“I work with data, but what truly motivates me is knowing that it will ultimately be of use to someone. I’m not particularly good at taking on a leadership role, so I prefer to work alongside others, ” says Professor Shinichiroh Yokota from the Graduate School of Nursing. With a background as a nurse in clinical practice, Professor Yokota now applies informatics methods to nursing and medical data—using tools such as machine learning on electronic medical records (EMRs) to predict patient falls and the risk of bedsores. We spoke with him about how AI is transforming the world of nursing.

Researchers from the University of Osaka and collaborating institutions accelerated protons to nearly half the speed of light using a long-pulse laser and ultrathin graphene. A moving electric field carried the protons to high energies, and artificial intelligence helped detect rare high-energy particles among millions of detector images. This technique could pave the way for future AI-driven autonomous laser experiment systems.

A small capsule could change how we study the microbiome of the small intestine. A team, led by researchers at the University of Tokyo, has created a pill-shaped device designed to take samples from the small intestine using a tiny extendable brush. Still in the early stages of development, they have demonstrated that the device could be magnetically controlled to move through extracted pig intestines and sweep useful samples from the intestinal surface. In the future, this type of device could provide a more comfortable and complementary option to current endoscopic procedures.

Researchers at Ritsumeikan University and collaborating institutions have shown that counteranions control the solid-state assembly of paramagnetic thiaporphyrin Cu^II complex cations and thereby tune their magnetic behavior. PCCp⁻ formed a charge-by-charge assembly without significant spin–spin interaction, whereas nonplanar counteranions promoted π-stacked cation dimers exhibiting antiferromagnetic interactions. These findings demonstrate that ion-pairing assembly can control molecular spin arrangements, providing a strategy for designing supramolecular materials with tunable magnetic properties for spintronic applications.

To simulate event cameras, which can capture brightness changes at microsecond-scale speeds, conventional methods render numerous frames from 3D scenes, resulting in high computational costs. Researchers from Japan developed an efficient method using physically based path tracing to precisely determine event timings. The efficient implementation using GPUs reduces computation time to as little as one-third of a naïve implementation, enabling more efficient training-data generation for event camera applications, including healthcare monitoring, autonomous driving, and robotics.

The clinical progression and outcomes of two major herpesvirus retinitis forms are associated with patients’ immune status, reveal Institute of Science Tokyo scientists. They evaluated the clinical symptoms at presentation, retinal detachment (RD) patterns, treatment strategies, and clinical outcomes of acute retinal necrosis (ARN) and cytomegalovirus retinitis (CMVR). They found that ARN was strongly associated with RD whereas CMVR followed an indolent course. These findings may help in early diagnosis and management of viral retinitis.

An international research team led by University of Tsukuba has discovered fossilized eggshells of large herbivorous titanosaurs collected from the Late Cretaceous Chorrillo Formation in southern Argentina and inferred their nesting behavior. These titanosaur eggshells are the highest-latitude dinosaur eggshell fossils definitively identified in the Southern Hemisphere. The findings suggest that the dinosaurs buried their eggs in nest substrate in a relatively high-latitude environment and used heat generated within the nest to incubate them.

Researchers from the Institute of Industrial Science at The University of Tokyo used advanced instruments to watch small crystals on a scale of about one millionth of a meter as they soaked up chloroform. Parts of these crystals were found to work together to change shape, and some crystals began to move. Understanding these effects could lead to the design of new high-tech devices, such as sensors for pollutants.

KANAZAWA, Japan — Spatial transcriptomics can reveal where thousands of genes are active across a tissue, creating molecular maps at single-cell resolution. But comparing two such maps is difficult: thin slices of tissue may be rotated, stretched, or otherwise distorted, so equivalent regions do not automatically line up.

Researchers at Kanazawa University and Sapienza University of Rome have developed a computational method that aligns these maps directly from the individual measurement locations and their gene-activity values. Called Domain Elastic Transform (DET), it smoothly reshapes one digital map to match another without first converting the measurements into a regular grid of pixels.

The research, led by Osamu Hirose of Kanazawa University in collaboration with Emanuele Rodolà of Sapienza University of Rome, was published online in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence on September 15, 2026.