Desalination makes about 35 trillion liters of fresh water a year and discards roughly 50 trillion liters of brine. A Tokyo lab drips it onto molten tin and recovers magnesium oxide, 280 times concentrated.
Hafnium keeps advanced chips and jet engines running, yet the world makes about 71 tonnes a year, nearly all of it in France and the United States. An Osaka chemical maker now wants a share of it by 2028.
China's rare earth magnet shipments to Japan fell 52.2% in July 2026 while US-bound shipments rose 4.6%. Japan tells itself pressure breeds breakthroughs. Optical glass and neodymium magnets agree; aluminium does not.
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.
The hat, found in 2023, tiles the plane forever without repeating. A Japanese team etched 372,100 of its points into a silicon nitride film, fired a laser, and got back a pinwheel of light with no mirror image.
A terbium-doped AlGaN LED from the University of Osaka and Ritsumeikan University emits four colors from a single spot, with wavelengths that barely move as the current rises.
University of Toyama researchers crystallized an OLED's emitting layer inside a practical thin-film stack: up to 1,000 times the current density at 1 volt, and turn-on at 1.33 V.
Chemists at Nagoya University cut a bond inside a flat carbon molecule and rebuilt it, producing figure-eight, bathtub and double-helix nanocarbons that emit spiraling light and trap carbon dioxide. Published in Nature Communications.
Kuroda Precision holds about 30% of the global market for EV drive motor-core dies. The 100-year-old firm now bets on amorphous alloy and cobalt-heavy permendur, and on a supply chain shaped by geopolitics.
A century-old Japanese packaging company will launch a flexible CIGS solar cell in early 2027, betting that proven, long-life thin-film tech can beat still-maturing perovskite to Japan's weak roofs and walls. The contrarian logic, and the catches.
Researchers at the Institute of Science Tokyo have created a surface electrene: a crystal whose outermost layer is a sheet of loose electrons, with a work function lower than cesium. It survives open air because nitrogen caps it, then leaves as ammonia. Here is what it means for green fertilizer, and how it compares with the electrochemical routes pursued in China, Europe and the US.
Altermagnetism, the third type of magnet that stunned physics in 2024, had one flaw: no one could steer it. A Tokyo-KEK team aligned its domains in MnTe with a tiny millitesla field and watched them flip with polarized neutrons, with a stray field 10,000 times smaller than a ferromagnet's.
Toyota, Shinshu University and 11 partners are building a self-driving lab where robots run experiments and AI picks what to try next. Here is how Japan's closed-loop materials push compares with Berkeley's A-Lab and China's robot chemist.
Resonac, BEAM and Nippon LEO signed an MOU to manufacture compound semiconductors in low Earth orbit. Why build chips in microgravity, and how Japan's bet compares to the US and China.
A Hirosaki University team made a hydrogel that is 70% water yet bounces like a superball. Swapping one end group from methoxy to hydroxyl raised its stiffness about twentyfold, pointing toward artificial cartilage and underwater cushioning.
Say you can hear plants and people back away slowly. Turns out it's real: researchers at Japan's Institute of Science Tokyo built a transparent 70-nanometer carbon-nanotube electrode that reads a crop's bioelectric stress signals for up to 10 months, even in the rain.
Sinfonia Technology, better known for semiconductor robots, has paired a cold crucible melting furnace with a disk atomizer to make highly spherical powder from high-melting metals like titanium and molybdenum. A look at the unglamorous powder that feeds metal 3D printing, and Japan's stake in it.
Toray's new TSW-K/M/V RO membranes remove over 99.9% of salt and enough boron to run seawater desalination in a single pass, trimming energy, equipment and cost. Here's why it matters worldwide.
Tokyo's Orbray and De Beers' Element Six have established a reproducible process for one of the largest single-crystal diamond wafers yet, at three inches. How a sapphire trick beat the cracking problem that long held back diamond, the material many call the ultimate semiconductor.
Researchers in Japan made a four-micrometer sphere of chiral polymer that lases in a flat ring, like Saturn. The molecules self-assembled into a surface swirl that gives the light a direction. A clear look at the first angle-selective lasing from a sphere, driven by its own surface chemistry.