CATL has taken sodium-ion cells into mass production. They can be shipped at 0V, which all but removes the fire risk in transit, they hold about 90 percent of their performance at -40°C, and they run past 10,000 charge cycles. Here is where the energy density problem still stands.
Farmed eels almost always turn out male. Aichi Prefecture's patented soybean-isoflavone feed flips more than 90% of them female, letting farmers raise them to roughly double the usual size without the flesh going tough. The result is "Enman," a branded eel from Mikawa-Isshiki.
ATR, Kyoto University, and AIST have shown a humanoid robot slaloming on a skateboard. How its Cyborg AI works, why the task maps onto disaster response and construction sites, and where the project sits against US and Chinese rivals.
Yamagata University is building Benibana Sat, a 1U CubeSat targeting launch by fiscal 2028. Named for the prefectural flower, the project is aimed less at the satellite than at keeping the firms and people who can build one inside the prefecture.
Bankruptcies and closures among Japanese healthcare institutions hit record highs two years running. How suppressed fee schedules, rising costs, and staff shortages combined, and what the 3.09 percent fiscal 2026 revision changes.
Two decades after Shinya Yamanaka's 2006 paper, Japan approved the world's first iPS-derived regenerative medicine products on March 6, 2026: Amchepry for Parkinson's disease and RiHEART for severe heart failure. The trial data, the seven-year clock, and the 55 million yen price.
At Toyosu Market's 2026 New Year auction, a purple sea urchin from Hakodate sold for a record 35 million yen, about 87,500 yen per gram, five times the previous year's top lot. The million-yen uni bowl, a 23-fold rise in two years, and why uni keeps getting pricier.
At Toyosu Market's 2026 New Year auction, a 243kg Oma bluefin sold for a record 510.3 million yen, about $3.2 million, to the Sushi Zanmai operator Kiyomura. What ichiban maguro means, how the ceremonial premium works, what the fisherman keeps, and where the stock stands.
"open.space" is an open-source phased array antenna built for Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication. It aims to replace the traditional dish-and-kilowatt setup with a 1-meter, 240-element array, priced from $49-99 for a single tile up to $4,999 for the full array. Here is what the project offers and where it now stands.
Meiji University spinout Pormedtec is preparing Japan's first pig-to-human organ transplant trial, now targeted for 2028 at Hokkaido University Hospital and Shonan Kamakura General Hospital. Only about 4% of Japan's 16,000 registered transplant candidates receive an organ each year. In the US, a gene-edited pig kidney has functioned in a patient for more than seven months.
Researchers at Japan's JAIST found that Ewingella americana, a bacterium from Japanese tree frog intestines, completely eliminated colorectal tumors in mice after a single dose, a 100% complete response rate that outperformed chemotherapy and immunotherapy in the same comparison. Here is what the preclinical study showed, and what it does not yet show.