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.
NEC and New York University estimate that flood defenses on the Rockaway Peninsula could avoid up to $800 million in losses, pricing everything from transit disruption to residents' mental health in a bid to pull private money into climate adaptation.
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.
Photo blur is usually a mistake to avoid. But a University of Osaka team uses the shape of that blur to read how far away objects are, recovering depth from a single camera with help from a physics-guided AI. Errors stay within about a centimeter at four meters, with uses in robotics and inspection.
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.
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.
The Super-Kamiokande collaboration has caught the first-ever evidence of the diffuse supernova neutrino background, the combined glow of every massive star that has died since the universe began. Here is what it could reveal, and the spoonful of gadolinium that made it possible.
Researchers at Science Tokyo built a cheap biosensor that uses a plastic-binding peptide and surface plasmon resonance to detect nanoplastics in water, catching 50-nanometer polystyrene particles in 20 minutes, label-free. Here is why measurement, not the plastic itself, is the bottleneck regulators keep hitting.
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.
HOKUSHIN-1, a cubesat from three Japanese universities, was deployed from the ISS on June 19. Why it proves deep-space tech in low orbit first, where failure is cheap.
Muon-catalyzed fusion needs no plasma and no 100-million-degree heat, and it is not 1989's discredited cold fusion. A Japan-led team made the first direct observation of muonic-molecule resonance states, closing a long-standing theory-experiment gap.
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.
A Japanese-led team has resolved the first atomic-level structure of a metabolon, the elusive enzyme cluster that hid from biology for 40 years, revealing a new control principle called the GATE mechanism.
In a 2004 book, a Japanese paleontologist described his country's dinosaurs in modest terms. Two decades on, Kamuysaurus and Yamatosaurus put Japan on the global dinosaur map.
A Science Tokyo team finds that the brain runs multiple clocks for elapsed time, shifting between coherence and independence. From M2 and PPC recordings to the Twin-RNN model and a clue for brain-inspired AI, here's what they saw in a mouse.
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.
Discovered by accident during a COVID-era experiment, a University of Tokyo and Navarra study found about 65% of people drift counterclockwise when walking freely. Handedness and culture don't explain it, and even five-year-olds do it.
In 1998, Akira Furusawa achieved the world's first unconditional quantum teleportation at Caltech. For two decades, no one knew what it was for. By 2024, that same trick was running an optical quantum computer on the cloud. From the teleportation misconception to the reframe that turned it into a processor, and the startup OptQC's push for a homegrown machine.
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.
In 2004, Japanese cosmologist Katsuhiko Sato said 96% of the universe was a mystery. Twenty years and billions of galaxies later, it still is—and DESI's latest data suggests the mystery just got deeper. Here's why that's not a failure.