Kagawa, Japan's self-styled udon prefecture, throws away thousands of tons of noodles a year. Two teams found wildly different uses for the waste: a small factory that turns it into electricity, and a professor who turns it into surprisingly tough paper grown by microbes, now made at a welfare facility for Marugame's traditional fans.
A team from Hokkaido University, Tokai University and Sapporo Maruyama Zoo has bred the slender shrew in captivity for the first time anywhere. Here is how they pulled it off with a mammal that cannot skip a meal, and why it matters for one of the smallest endangered mammals on Earth.
It has its own asteroid and is a prefectural symbol, yet for over 60 years the Musashi stickleback officially didn't exist. How an ice-age survivor near Tokyo finally became a named species, Pungitius nakamurai.
Electronics giant Panasonic hosted a Tokyo adoption event where 193 rescue dogs and cats met would-be families. A look at why a tech company backs animal welfare, and the company-NPO-newspaper model behind it.
Tokyo's tree canopy fell from 9.2 percent in 2013 to 7.3 percent in 2022, a 20 percent drop in nine years, and Japan has roughly 500,000 fewer street trees than at its peak. As Singapore, Paris and New York expand their canopies, why do Japanese cities keep losing shade? A look through public data and recent research.
In the American South, kudzu is a notorious invasive weed. In Japan, its flower yields tectorigenin, a supplement compound. A RIKEN team has now decoded how the flower makes it and brewed it in yeast, with no kudzu required.
A team led by the Nagoya Institute of Technology has found that water vapor can accelerate bond exchange in vitrimers, a third class of plastic that could finally make 'unrecyclable' thermosets repairable and reusable.
A baby red-shanked douc langur named Mee, from a species called the world's most beautiful monkey, has gone on display at Yokohama Zoorasia. We look at what this critically endangered birth means, and at Japan's habit of naming zoo animals by public vote and following each individual's life story.
A paddy field in central Japan was swallowed by bright yellow flowers. Water primrose, a South American invader, regrows from the tiniest stem fragment. We look at why farmers cannot kill it, how the same plant is wrecking waterways in France, Britain and the US, and why eradication may be impossible.
Seven months after metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, where does the technology actually stand? A status check on Atoco's air-to-water devices, scaled-up carbon capture by Svante and Kobe Steel, China's lead in MOF research output, and why an Atomis executive says a Nobel does not lower the hurdles.
Eleven days, 44 countries, 400 delegates. We score the five expectations from our pre-meeting article against the MOFA outcome communique: emperor penguin protection blocked, tourism rules deferred, Annex VI stalled, only the transparency resolution delivered.
Roadkill of the Amami black rabbit, a 'living fossil' found only on two southern Japanese islands, hit a record 185 in 2025. The grim milestone is a side effect of Japan's celebrated invasive-species eradication programs, including a 24-year mongoose campaign declared complete in 2024.
A Japanese research team from the University of Tokyo, JAMSTEC, and the National Institute of Polar Research has produced the first direct observational evidence that warm-water microbes carried into the Arctic Ocean are altering its nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. Aboard the R/V Mirai between 2015 and 2020, they tracked how UCYN-A2, a nitrogen-fixing organism normally associated with subtropical seas, surged into the Arctic basin during the early ice-melt year of 2017, and why that matters for the world's most rapidly warming ocean.
Calbee is switching 14 of its flagship snacks (including Potato Chips Lightly Salted, Consomme Punch, and Kappa Ebisen shrimp chips) to monochrome 'petroleum-saving packages' from May 25. The cause: ink shortages triggered by the Hormuz Strait crisis. A symbolic case of geopolitical risk reaching Japan's shelves, compared with parallel moves at Lindt, Lamb Weston and Smithfield Foods.
Between March and May 2026, Japan launched a wave of perovskite solar cell demonstrations across the country—world efficiency records, rice paddies, mountain tea fields, skyscraper windows, highway parking areas, and Toyota's Woven City. We unpack for international readers why everything is happening at once.
Japan's Resonac (formerly Showa Denko) will switch its Kawasaki ammonia plant to 100% waste-plastic-derived hydrogen by April 2030, ending its reliance on natural gas reforming. The world's only long-running commercial gasification chemical recycling plant processes 70,000 tons of plastic waste annually to produce 120,000 tons of ammonia, with 80%+ CO2 reduction. Now backed by Japan's first CCfD-style price-gap subsidy. A circular alternative to urban mining.
Tourist numbers up from 5,000 to 120,000 a year, sea ice at record lows, emperor penguins now Endangered. What ATCM48 in Hiroshima settled, and what it left unresolved.
Toshiba Energy Systems, Airbus, and Toyota are racing to commercialize superconducting motors that promise 10x the power density of conventional motors. Dubbed the 'ultimate motor,' the technology enables hydrogen aircraft and hydrogen-engine cars while leveraging Japan's decades of niche superconductor expertise. As eVTOL startups falter, why is Japan's aviation motor technology suddenly central to the global decarbonization race?
Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, joint winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has long advocated turning air itself into a resource through metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). His porous crystals can sort and capture CO2, water vapor and other molecules, putting Japan in direct conversation with players like Switzerland's Climeworks in the rapidly evolving direct-air-capture industry. Here is how a basic-science breakthrough from Kyoto could rewrite the economics of decarbonization.
On March 25, 2026, five partners, NYK Line, NTT Facilities, Eurus Energy, MUFG Bank, and the City of Yokohama, launched a world-first floating data center powered entirely by solar panels and batteries at Yokohama Port. How does this off-grid demonstration differ from the MOL-Hitachi used-ship concept, and what does it say about Japan's answer to the AI power crisis?