Sperm tails and male infertility: Critical protein revealed by ultrastructure microscope
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 3-Dec-2025 14:11 ET (3-Dec-2025 19:11 GMT/UTC)
Iron is essential for rice plants, and its proper distribution to young leaves and developing grains depends on precise transport through the plant’s nodes. In a recent study, researchers from Japan identified and characterized OsIET1, an iron efflux transporter that directs iron into the vascular structures. Their findings shed light on the mechanisms by which plants distribute iron, paving the way for more resilient crops and strategies to manage iron deficiency.
Researchers at Okayama University have developed a novel photochemical macrolactonization that converts hydroxyaldehydes into macrolactones (ring sizes 7–21) using in-situ generated acyl bromide intermediates under purple LED light. This radical light-driven method bypasses conventional activating agents and opens a versatile, efficient pathway for constructing complex natural product frameworks—a promising advance for drug discovery and macrolide synthesis.
A researcher from the University of Tokyo and a U.S.-based structural engineer developed a new computational form-finding method that could change how architects and engineers design lightweight and free-form structures covering large spaces. The technique specifically helps create gridshells, thin, curved surfaces whose members form a networked grid. The method makes use of NURBS surfaces, a widely used surface representation format in computer-aided design (CAD). It also drastically reduces computation cost — a task that previously took 90 hours on a high-end GPU completes in about 90 minutes on a standard CPU.
Silicon anodes can greatly boost the energy density of all-solid-state batteries, but their large volume changes often cause contact loss with solid electrolytes. Using operando synchrotron X-ray micro- and nano-computed tomography, researchers at Ritsumeikan University directly visualized the 3D evolution of the silicon–electrolyte interface during charge and discharge cycling. They found that even as silicon expands and shrinks, the thin, solid-electrolyte layers remain adhered, preserving partial ion pathways and enabling stable operation.
Kyoto, Japan -- Shisei Tei claims he is clumsy with technology and doesn't even own a smartphone, yet he has found himself thinking a lot about what we call generative AI.
Tei is cautiously optimistic about AI. As a researcher, he uses it to help with analyzing psychiatric data, and outside work it helps him plan personalized hikes. But Tei is concerned that AI will change how we think about death, which he discusses in a chapter he wrote for the book SecondDeath: Experiences of Death Across Technologies.
"Today, I often see how AI reframes grief and remembrance," says Tei. Though he thinks mental health chatbots have the potential to lower barriers to care, maladaptive use of chatbots that reconstruct deceased individuals can distort our perceptions of death and existence.
Rechargeable batteries get a supercharged boost from newly developed RAMOFs that don’t break down in water, which was previously a major problem for this material.