East Asia experienced a record-breaking heatwave in the summer of 2023. Researchers at the University of Tsukuba numerically simulated this event using an atmospheric model, revealing for the first time that this record-breaking heatwave was considerably amplified by an unprecedented marine heatwave in the surrounding seas.

Kyoto, Japan -- Humans everywhere may be able to eat bananas all year round, but wild animals must always eat "in-season". For them, seasonal shifts in food availability present a major challenge, especially in temperate regions like Japan with strong seasonal variation.

Japanese macaques reside further north and in a colder climate than any other non-human primate. They like to eat fruits and seeds, but when unavailable the monkeys must rely on low-quality foods such as leaves and bark. How animals like macaques adapt to such dietary shifts has long been a central question in ecology.

It is well known that the composition of the gut microbiome changes with diet and environment in many animals, so research has increasingly focused on how gut microbes help animals cope with seasonal dietary changes. But scientists still do not fully understand how these microbial changes affect digestive efficiency.

A study by the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Institute of Science Tokyo offers insights into how microbial life may have functioned during a critical phase in Earth's history, when oxygen was only beginning to accumulate in the atmosphere. By studying iron-rich hot springs in Japan that mirror the conditions of early, low-oxygen oceans, researchers discovered microbial communities sustained by iron metabolism, supported through a relationship with oxygen-producing photosynthetic microbes.

Researchers at Tohoku University developed a photonic router that can direct single and entangled (quantum) photons at unprecedented levels of efficiency. This may bring us closer to realizing superfast quantum tech.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has captured the motion of spirals of dust around a young star and shown that the winding motion of the spiral pattern is conducive to planet formation. This provides new evidence for planet formation around this young star. The results could have implications for other young stars as well.

We show that regionally endothermic shortfin mako sharks have enhanced thermoregulatory ability with an order higher warming rate than cooling rate during repeated dives, likely optimizing foraging efficiency. This ability, only comparable to bigeye tuna and swordfish in teleosts, represents the key adaptive significance of regional endothermy in fishes.

In a world-first, researchers from the Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have directly observed the evolution of the elusive dark excitons in atomically thin materials, laying the foundation for new breakthroughs in both classical and quantum information technologies. Their findings have been published in Nature Communications. Professor Keshav Dani, head of the unit, highlights the significance: "Dark excitons have great potential as information carriers, because they are inherently less likely to interact with light, and hence less prone to degradation of their quantum properties. However, this invisibility also makes them very challenging to study and manipulate. Building on a previous breakthrough at OIST in 2020, we have opened a route to the creation, observation, and manipulation of dark excitons."

Ko Mochizuki of the University of Tokyo has discovered that Vincetoxicum nakaianum, a dogbane species native to Japan described for the first time by Mochizuki and his collaborators only a year ago, mimics the smell of ants attacked by spiders to attract flies that feed on such attacked insects, and in the process pollinate the flowers. This is the first case of a plant mimicking the odor of ants, revealing that the scope of floral mimicry is more diverse than previously imagined. The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.