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.
Over 100 researchers across six Asian countries, led by the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology and including Japanese institutions such as RIKEN and Waseda, have published a 10-year roadmap to build a synthetic cell from scratch. Their two-stage ProtoCell-to-AutoCell plan and AI-driven central biofoundry mark a new approach to a question Europe and the US have chased for 20 years.
Telomelysin, a common-cold virus reprogrammed to destroy cancer cells, has won the world's first approval for esophageal cancer. It took 35 years, one surgeon's idea, and an Okayama University startup pushing through a regulatory maze.
JAMSTEC's D-ARK project filmed the first bioluminescence ever recorded inside a deep-sea cave: a glowing new zoanthid, Corallizoanthus aureus, at 385 meters off Okinawa's Daito Islands. A look at the strange ecosystem hiding in unexplored submarine karst.
It began with a particle mistaken for a bacterium in an English cooling tower. Two decades later, giant virus research in Japan has reached a startling question: where did the cell nucleus that defines us come from? A look at Furtivovirus, found in a Kamakura river.
Why is Japan's prized dadachamame edamame so flavorful? Yamagata University traced it to tof11, a broken soybean gene whose accidental failure boosts umami and ripens the beans in summer.
Water beads up and rolls off a raincoat, so surely it slips along surfaces that repel it? A Kyushu University and University of Illinois team built a measurement 159 times more sensitive than before and found the opposite: water barely slips at all, regardless of wettability. Here's what that means for desalination and cooling tech.
Cold has killed living things since long before humans had fire. But what pulls the trigger inside the cell stayed murky. A Japanese team studying nematodes points to an unlikely suspect: copper.
A University of Tokyo-led team has produced the first high-precision genome of the Greenland shark, the longest-lived vertebrate. Changes in a linker histone and the ferritin gene offer the first real clues to its ~400-year lifespan, and to human aging.
With water that is neither sea nor fresh, Okayama University of Science is trying to farm salmon through its entire life cycle on land. If it works, the university calls it a world first. We unpack the technology behind it, why salmon is the hardest fish to farm this way, a 250-year-old salmon town's role, and the global scramble for farmed salmon.
Terahertz promises jaw-dropping 6G speeds, yet a passing body can kill the link. NICT just demonstrated the world's first system that auto-switches between millimeter and terahertz waves. The real breakthrough isn't a speed record but knowing when to give up on speed.
In 2004, virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka titled a dialogue A Pandemic Will Definitely Come. COVID proved him right 16 years later, and the bird flu he truly feared, H5N1, is now spreading in cattle and people. A 20-year reckoning.
The world's first factory built to mass-produce diamond semiconductors has opened in Okuma, the Fukushima town that hosts the wrecked Daiichi nuclear plant. How a material researchers chased for 40 years found its purpose in the place that needed it most.