Chemical-free pesticides and integrated pest management are the need of the hour to limit the damage to the environment while improving food productivity. In a new study, researchers from Japan have turned their attention to aromatic bush basil plants to contain agricultural pests. They found that the volatile organic compounds emitted from bush basil could activate plant defense-related genes in the leaves of common bean plants cultivated closer to bush basil.

Wireless power transfer (WPT) systems deliver electricity without cables but often struggle with voltage stability when loads change. In this study, researchers developed a machine learning-based design method that uses numerical optimization to achieve load-independent operation. Their approach ensures stable output voltage (fluctuations under 5%) and high efficiency (86.7%) under varying loads. This breakthrough simplifies WPT design and could help create more practical, reliable wireless power systems for a wide range of applications.

A joint research team led by Professor Eijiro Miyako of the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), in collaboration with Daiichi Sankyo Co., Ltd. and University of Tsukuba, has developed a groundbreaking immune-independent bacterial cancer therapy using a novel microbial consortium called AUN.

Researchers from Japan successfully parallelized both the backward narrowing and transition subsumption steps in the powerful analyzer Maude-NPA for cryptographic protocol analysis

A joint research team from Japan has observed "heavy fermions," electrons with dramatically enhanced mass, exhibiting quantum entanglement governed by the Planckian time – the fundamental unit of time in quantum mechanics. This discovery opens up exciting possibilities for harnessing this phenomenon in solid-state materials to develop a new type of quantum computer.

Researchers at Tohoku University developed a method that uses an abundant, renewable biomass to ultimately create environmentally-friendly fuels.

In Indonesia, a research team from University of Tsukuba and other institutions studied genetic diversity and structure using both natural populations and plantations of teak, a valuable tree species utilized for furniture and various other applications. The results indicated a strong correlation between genetic diversity and temperature. In addition, the team assessed the adaptability of teak populations ranging from India to Indochina in relation to climate change and found that populations in southern India exhibit high adaptability.

A new empirical study conducted in collaboration with University of Tsukuba and other institutions revealed that over the past 50 years, bird species that expanded their populations on the mainland have colonized 10 islands in the Izu Islands. However, bird taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity has declined on nearly all of these islands. On four islands where predators—Japanese weasels—were introduced, the degradation in bird communities was particularly pronounced. This degradation may have spread throughout the Izu Islands owing to reduced bird species populations that move between the islands.

Astronomers have observed an explosion in space that is pushing back against and influencing the baby star which triggered the explosion in the first place. If explosions like this one are common around young stars, then the young stars and their planets are exposed to a harsher environment than previously thought.

Gram-negative bacteria are highly resistant to antibiotics due to their robust outer membrane (OM), which is built and maintained by specialized molecular machinery. In a recent study, researchers from Japan uncovered how a small protein called LptM stabilizes the LptDE complex, which is essential for proper OM function. Their structural and biochemical analyses revealed how LptM fine-tunes the structure of LptDE during maturation, offering key insights that may support future antibiotics targeting this complex.