A one-off training session increased how much time fathers spent with their children and on chores by about two hours a week, reports a new study from the University of Tokyo. A team in Japan provided male employees and their managers with either information on positive office attitudes towards paternity leave or a work-life balance training session. The former corrected common misconceptions, but fathers who attended the training reported real behavioral change. This unexpectedly freed up 3.6 hours of time which mothers used for their own work. This study shows how small workplace interventions can have wider positive impacts, for families and businesses.A one-off training session increased how much time fathers spent with their children and on chores by about two hours a week, reports a new study from the University of Tokyo. A team in Japan provided male employees and their managers with either information on positive office attitudes towards paternity leave or a work-life balance training session. The former corrected common misconceptions, but fathers who attended the training reported real behavioral change. This unexpectedly freed up 3.6 hours of time which mothers used for their own work. This study shows how small workplace interventions can have wider positive impacts, for families and businesses.

A chance discovery at Nagoya University in Japan has shown a well-known brain enzyme has a hidden ability: it builds a sugar chain on itself, becomes secreted from the cell and deactivates, then switches on outside the cell once the chain is removed. The finding, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, overturns a decades-old assumption about how polysialic acid, a sugar chain critical for brain development and function, is produced and shows a new way an enzyme can regulate its own activity.    

Researchers at Niigata University’s Brain Research Institute have discovered that amyloid precursor protein (APP), long associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), plays a previously unknown protective role in clearing nuclear-derived waste material via lysosomal exocytosis. Reduced APP function or familial AD-associated APP mutations impair this clearance, promoting neuroinflammation and cell death. The findings suggest that nuclear damage and intracellular waste clearance failure may contribute to AD pathogenesis.

Newborn nerve cells must squeeze through crowded, narrow spaces—through dense tissue, past other cells, between fibres—to reach the areas where they form neural circuits in the brain cortex. 

In a new study published in Nature, researchers at Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (WPI-iCeMS) and their collaborators report that this journey causes widespread DNA damage in neurons, resulting in double-strand breaks where both strands of the double helix are completely severed. While this is the most severe type of DNA damage—capable of causing mutations and cell death—the team surprisingly found that it is a normal, routine feature of brain cortex formation, and a healthy brain quickly repairs it before harm occurs. 

Cells have surface receptors that couple to proteins and other molecules to initiate or inhibit certain behaviors. Typically, the number of these receptors increases as the cell matures, but researchers have now identified that one receptor influences cell behavior much earlier than previously thought and appears to help trigger the cell differentiation process to form neurons. 

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), with help from a ‘natural telescope’ formed by gravity, have identified the source of a neutrino burst. The team expected a supermassive black hole to be the engine driving the remarkably bright galaxy. Instead, the team found that the galaxy was driven by vigorous star formation. This result provides important observational evidence to help explain the mysterious origin of cosmic neutrinos.

Continuous consumption of foods containing heat-inactivated Lactiplantibacillus pentosus can help reduce gum bleeding, report researchers from Institute of Science Tokyo. These postbiotic foods can improve inflammatory conditions and enhance gum health in adults with mild gingivitis. The study suggested that these postbiotic foods offer a simple and practical way to support oral health in daily life without altering oral care habits. The findings also aid in the prevention of early-stage periodontal disease.

Published on June 12 in the Journal of Micro/Nanopatterning, Materials, and Metrology (JM³), Professor Tsumoru Shintake of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), has proposed a radical redesign to the illumination systems and projectors used in high numerical aperture (high-NA) EUV lithography. Simulations suggest that his design could eliminate troublesome optical (so-called ‘mask 3D’) effects, enhance resolution and enable the manufacture of smaller computer chips at lower cost than current EUV methods. 

The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Sharp Corporation, Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation, and TECHLAB Co., Ltd. jointly reduced the total weight of a planar antenna for NTN (Non-Terrestrial Network) applications by 47% (from 5.5 kg to 2.9 kg) through a new heat dissipation device design.

This was achieved by integrating a CFRP heat dissipation device using a composite material combining carbon fiber prepreg and graphite sheet into the NTN planar antenna. The required electrical performance of the planar antenna was also confirmed. In addition, operation including the modem was confirmed as a satellite communication user terminal.

The achievement greatly expands the range of mobility platforms on which the terminal can be deployed, including drones and vehicles. It is expected to support the establishment of communication links in mountainous areas and disaster-affected regions, real-time transmission of location information from various types of mobility, and future applications such as autonomous driving, thereby representing a major step toward the realization of NTN.

Physicists have long wondered whether the fundamental laws of nature contain freely adjustable external “dials.” A researcher at Kyushu University and collaborators have shown, under certain assumptions, that continuous parameters in conformal field theories can be generated by operators within the theory itself. The findings support Einstein’s idea that apparent free parameters in quantum gravity should be explained by dynamical fields rather than chosen externally.