For museums using digital content, creating experiences that build emotional connections with visitors is key to making digital cultural experiences more engaging, finds a study from Science Tokyo. A survey of 266 visitors at the Ryushi Memorial Museum revealed that immersive digital exhibits helped visitors connect with personal memories, historical stories, and cultural heritage. The findings suggest that museums can increase engagement by designing digital experiences around local stories, memories, and cultural identity.

Kagome metals have emerged as promising materials for exploring unusual superconductivity, but conflicting experiments have made it difficult to determine what drives their superconducting behavior. Now, researchers show that applying tensile strain to CsV3Sb5 separates two hidden superconducting states, raising the transition temperature while leaving its charge order unchanged. The findings establish strain as an independent tool for revealing and tuning unconventional superconductivity in quantum materials and related quantum systems worldwide.

Kyoto, Japan -- Monitoring biological indicators plays a crucial role in forest management, which requires finding a delicate balance between timber use and biodiversity conservation. Across forests and across species, responses to forestry operations that alter habitat conditions vary, so repeatable surveys of biological indicators like ground-dwelling beetles can capture forest spatial variation and changes over time.

While ground dwelling beetles help scientists understand conditions on the forest floor, indicators that reflect conditions in the canopy have been more evasive. But a team of researchers at Kyoto University thought that Platycerus might fit this role: a genus of stag beetles that inhabits broadleaf forests, munching on the dead wood of trees as larvae and new leaf buds as adults. The research team chose to investigate whether these beetles might complement their ground-dwelling counterparts in the biological monitoring of broadleaf forests.

In the forests of Hida, Japan, the scientists conducted a survey called a female-attracted flight Interception trap -- F-FIT -- a "honey trap" that uses female Platycerus stag beetles to attract males. F-FIT was introduced only recently to address the limitations of conventional Platycerus surveys, which depend on an observer's skill and may risk damaging breeding sites. With this new survey, the team recorded captures of male Platycerus takakuwai, a species typical to Japan.

Researchers at Kyushu University have developed a VR system that requires no head-worn device. Using aerial imaging optics, the system presents stereoscopic imagery to both eyes, letting users enter a VR environment simply by sitting down. By removing the weight of a headset and moving image processing outside the wearable device, the system could enable more comfortable, longer VR use. The researchers expect it to find applications in remote operation, healthcare, education, and entertainment.

Researchers at Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo) have developed a new liquid–metal process that can recover freshwater and magnesium resources from the concentrated brine. By combining liquid-tin direct-contact distillation with vacuum degassing, the method removes chlorine- and sulfur-containing species from the tin and enables magnesium-rich precipitates, with MgO as the major crystalline phase, to be recovered during cooling. More than 99% of the magnesium taken up by the liquid tin was recovered.

A study from the Research Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA), one of the centers under the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), presents a new method to decode hidden material disorder contained in complex photoluminescence spectra, paving the way for new optical diagnostics of material disorder in two-dimensional semiconductors and related light-emitting materials.

Researchers led by the University of Osaka have directly observed a heavy-fermion state forming at the interface between a one-atom-thick ytterbium–copper layer and a copper substrate. Using synchrotron-based measurements, they showed that electrons across the interface interact to create this unusual quantum state. The finding offers a new approach to designing low-dimensional quantum materials and may help enable previously unexplored phenomena, including unconventional superconductivity.

Researchers at the University of Osaka developed new mouse models of hypophosphatasia that reproduce dental symptoms seen in patients. The models showed that teeth, surrounding bone, and tooth-supporting tissues can be affected even when skeletal symptoms elsewhere are mild. Differences between the models suggest that specific genetic changes influence dental symptoms, providing a new platform for studying disease mechanisms and developing dental treatments tailored to severity.