University of Tokyo

DNA is a promising data storage medium, but it’s difficult to retrieve and manipulate data written to it. Now a team has developed “chemical neurons” that can conduct calculations on data stored in DNA and read back the answers easily.

The ability to pickup the beat in a song and predict its timing, even shaking your hips to it if you’re that adept on the dance floor, is thought to be skill unique to humans, but new research suggests it may well extend to the animal kingdom.

When crossing the road in front of a car, pedestrians should make eye contact with the driver, to make sure they've been seen. However, what if the car has no driver? New research suggests that the vehicle should then have eyes of its own.

Scientists studying the biology of the tardigrade have filled in important new details around how the tiny aquatic creature can survive the harshest of conditions, highlighting a newfound mechanism that kicks into gear as dehydration sets in.

Using their sonar system, toothed whales are able to zero in on prey in the pitch black conditions of the deep sea. Seals lack such a system, but still catch prey in the same conditions. New research now shows how their whiskers allow them to do so.

We've been hearing a lot about synthetic skins made for robotic hands, which would give the devices human-like qualities. Scientists in Japan have gone a step further, by covering a robotic finger in a self-healing skin made from live human cells.

A new type of desalination membrane uses a series of nanoscale tubes lined with a Teflon-inspired material that repels salts while allowing water to flow through with little friction. The team says it's fast, and requires little pressure and energy.

The movements of the Sun, Moon and stars have long been used to keep track of time, and now engineers from the University of Tokyo have proposed a new way to use the cosmos to precisely track time, using showers of particles from cosmic rays.

Red wine and chocolate are notorious for staining clothes, thanks to the tannic acid that they contain. Scientists at the University of Tokyo have now used that acid in a textile coating which keeps clothes from stinking, and that doesn't wash out.

Concrete is the most widely used building material in the world, but it comes at a huge environmental cost. Engineers in Japan have developed a new technique to make concrete by recycling waste concrete and combining it with captured carbon dioxide.

Widespread wireless charging could one day keep our devices juiced up indefinitely. A new breakthrough has been made in that direction, as researchers in Japan have developed a system that can turn a whole room into a wireless charger.

Japanese researchers have developed a new type of cholera vaccine by genetically modifying rice to carry a non-toxic cholera antigen. The vaccine needs no refrigeration with the rice simply ground into a powder, mixed with water and consumed.