About 30% of people with ADHD get limited benefit from methylphenidate. A Fukui mouse study found adding a D2 drug helped mice missing the protein NSF, but the same combo made normal mice more impulsive.
Cryo-electron microscopes flash-freeze proteins and build 3D models from millions of molecular images. What they see, what they do and what they cost, as a Kyoto university teaches undergraduates to use the data.
A 26-site, two-year double-blind trial in Japan found high-absorption curcumin did not cut colon polyp recurrence overall (risk ratio 0.98), but large adenomas were about 44% lower. Not proof of cancer prevention.
Divers in Shiretoko have long called it Ikuone. Now Clione ikuoi is the sixth sea angel species, and the third from Japanese waters in 10 years. A misread set of feeding arms had kept it in the wrong genus.
The 47th Honda Prize goes to Graeme Clark and Ingeborg Hochmair for the multichannel cochlear implant, now fitted in more than one million people. Why did a carmaker founder's foundation pick it?
On October 2, 2026, a Sapporo hospital gave the first commercial dose of Akuugo to a man paralyzed in a traffic accident. Why it took over two years, and what the trial evidence shows.
Tohoku University-led researchers built a DNA switch: blue light makes mRNA inside cell-sized capsules, UV stops and cuts it. Why the brake matters, and why pinpoint therapy is still far off.
High-speed cameras trade detail for duration. A University of Tokyo team packs frames tightly at first and spreads them out later, linking roughly 5 orders of magnitude in time with 11 frames in a single shot.
Some AI GPUs are now far weaker at the FP64 math science needs. A Shibaura Institute of Technology method rebuilds it from low-precision units; NVIDIA lists up to 175 TFLOPS on a B200. How it works, and its limits.
Spoon-leaved sundews with cut leaves closed their flowers more tightly when touched, in an indoor test of 15 and 17 plants. What carries that 'memory' is still unknown.
Cyclo-octasulfur, the yellow sulfur of volcanoes, is made and stored in fat droplets in mouse and human cells. It won't dissolve in water and breaks apart when measured; a chemistry capsule caught it.
Kanazawa University and AIST report the first vertical diamond MOSFET with an inversion-layer channel. Diamond transistors that switch off this way existed by 2016; what is new is building one vertically.
A Japanese headline put this year's El Niño losses in the trillions. The figure traces back to a 2023 estimate of $5.7 trillion for the 1997–98 event. Why estimates differ 100-fold, and a think tank's own correction.
An international team used NAOJ's ATERUI III to show how a newborn black hole could look like one of Webb's little red dots. NAOJ's Japanese release says 'closing in'; its English one says 'explained.'
For nearly 25 years, only one double-Lambda hypernucleus had been fully identified. A RIKEN-led team used AI to sift 0.2% of J-PARC's photographic film, then pinned down a boron-13 nucleus by hand.
The Tsugaru Strait separates Japan's brown bears from its black bears. According to a genetic study of 327 frogs, the only amphibian known to live naturally on both sides crossed it 1 to 2.5 million years ago.
Japan's gene-edited GABA tomato opened its field. It wasn't the first gene-edited food sold (US soybean oil, 2019), but the first CRISPR food shoppers could buy. How Japan's rules compare with the EU's.
Masahiko Inami read Ghost in the Shell as lab homework and helped build optical camouflage from reflectors and a projector. The world called it an invisibility cloak. He says that name would never have sparked the idea.
Chihaya Adachi, a 2026 Citation Laureate, was first author of a 2001 paper on iridium-based OLEDs, then created TADF, which needs no rare metal. Yet iridium, mined at about 7 tonnes a year, is still in OLED screens.
A wild fox dropped a mole at a home in Yonago, Japan, and walked away. It has visited about seven times. Japan's internet thought of a school folktale; a mole researcher has a more practical theory.