These insects, including pollinators, predators, and crop pests, play a vital role in moving nutrients, energy, and genetic material across ecosystems. Studying them has proven notoriously difficult, as they spend much of their lives high in the atmosphere.

The Institute for Fusion Science installed the "Hyperspectral Camera for Auroral Imaging (HySCAI)" in Kiruna, Sweden, in May 2023 and commenced full-scale observations in September of the same year. A research group led by Professor Katsumi Iida and Assistant Professor Mikio Yoshinuma from the National Institute for Fusion Science, Professor Yusuke Ebihara from the Institute for Advanced Studies on Human Survival and Environmental Science at Kyoto University, and Professor Kazuo Shiokawa from the Institute for Space and Earth Environmental Research at Nagoya University has now succeeded in observing the altitude distribution of blue nitrogen ion (N₂⁺) auroras emitting light during astronomical twilight using HySCAI. This research developed a completely novel method, utilizing the phenomenon where the altitude at which sunlight illuminates the aurora changes as twilight progresses. This enabled precise observation of the altitude distribution of the nitrogen ion's emission intensity. The peak was found to be located at an altitude of approximately 200 km, exhibiting extremely high intensity.

The American Physical Society (APS) – the world’s largest organization of physicists – has awarded the 2026 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics to Stefano Baroni, Professor of Condensed Matter Physics at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) and research associate at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche – Istituto Officina dei Materiali (CNR–IOM). The prize is regarded as the most prestigious international recognition in the field, awarded for outstanding achievements in computational physics.

The official citation recognizes his “seminal contributions to the development of first-principles methods for studying the electronic and thermal properties of condensed systems, and for the development and dissemination of open-source software for electronic-structure calculations, now widely adopted.”

Two formulations are at the heart of the study of turbulence: Kolmogorov’s universal framework for small-scale turbulence, which describes how energy propagates and dissipates through increasingly small eddies; and Taylor-Couette (TC) flows, which are very simple to create yet exhibit extremely complex behaviors, thereby setting the benchmark for the study of the fundamental characteristics of complex flows.

For the past many decades, a central contradiction between these potent formulations has plagued the field. Despite extensive experimental research and despite being found universal to almost all turbulent flows, Kolmogorov’s framework has apparently failed to apply to turbulent TC flows.

But now, after nine years developing a world-class TC setup at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), researchers have finally resolved this tension by conclusively demonstrating that, contrary to the prevailing understanding, Kolmogorov’s framework does apply universally to the small scales of turbulent TC flows – precisely as predicted.