A Tokyo pediatrician is working to promote "evidence-based medicine" and ensure that medical treatments used in Japan are backed by the highest-quality international research. Rintaro Mori, 44, is co-director of the Japanese branch of the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization that aims to produce ...
Japanese doctors are stepping up efforts to help Asia's developing economies stop using asbestos, sharing knowledge bitterly learned in Japan about the serious and fatal illnesses caused by the material that was used in abundance during the postwar economic boom through the 1970s. Emerging economies ...
Naomi Uemura, a 63-year-old physician who specializes in digestive organs, is credited with conducting the tenacious clinical research that helped two Australian doctors win the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2005. Born in Kitakyushu, Uemura graduated from Hiroshima University and then honed his therapeutic skills ...
Half a century ago, a team of young Japanese IBM engineers built a computerized real-time results service for the Tokyo Olympics, a breakthrough that led to modern-day networks such as ATMs and travel reservation systems. The order came in early 1962, when an executive at ...
Robert Geller, an American seismologist teaching in Japan, has been fighting a lonely battle against what he says is a hopeless national initiative for predicting big earthquakes. "Earthquake probability information announced by the government is quite meaningless," Geller, 62, said at an open seminar held ...
Haruo Miyadera is spearheading a project to use subatomic particles called muons to peer into the damaged reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant. "Finding out what is happening inside the reactors will be the first step toward dismantling them," said the 36-year-old physicist ...
In an effort to solve real-life problems and apply knowledge that would otherwise be purely academic, Japanese mathematicians have begun boosting their ties to industry. Around 20 of them gathered at a "study group" session designed for that purpose at the University of Tokyo's Graduate ...
If robots with artificial intelligence prove they can outperform humans, will most jobs currently undertaken by people be done by robots instead? To find out the answer, Noriko Arai, 51, a mathematician at the National Institute of Informatics, launched the "Can a Robot Get into ...
Hiroyuki Kyushima, an engineer at Hamamatsu Photonics K.K. who helped create a particle detector that enabled physicist Masatoshi Koshiba to win the Nobel Prize in physics in 2002, has developed an ultra-small photomultiplier tube together with his fellow workers. "This is a break-proof, ideal PMT ...
A rash of fires has transformed the incredible forest of Siberia from a vast "sink" that absorbs carbon dioxide and releases oxygen into a cause of global warming. "Suddenly, since 2000, fires have occurred frequently" in the taiga forest in Siberia, said Masami Fukuda, a ...
