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Tokyo, Sept. 10 (Jiji Press)--Since its birth around 4.6 billion years ago, Mercury's radius has shrunk by over 10 kilometers as the inside of the planet cooled down, a team from Japan's Hokkaido University has found. The team's findings were published in the U.S. science journal Geophysical Research Letters on Thursday. Mercury's radius currently stands at some 2,440 km. Observations by...
The rural Japanese town of Hitachiomiya sprawls down the Naka River valley in northwest Ibaraki prefecture, surrounded by lush forests and overlooked by the picturesque Yamizo mountains. Just 140km (87 miles) from Tokyo, its golf courses attract weekend players, while onsen hot spring resorts in the surrounding hills keep local business steady year-round. The local tourism association’s website highlights traditional festivals, campsites, hiking and cycling routes, alongside unique sights –...
Tokyo, Sept. 6 (Jiji Press)--Japan has already entered this year's influenza season in earnest, the second earliest on record. With the start of the new school term, students are having more opportunities to come into contact with each other, and experts are closely watching how the situation will develop. The health ministry is calling on people to take basic infection control measures,...
In all his five decades of living in Hokkaido, Makoto Watanabe cannot recall ever being confronted by a cockroach. But he admits being alarmed by reports that the despised insects are taking advantage of global warming to gain a foothold in a part of Japan where winters were previously considered too hostile for large colonies to emerge. “When I was a university student in Tokyo 30 years ago, I used to see them in my accommodation and I absolutely hated them,” Watanabe told This Week in...
Tokyo, Sept. 6 (Jiji Press)--Japan's emergency bear shooting system was used in a total of 81 cases in 14 of the country's 47 prefectures in the first year after its introduction in September 2025, according to the Environment Ministry. It was used mainly in the Tohoku northeastern and Hokuriku central regions. The emergency culling system allows shooting of bears or wild boars in residenti...
Tokyo, Sept. 4 (Jiji Press)--Japan's Environment Ministry said Friday that it will launch a pilot project under which expert teams will help local governments tackle problems linked to wild bears. The ministry aims to strengthen the response capabilities of local governments with limited expertise and experience in bear countermeasures. It will recruit about 10 prefectural and municipal gov...
Zurich, Sept. 3 (Jiji Press)--A late Japanese researcher won this year's Ig Nobel Prize in medicine on Thursday for an aerodynamic study of how to blow one's nose properly. It is the 20th straight year for a Japanese researcher to receive an Ig Nobel Prize, a spoof of the Nobel Prize that honors humorous but creative research. The medicine prize was given to the late Tokuji Unno, profess...
Tokyo, Sept. 3 (Jiji Press)--University of Tsukuba professor emeritus Hideki Shirakawa, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000 for developing conductive polymers, died of metastatic liver tumor and cancer of unknown primary origin at a hospital in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, eastern Japan, on Aug. 24. He was 90. A Tokyo native, Shirakawa graduated from the science faculty at the To...