Higher activity of PGC-1α enables brown fat cells in females to thermogenic activity and energy expenditure compared to males, reveals a study conducted in Japan. This research demonstrates that PGC-1α protein promotes phospholipid synthesis, which strengthens mitochondria of brown fat cells and enhances their heat-generating capacity in female mice. The findings reveal a female-specific mechanism of energy metabolism, boosted by PGC-1α and estrogen, which could inspire new therapies for the prevention of obesity and diabetes.

People are constantly exposed to fungal spores, including those of Aspergillus fumigatus, but individuals with weakened immune systems may develop life-threatening infections. In a recent study, researchers from Japan clarified the mechanisms by which the dendritic cell immunoreceptor (Dcir) suppresses neutrophil activity during infection with A. fumigatus. Their findings highlight Dcir as a potential therapeutic target for aspergillosis and suggest promising research avenues in the field of immunology.

Perimetry (visual field testing) quantifies a patient’s retinal sensitivity to light and clarifies a deviation from normal retinal sensitivity. Visual field tests generally require high patient concentration, which can be exhausted. We constructed a framework for deep reinforcement learning to train ViFT (Visual Field Transformer), which controls all processes of visual field testing. ViFT achieves the same or higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art strategies, with less than half the test time of the state-of-the-art strategies.

The University of Osaka D3 Center will begin trial operations of the “Osaka University Compute and sTOrage Platform Urging open Science” (OCTOPUS), a computational and data platform promoting open science built by NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701), starting this September, with full-scale operations commencing in December.

Inspired by molecular motors in biological systems, researchers at Doshisha University develop the world’s first symmetric ratchet motor in which a perfectly circular disk spins in one direction when placed on vibrating particles. While conventional rachets rely on asymmetry, this motor emerges from spontaneous symmetry breaking. This discovery highlights a new principle in physics of extracting order from noise, setting the stage for innovative energy-harvesting devices that work on ambient vibrations.

An international research group led by The University of Osaka has developed scODIN, a novel computational tool to classify cell types from single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. Existing methods struggle to balance speed and accuracy, often misclassifying rare or transitional cells. scODIN overcomes this limitation by combining a hierarchical classification system (Tier system) with k-nearest neighbor inference. This approach allows for the rapid and accurate classification of large datasets, processing 650,000 cells in just six minutes. The tool's improved accuracy stems from its ability to identify cells at varying levels of detail, recognize intermediate phenotypes through double labeling, and recover cells affected by dropout events. scODIN promises to accelerate biomedical discoveries by enabling more precise and efficient analysis of complex biological processes and disease mechanisms.

Exoskeletons typically work by implementing motions programmed in advance and having the user call for them, making it difficult to use them for a wide range of motions in real-life environments. Now, in a notable example for wearable robotics, published in npj Robotics, researchers from the RIKEN Guardian Robot Project in Japan have used artificial intelligence to better assist users, by designing an exoskeleton that functions based on inputs regarding the user’s status as well as a view of the environment based on the user’s perspective.

    Led by Assistant Professor Kou Li, a research group in Chuo University, Japan, has developed a synergetic strategy among non-destructive terahertz (THz)–infrared (IR) photo-monitoring techniques and ultrabroadband sensitive imager sheets toward demonstrating in-line realtime multi-scale quality inspections of pharmaceutical agent pills, with a recent paper publication in Light: Science & Applications.

    While non-destructive in-line monitoring at manufacturing sites is essential for safe distribution cycles of pharmaceuticals, efforts are still insufficient to develop analytical systems for detailed dynamic visualisation of foreign substances and material composition in target pills. Although spectroscopies, expected towards pharma testing, have faced technical challenges in in-line setups for bulky equipment housing, this work demonstrates compact dynamic photo-monitoring systems by selectively extracting informative irradiation-wavelengths from comprehensive optical references of target pills. This work develops a non-destructive in-line dynamic inspection system for pharma agent pills with carbon nanotube (CNT) photo-thermoelectric imagers and the associated ultrabroadband sub-terahertz (THz)–infrared (IR) multi-wavelength monitoring. The CNT imager in the proposed system functions in ultrabroadband regions over existing sensors, facilitating multi-wavelength photo-monitoring against external sub-THz–IR-irradiation. Under recent advances in the investigation of functional optical materials (e.g., gallium arsenide, vanadium oxide, graphene, polymers, transition metal dichalcogenides), CNTs play advantageous leading roles in collectively satisfying informative and efficient photo-absorption and solution-processable configurations for printable device fabrication into freely attachable thin-film imagers in pharmaceutical monitoring sites. The above non-destructive dynamic monitoring system maintains in-line experimental setups by integrating the functional thin-film imager sheets and compact multiple photo-sources. Furthermore, permeable sub-THz–IR-irradiation, which provides different transmittance values specific to non-metallic materials per wavelength or composition, identifies constituent materials for pharmaceutical agents themselves and concealed foreign substances in a non-contact manner. This work finally inspects invisible detailed features of pharmaceutical pills with the non-destructive in-line dynamic photo-monitoring system by incorporating performances of CNT imagers and compact optical setups.