Why does osteosarcoma cluster in the knees of growing teenagers? A University of Tokyo team, working from an accidental clue in aging research, has pieced together how the cancer starts: an accelerator gene (c-Myc), a brake gene (p53), and a signal from the bone's growth plate. It could reshape drug discovery for a rare cancer.
Toho University stroked infants on the head, back and belly. Only the back calmed them, at about 10.5 cm/s. In mouse pups raised without a mother, the response never appeared at all.
Modern wild boars still carry traces of domestic pigs brought from the Asian mainland over 2,000 years ago. Nagoya University read that story off 93 jawbones from Shimane's Nishikawazu site—escaped pigs going feral and breeding with native boars. The same thing is happening today from Texas to Brazil.
Two schoolkids on Tanegashima found a stag beetle with a female-type jaw on one side and a male-type jaw on the other. An expert says it's likely a mandible mutation, not a true gynandromorph. Here's the biology, and Japan's deep love of beetles.
Some upright-eared Scottish Folds secretly carry the fold gene, a Japanese study finds. What this means for a painful cartilage disease and the global push to restrict fold-cat breeding.
Japanese startup PorMedTec will run the country's first pig-to-human kidney transplant trial at Hokkaido University Hospital and Shonan Kamakura General Hospital in early 2028. Against a backdrop of 340,000 dialysis patients and 15-year transplant waits, we look at the plan, the gene-edited eGenesis pigs, and how it compares with US clinical cases.
Two nearly identical proteins, one sees red and one sees green, separated by just 30 nanometers. A Japan-led international team determined the dark-state atomic structures of the red and green cone pigments for the first time, revealing that three amino acids decide how we tell red from green. The story behind a long-standing mystery in color vision.
A Kyushu University team showed for the first time that RPS19, long known as an anemia gene, also suppresses cancer by keeping p53 working. The finding hints at repurposing existing MDM2-inhibitor drugs.
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.
Why is Japan's prized dadachamame edamame so flavorful? Yamagata University traced it to tof11, a broken soybean gene whose accidental failure boosts umami and ripens the beans in summer.