In 2015 the United Nations adopted Sustainable Development Goals that are related to social welfare, social equity, and environmental protection. They set a target of reaching these goals by 2030. Since the goals were proposed, China has implemented a wide range of strategies to achieve these goals. A research team has developed a multi-dimensional framework and then used that framework to evaluate Huzhou city’s sustainable development from 2003 to 2022.

Automated spoken English assessment tests have gained popularity for their well-documented advantages, such as ease of administration and cost efficiency. However, they often focus on single modalities, such as text or audio, and have limited relevance in interactive settings. Now, in a new research study, researchers from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have developed a multi-output learning framework that can simultaneously assess multiple aspects of spoken English proficiency.

Turbulence—where flows and vortices intricately intertwine—is a fundamental phenomenon found across nature, from our everyday surroundings to the cosmos. In particular, high-temperature fusion plasmas exhibit highly complex turbulence, driven by the coupled fluctuations of multiple physical quantities such as density, temperature, and magnetic fields. A research team led by  Dr Go Yatomi of the National Institute for Fusion Science (a graduate student at SOKENDAI at the time of submission) and Associate Professor Motoki Nakata of Komazawa University (also a visiting researcher at RIKEN) has developed a novel method to analyze turbulent states and interactions from the perspective of "information," drawing inspiration from mathematical frameworks in quantum mechanics, such as information entropy. This approach enables the discovery of previously overlooked turbulence regimes in plasmas and reveals essential nonlinear interactions between multi-scale vortices and flows—interactions that conventional energy-based analyses often miss. The study also proposes potential applications of the method to experimental diagnostics of turbulence and fluctuations. Looking ahead, this technique is expected to extend beyond plasma physics, offering new insights into complex systems in atmospheric and oceanic sciences, as well as in social dynamics, where complex flows and multi-variable interactions also play critical roles.