Obesity prevention strategies often focus on diet, but eating behaviors also play a key role. In a recent study, researchers from Japan investigated factors influencing meal duration, including sex differences, chewing patterns, and rhythmic cues. Their findings suggest that eating more slowly—by increasing chews per bite or using slow rhythmic cues—may help reduce food intake. These insights could inform practical, low-cost obesity prevention strategies by promoting slower eating habits in daily life.

Enzymes originally evolved in high-temperature environments and later adapted to lower temperatures as Earth cooled. Scientists from Waseda University and RIKEN, Japan, discovered that a key shift in enzyme function occurred over evolutionary time due to amino acid changes distant from the active site. These mutations lowered activation energy, enhancing catalytic efficiency at low temperatures. Their findings highlight how global cooling events influenced enzyme evolution.

Despite decades of research, the structural and functional brain abnormalities in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) remain unclear. Now, researchers from Japan have used advanced neuroimaging to identify white matter differences linked to autism symptoms. Alterations in the left hemisphere were associated with repetitive behaviors and communication difficulties. These findings could lead to more objective diagnostic tools and potential therapeutic strategies, improving early detection and intervention for children with ASD.

In vertebrate retinas, specialized photoreceptors responsible for color vision (cone cells) arrange themselves in patterns known as the “cone mosaic”. Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have discovered that a protein called Dscamb acts as a "self-avoidance enforcer" for color-detecting cells in the retinas of zebrafish, ensuring they maintain perfect spacing for optimal vision. Their findings have been published in Nature Communications. 

Imagine the world’s oceans with their beautiful blue color. Now, imagine that the same oceans were green. This is the intriguing possibility suggested by new research from Nagoya University in Japan. A research group has found evidence that cyanobacteria, important bacteria in the evolutionary process, flourished in green seas. Their findings not only tell us about the history of our planet but also suggest a new way to look for alien life on other planets.

The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) has revealed, through fMRI-based brain activity analysis, that multiple regions in the human cerebral cortex flexibly represent numerical quantity. This finding comes from research by HAYASHI Masamichi (Researcher (Tenure-Track)) at Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet), part of NICT’s Advanced ICT Research Institute, in collaboration with the University of Tokyo’s graduate student KIDO Teruaki (NICT cooperative visiting researcher), and Prof. YOTSUMOTO Yuko.

Although certain brain areas are known to respond to numerical quantity, this study expands that understanding by showing that some regions respond to relative quantity (e.g., “extra-small,” “small,” “large,” and “extra-large”) rather than absolute quantity (i.e., specific quantity). Moreover, these context-dependent, relative representations become more pronounced along the pathway from the parietal to the frontal lobe.

These results highlight the flexible nature of numerical quantity processing in the brain, and they are expected to advance our understanding of how the brain handles other types of “magnitude” concepts, including time and size.

The Super-Kamiokande and Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) Collaborations have produced a first joint analysis of their data.