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.

Billions of years ago, rain may have helped shape where the chemistry of life could begin on Mars. A new study maps the delivery of formaldehyde, an important prebiotic molecule, to the surface. The map could help guide future Mars missions searching for signs of the planet’s early organic evolution. 

A team including researchers from the University of Tokyo found the distance family caregivers have from people they care for can affect how they reflect on stressful experiences. When caregivers engage in therapeutic writing soon after a stressful event or while they are with the person they care for, they tend to focus their writing on emotional expression or on the care recipient. Waiting for some time, moving to another space, or handing care to someone else, can help caregivers take a more objective view and even work through problems. The researchers used a smartphone app to examine how timing, physical surroundings and caregiving responsibilities affected the carers’ reflective writing. 

A collaborative study led by researchers from the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology has demonstrated that tau filaments extracted from Alzheimer's disease (AD) and corticobasal degeneration (CBD) patient brains, when injected into wild-type mouse brains, induce the formation of endogenous tau amyloid-like filaments with the same disease-specific structures. The injected human tau disappears within a week, while mouse tau pathology arises and spreads over months, confirming prion-like transmission. Cryo-electron microscopy revealed that the newly formed tau filaments share identical folded structures with the original human tau strains. This mouse model provides vital insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying tauopathies and offers a platform for developing novel therapies targeting tau-related neurodegenerative diseases.

The effects of drying-rewetting cycles on soil CO₂ release were examined in surface soils and buried humic horizons from Hokkaido. In buried humic horizons in particular, drying-rewetting cycles increased CO₂ release beyond what microbial biomass alone would explain. This study highlights the potential contribution of disrupting reactive metal-organic complexes, a key mechanism for soil carbon stabilization, to enhanced soil CO₂ release.

A joint research team from Saitama University and the Institute of Microbial Chemistry (BIKAKEN) has developed a polymerizable monomer from 4-trehalosamine, a biologically stable and chemically modifiable analog of trehalose, and used it to prepare water-soluble polyacrylamides with tunable compositions. By taking advantage of the uniquely reactive amino group of 4-trehalosamine, the approach provides a new route for incorporating this sugar into synthetic polymers at controlled levels. Unlike conventional carbohydrate-containing polymers that often require complex protection and deprotection chemistry, the new approach exploits the naturally occurring amino group of 4-trehalosamine to introduce polymerizable functionality selectively and efficiently. The resulting platform may facilitate the design of carbohydrate-containing polymers for biotechnology and advanced functional materials.

A research team from the Vision and Action Laboratory, Visual Perception and Cognition Laboratory, and Cognitive Neurotechnology Unit in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology, led by Associate Professor Hideki Tamura, has demonstrated that, even when an object moves at the same physical speed, its approach is perceived as faster when it comes from behind than when it approaches from the front. Across five experiments using both a real autonomous mobile robot (AMR) and immersive virtual reality (VR), 92% of the participants consistently exhibited this perceptual bias, perceiving approaches from behind as faster than frontal approaches. The results further suggest that this phenomenon is unlikely to be explained by factors such as object appearance or motor noise, but is instead associated with vision-dependent factors that arise when observers turn around to view an approaching object from behind. Furthermore, by incorporating the experimentally observed perceptual bias into a robot navigation model, the researchers simulated a robot overtaking a pedestrian from behind. The simulation suggested that accounting for human perceptual characteristics results in avoidance trajectories that begin earlier while maintaining a greater distance from pedestrians than conventional navigation models.

The study was published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters on September 10, 2026.

https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2026.3732839

“My job is to collect and clean data,” says Associate Professor Tazro Ohta of Chiba University’s Institute for Advanced Academic Research, Graduate School of Medicine, and Data Science Core (DSC). As human genetic information has become easier to obtain as digitized data, analyzing it now requires advanced expertise and high-performance computing. By making his research products available as freely accessible open-source software and databases, Dr. Ohta is contributing to the development of data science. “I believe that data science needs a place where people can interact,” he told us, speaking about the importance and excitement of making databases open to the public.

Novel framework enables fine control over the intensity and expressiveness of AI-generated human motion, as reported by researchers from Science Tokyo. The “Motion Style Slider” framework enables animators to control the style and adjust a virtual character’s motion, from subtle to overly exaggerated, based on only two motion samples. The proposed approach achieves consistent style control and smooth transitions without the need for extensive motion-capture datasets.

Researchers found that carefully balancing metallic cobalt and cobalt oxide enables highly selective electrocatalytic hydrogenation of nitrogen-containing compounds. The catalyst converted pyridine to piperidine with a more than 99% yield, while intermittent electrolysis maintained its optimal chemical state, offering a potential route toward sustainable chemical manufacturing without use of scarce precious metals.