For the first time worldwide, we have achieved remote, real-time control of fusion plasma using a digital twin running on a supercomputer located about 1,000 km away (round-trip network path ~2,000 km).

In magnetic confinement fusion power, sustaining and precisely controlling plasma at temperatures exceeding 100 million ℃ over long durations is essential. Yet “predicting-while-controlling” has been challenging due to model accuracy limits, computation speed, and unresolved physics. Our team has developed a system that applies data assimilation, continuously updating the predictive model with real-time measurements to improve accuracy and using accelerated parallel prediction to determine optimal unrehearsed control actions.

A research team from Kyoto University, the National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST), and the Institute of Statistical Mathematics (ISM), has connected the Large Helical Device (LHD) in Toki, Gifu, Japan to the new “Plasma Simulator” supercomputer in Rokkasho, Aomori, jointly procured by NIFS and QST, via the high-quality, high-bandwidth academic network SINET6. By exclusively using more than 20,000 Central Processing Unit (CPU) cores and minimizing communication latency, the team has realized real-time predictive control of LHD from a remote supercomputer. This approach — linking a large experimental facility and a large computing system over a ~2,000 km network loop — can serve as a foundation for real-time control beyond fusion.

An Osaka Metropolitan University-led research team aimed to identify an effective method for counting the number of teeth according to their condition to predict all-cause mortality.

Plants are quietly absorbing microplastics from soil and air, and those particles can work their way into our food and ecosystems, according to a new review by researchers at Nankai University in China. The study pulls together the latest evidence to show how plastic fragments and fibers enter plants through roots and leaves, how they travel and accumulate inside tissues, and what this means for crop health, soil microbes, and global food security.

As sea levels rise and soils grow saltier, even the iconic Sabal palmetto – the official state tree of Florida also known as the cabbage palm – may be in danger. But a new study in HortScience suggests a simple, widely available amendment could help young palms survive in salty conditions. 

With the advancement of Internet applications, the global demand for broadband satellite communication services is incessantly escalating. Furthermore, there exists an exponential surge in the requisition for the capacity of satellite communication systems. In response to this evolving demand, the domain of satellite communication technology is progressively evolving toward the realm of high-throughput satellite (HTS) communication systems. The typical technical characteristics of HTS are: (a) the satellite adopts multibeam technology for beam overlapping coverage of the service area, which improves the quality of the wireless link while realizing the spatial dimension segmentation; (b) based on this, the system adopts multiple frequency multiplexing to improve the communication capacity of a single satellite; (c) the gateway station is tightly coupled with the user beam clusters are tightly coupled to complete 2-hop communication, which makes multiple gateway stations share the communication resources of the same satellite, forming a spatial isolation of the gateway stations, and once again realizing the frequency multiplexing of the gateway station links. A key requirement for future multibeam broadband satellite communication systems is the ability to flexibly adjust beam capacity according to changes in business distribution, in order to meet time-varying business requirements. Beam hopping technology provides an efficient solution to achieve the efficient use of frequency resources and power resources. At the same time, the use of beam hopping makes the beam hopping of satellite payload need to match the business signals of ground signal stations, bringing about the need for synchronization of beam hopping between satellite and ground.

In a landmark study from the Journal of Sport and Health Science, an international team of researchers has gathered evidence from 27 reviews and 135 studies to provide a first global consensus on the definition and classification of short bouts of accumulated exercise. They expect its implementation to empower populations to avoid sedentary behavior, such as prolonged sitting, and move increasingly often, promoting improvements in public health.

A nationwide, multicenter trial in China compares tegoprazan-based (TACB) and esomeprazole-based (EACB) triple therapy plus bismuth for Helicobacter pylori. TACB has 93.5% eradication in the full analysis set, superior to EACB’s 86.4%, with comparable safety and high compliance.