next-generation in-vehicle OS. We unpack the trap of in-house software development that cost Volkswagen's CARIAD 14 billion euros, and the path Nissan chose to avoid it.