To address rising depressive symptoms among high school students, researchers in Japan have developed a year-long intervention called the Mastery of Interpersonal Relationships and Emotional Skills program. Tested among 120 part-time high school students, the program significantly reduced the progression of depressive symptoms in frequent participants. By integrating key emotional and social skill training into the school environment, the program offers a practical and scalable model for universal mental health prevention in high school settings.

This work marks the first practical use of boson sampling, long seen as a key demonstration of quantum computing’s potential to outperform classical methods.

The researchers used computer simulations to model a quantum optical experiment that recognizes images using just three photons, successfully identifying images from several well-known datasets.

This paves the way towards future applications of quantum AI in complex image recognition, and represents a step toward low-resource, energy-efficient quantum computing.

A Japanese research team has harnessed the unique microgravity environment aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to elucidate, for the first time, the detailed structure of amyloid β fibrils bearing the Tottori-type familial mutation (D7N), a rare variant linked to Alzheimer's disease. This space-based breakthrough not only enabled structural analysis that is difficult on Earth but also provides new insights into how disease-related mutations affect fibril formation—paving the way for new therapeutic strategies.

Neuroblastoma is a cancer that shows a strange behavior: sometimes it regresses spontaneously, whereas other times it becomes malignant. A team from Nagoya University in Japan identified a previously unknown “uncommitted" neuroblastoma cell state and found that mice presumed to have undergone spontaneous regression exhibited a higher frequency of these uncommitted cells. Gene signatures of the uncommitted cell state were strongly associated with favorable prognosis in human neuroblastoma patients suggesting that understanding these cells could help treat this devastating disease.

Researchers from the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, have created a specially designed “bottlebrush” polymer that was used to produce a reaction space the size of a single molecule. This space acted as a nanoscale vessel to allow new materials, such as specialty polymers, to be created under highly controlled conditions. The technology has applications in advanced technologies such as drug delivery and remote sensing.  

A Japanese research team has successfully achieved direct observation of the charge distribution at the interface of ferroelectric domains. This nanometer-scale distribution was measured using a combination of advanced local charge imaging with a state-of-the-art electron microscope and atomic displacement analysis at the picometer (one trillionth of a meter) scale.

These findings represent a significant breakthrough in understanding the behavior of ferroelectric devices—such as multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs)—which are increasingly in demand for miniaturization and enhanced performance.

 Researchers from The University of Osaka found that both inhibitory and activating killer immunoglobulin-like receptors on natural killer (NK) cells were able to bind repetitive interspersed family proteins expressed on the surface of malaria-infected red blood cells. The role of these proteins in triggering both inhibitory and stimulatory responses from NK cells makes them extremely promising targets for the development of therapies and vaccines for malaria.

The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) the Advanced ICT Research Institute, ASTRODESIGN, Inc. , and Fujikura Ltd. have developed a multi-core fiber cable consisting of eight 4-core, standard cladding diameter multi-core fibers, and they have successfully implemented it for the first time as an ultrahigh-capacity data transmission unit in a real system handling uncompressed 8K video.

In an uncompressed 8K video system, approximately 70 Gbps of data must be transmitted per video stream, requiring one single-core single-mode fiber for each uncompressed 8K camera. The developed multi-core fiber cable contains a total of eight standard cladding diameter (125 μm) single-mode 4-core multi-core fibers of two different types within a 3 mm diameter cable, which is equivalent to the 32 single-core single-mode fibers that are conventionally used in uncompressed 8K video systems.

In this implementation, by introducing a transmission unit that utilizes the multi-core fiber cable, we successfully achieved stable system operation by transmitting high-volume video data from multiple 8K cameras installed in a cleanroom, through limited-capacity information conduits and building interior spaces, over 300 m to an 8K video composition device located in a separate building.

This achievement enables the deployment of systems requiring high-capacity data transmission, such as uncompressed 8K video systems, even in cases in which conventional installation was difficult owing to limited space in information conduits or wiring pathways within or between buildings.