A 10 mm jellyfish rewound itself ten times in two years. A genome paper on about 1,000 genes cast it as nature's Yamanaka reprogramming; a US researcher attacked that premise with Japanese data it never cited.
A PNAS study rebuilt the songs of 9 extinct species from 20 fossils in Inner Mongolia. The 5 to 7 kHz result lands in the same band as Japan's 4.5 kHz bell cricket, listened to for 1,000 years.
A team from Osaka, Okayama and Tokyo has found why IgG antibodies outlast IgM. After mRNA vaccination, spike-specific cells were 0.14% of the long-lived bone marrow compartment, against 7.3% for influenza.
Three fossils, two of them picked up by amateurs more than twenty years ago, sat in a Hokkaido museum drawer until a CT scan added ten million years to a family of ammonites long thought extinct.
Japan's NIES has made iPS cells from four endangered birds. The flightless Okinawa rail has lost one of the two genes birds use to spot a virus. Inside the minus-160°C cell bank and the brain organoids grown from it.
Rausu, Rishiri, hosome, ma-kombu: four kelps sold under four names and four price tiers. A Hokkaido University team read the DNA of 475 plants and found no genetic line between them.
A University of Tokyo and Arc Institute team has shown how the IS621 jumping gene cuts itself out of an E. coli genome, resolving a chicken-and-egg puzzle that had stood since 2024.
Hokkaido University and Japan's forestry institute modelled all 349 ski areas in the country. At 4°C of warming, only seven stay open 100 days a year on natural snow. At 2°C, 53 do.
Fish have no eyelids, yet pufferfish close their eyes. Shimonoseki's Kaikyokan aquarium dissected 51 species and traced the eye-closing muscle to the one that deflates a puffed-up puffer.
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.
Japan has begun selling Telomelysin, a rewired cold virus that multiplies only inside cancer cells and goes into esophageal tumors by endoscope. Three doses list at 9.3 million yen; the trial behind it had 37 patients.
A kawakawa hybrid made bluefin tuna sperm at eight months, and rainbow trout now spawn Chinook salmon yearly. Inside Japan's 20-year surrogate broodstock effort and Kindai's 32-year tuna project.
Kobe University isolated seven bacterial strains from PFAS-polluted river sediment in Osaka. Three cut PFOS by up to 17.8%; one removed up to 97% of PFHxS in real landfill leachate. Degradation or adsorption? Unsettled.
That blank, open-mouthed face your cat makes after a sniff may finally have an explanation: 13 branched-chain fatty acids in urine, blended to a ratio unique to each cat and stockpiled in the kidney.
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.
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.
A shrine in Iwakuni held a memorial for 281 white snakes that died in one year, the most since records begin in 2009. Only 804 remain in the society's care, and this sacred albino population now breeds as a closed group.
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.
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.