Animals such as bats rely on sound for navigation and locating prey. However, they must distinguish between important signals and surrounding noise. Researchers from Doshisha University, Japan, now report that greater Japanese horseshoe bats actively create a “silent spectral window” through ultrasonic frequency control, which allows them to clearly detect echoes from their prey against the background clutter. This strategy not only stabilizes echoes but also suppresses environmental noise, inspiring future noise cancellation technologies.

People buy things using services like Amazon and Rakuten and share information on social media. We call these places of commerce and exchange “platforms,” and nowadays, they’ve become essential parts of our lives. On the other hand, various issues have also been pointed out in recent years regarding the direction of these platforms, such as oligopolies formed by massive corporations and scams from fake advertising. We sat down with Professor ZENNYO Yusuke of the Graduate School of Business Administration, who researches platform businesses, to tell us about the background and current state of these rapidly growing businesses as well as some challenges moving forward.

What plant do cats love most? In Europe and North America, many people would say catnip, while in Japan the answer would more likely be silver vine (matatabi in Japanese). A research team from Iwate University and Nagoya University found that domestic cats respond more reliably to silver vine than to catnip when they are free to approach or ignore the plants. In outdoor experiments, free-roaming cats repeatedly rubbed and rolled on fresh silver vine but showed little response to nearby catnip plants. The same pattern was observed in 22 captive purebred cats tested in a large indoor environment. Surprisingly, chemical analysis showed that catnip contained abundant active compounds, including nepetalactone isomers, and laboratory cage tests confirmed that catnip-derived compounds can trigger the typical feline response. The findings show that chemical activity in the laboratory does not always predict real-world behavior, highlighting the importance of studying animals under conditions that allow natural choice.

Despite widespread claims that social changes have intensified loneliness, no study has yet examined how loneliness has changed over time in Japan. To address this gap, graduate student Momo Homma from the Department of Psychology at Chuo University, Japan and Professor Kenkichi Takase from the same institution conducted a cross-temporal meta-analysis to investigate how loneliness has changed over time in Japan and identify the factors contributing to this change. The results indicated that loneliness increased in Japan from 1983 to 2023. Furthermore, the increase was particularly pronounced among adolescents and women, and social indicators such as marriage rates were found to covary with loneliness. These findings provide a foundation for future research on loneliness and help identify target populations for interventions aimed at reducing loneliness.

NIMS developed TEGNet (Thermoelectric Generator Neural Network), a neural network for designing thermoelectric generators by utilizing artificial intelligence (AI). TEGNet can predict performance of a power generator, a process which used to take enormous computational time with traditional simulation techniques, with only about 1/10,000 of the time conventionally needed, while maintaining over 99% accuracy. This technology significantly accelerates optimization from material development to device design, and is expected to be applied to waste heat recovery and stand-alone power supply for IoT sensors, for example. This research result was published in Nature at 11:00 U.S. Eastern Standard Time, April 15, 2026 (0:00 Japan Standard Time, April 16, 2026).

In recent years, atomically thin materials—crystals only a few atoms thick—have attracted growing attention because they can exhibit physical properties that do not appear in conventional bulk materials. Among them, atomically thin magnetic materials are particularly intriguing, as they can host unconventional magnetic states and offer new possibilities for spin-based electronic technologies.

Researchers at the Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (WPI-ITbM), Nagoya University, together with collaborators from RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (RIKEN CSRS) and The University of Osaka, have uncovered a previously unknown mechanism by which plants detect hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂), a key signaling molecule involved in stress responses and immunity. Published in Nature Communications, the study reveals that plants rely on a copper-dependent sensing system, rather than the previously assumed cysteine-based mechanism, to perceive reactive oxygen species (ROS).