Nagoya University, Columbia University and Harvard University have made an important discovery about the relationship between hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and immune response evasion. Their findings show how certain HSCs have regulatory functions that help control the immune response, preventing excessive or harmful immune activity. This insight could be the key to developing new treatments for immune-related conditions and improving tissue regeneration techniques.

Kanazawa University’s Nano Life Science Institute (WPI-NanoLSI) is now accepting proposals from industry partners for collaborative research utilizing the world’s most advanced bio-scanning probe microscope (Bio-SPM) technology. This initiative aims to foster groundbreaking industrial applications by leveraging WPI-NanoLSI’s pioneering expertise in nano-life sciences.

An Osaka Metropolitan University-led team analyzed the historical evolution of the bureaucracy from an economic perspective and came up with surprising results about nation-building and democratization.

Kyoto, Japan -- We're all familiar with Pavlovian conditioning, in which a reward-anticipatory behavior follows a reward-predicting stimulus. Perhaps you experience it yourself when passing a café or restaurant and catching a whiff of something delectable.

Behind this mechanism is dopamine released within the striatum, the largest structure of the subcortical basal ganglia, which links motor movements and motivation. Yet it has remained unclear exactly what kind of dopamine signal is transmitted to the striatum to cause this behavior in primates.

In order to understand this dopamine signal, a team of researchers from Kyoto University and Cambridge University developed a new method of monitoring dopamine, utilizing a fluorescent dopamine sensor.

Kyoto, Japan -- As a child, did it ever occur to you that your perception of color differed from that of others? It's quite common to have this thought, but it turns out that the human color experience may be more universal than we previously believed.

In psychology and neuroscience, the relationship between subjective experience, such as how we perceive color, and physical brain activity has remained an unresolved problem. Furthermore, due to their limited language abilities, studying conscious experiences in children has posed a particular challenge.

This inspired a team of researchers at Kyoto University to establish a methodology for evaluating conscious experiences, or qualia, in young children. Focusing on their experience with color, the team developed a touch panel interface that requires only minimal language skills, making it accessible for children as young as 3 years old.

Scientists have achieved the first real-time visualization of how "excited-state aromaticity" emerges within just hundreds of femtoseconds and then triggers a molecule to change from bent to planar structure in a few picoseconds. By combining ultrafast electronic and vibrational spectroscopies, the team captured these fleeting structural changes at the molecular level and showed that aromaticity appears before--and then drives--the structural planarization. Their findings lay the groundwork for designing more efficient photoactive materials, such as sensors and light-driven molecular switches, by leveraging the power of aromaticity in excited states.

Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH) is a polygenic disorder influenced by multiple genes, but their specific roles in the progression of disease remain unknown. To address this gap, researchers conducted a series of experiments that identified the NACHT and WD repeat domain-containing protein 1 (Nwd1) gene and its role in liver pathogenesis. This breakthrough represents an important step toward establishing new therapeutic targets for MASH.

Polypseudorotaxanes, in which α-cyclodextrin (α-CD) rings shuttle along a poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) chain, are promising candidates for molecular machines. However, their molecular dynamics have remained unclear. Researchers have now used fast-scanning atomic force microscopy (FS-AFM) to visualize α-CD rings moving along a PEG chain. This breakthrough establishes FS-AFM as a powerful tool for analyzing supramolecular polymers and paves the way for designing efficient molecular motors.