Cold sleep was a movie prop. Then ESA calculated that a hibernating crew would cut a Mars spacecraft's mass by a third, and a Japanese lab found the brain switch. With humans, it is still a matter of hours.
On August 7, 2026, Japan's mechanical engineers added six objects to their Mechanical Engineering Heritage list, now 138 long: a camera that hit 45,000 frames a second in the 1920s, and a micrometer kept on a home altar.
Kanazawa Institute of Technology and sand maker Yamakawa Sangyo scatter sapphire grains across a warehouse floor and let the load slide instead of resisting. The grains cost a few hundred yen per square meter.
Seven Japanese research groups repeated two landmark University of Tokyo senolytics experiments under blinded conditions and found no effect. The original team's rebuttal ran the same day, in the same journal.
ispace and Mitsubishi Heavy will launch the ULTRA lunar lander on an H3 rocket in 2028, with no rideshare. Of the 18.7 billion yen Mission 3 expects to bring in, 12 billion is a government subsidy.
Mice spent two days in artificial hibernation and lost more than half the synapses in the hippocampus, yet still knew where the food was. What survived was not the big connections but the tightly clustered ones.
A lump of iron from a Toyama riverbed turned out to be a meteorite. Enomoto Takeaki had five swords forged from it in 1898, and the same rock later served as a reference for researchers analysing Tutankhamun's dagger.
Kagawa University Hospital treated a three-year-old girl's recurrent C. diff colitis with her father's gut bacteria. A year on, no relapse. US-approved products exclude children, and the EU sets shared rules in 2027.
Navitas sued Renesas on August 10, 2026 over four US patents covering SuperGaN. The CEO who filed it once ran that business inside Renesas, which sued first over trade secrets and holds 39.9 percent of Wolfspeed.
Sony and TSMC signed a binding deal on August 11 to build smartphone image sensors in Kumamoto, contributing about 747 billion yen ($4.7 billion) toward production in 2029. TSMC takes only 38% and lets Sony lead.
A Czech team pooled five studies on what competitive gaming does to the body. Energy use barely moves, 1.3 to 2.5 kcal a minute, while heart rate can jump from 85 to 137 bpm. In Japan, the argument is about the word.