Cognitive impairment, including decreased attention and memory, remains one of the most disabling aspects of schizophrenia, affecting social life of patients. However, no effective treatment has yet been established for it. Now, researchers have investigated the effect of adding brexpiprazole on cognitive function in patients with schizophrenia. The findings revealed that patients with schizophrenia receiving adjunctive brexpiprazole showed a meaningful improvement in information processing speed, without worsening psychiatric symptoms.

Researchers at Niigata University used advanced three-dimensional imaging to reveal how amyloid β deposits spread along blood vessels in the human brain in cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA). Analysis of postmortem brain tissue showed that vascular amyloid deposition is most prominent in surface arteries and extends continuously toward deeper vascular branches—a spatial pattern that could not be resolved by conventional two-dimensional pathology— providing new insight into the spatial architecture of amyloid pathology in CAA.

A male fruit fly in a laboratory chamber extends his wings and vibrates them to produce his species' version of a love song. A female fly stays nearby listening. Suddenly, a green light flashes across the chamber for a fraction of a second. The male's song cuts off mid-note and his wings fold. The female, not impressed by the interrupted serenade, walks away. The culprit? An AI system that watched the male begin his courtship dance and shut down his song-producing brain cells. Developed by scientists at Nagoya University and their collaborators from Osaka University and Tohoku University, the AI can watch and recognize animal behaviors and control the specific brain circuits that drive them. Published in Science Advances, the study presents an advanced AI system that can identify which animal performs a behavior in a group and selectively target only that animal’s brain cells during social interactions. 

The 4^th Annual Symposium of Project CHANGE, which is the Kawasaki activity of the national project “COI-NEXT” by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology/Japan Science and Technology Agency, will be held at 1:30 pm – 5:10 pm on March 5 (Japan Standard Time) at the Kawasaki Institute of Industrial Promotion Hall. This event will also be streamed online, so please be sure to watch it.

A study finds that shelterbelts, trees planted as windbreaks, in Japan’s wet farmlands boost edge-dwelling bird population but cut grassland species by about 74%, with numbers rebounding roughly a kilometer away, revealing an overlooked conservation trade-off.

A team from the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, uses a multi-model approach to improve climate modeling. Isotope analysis allows researchers to track the global water cycle and identify changes in atmospheric dynamics in a warming climate. Their simulation data, identification of parameter sensitivity, and discovery of ongoing challenges in understanding the behavior of atmospheric water vapor provide a baseline for better general climate models in the future.

The ways people interact with and view nature speak volumes as to how the Earth is treated, and the severity of environmental concerns rising makes what shapes people’s view of nature a pertinent topic. Understanding how and why people might be motivated to protect nature is no small feat. Researchers have been able to present a study on 745 Japanese participants using three types of nature’s value—intrinsic, relational, and instrumental—to categorize a method to fully appreciate what goes into the construction of a human’s relationship with nature.

While heart rate variability (HRV) is a standard measure of the autonomic nervous system activity, its real-time monitoring is often compromised by inter-patient variability and data contamination from procedural artifacts. Addressing these challenges, researchers from Fujita Health University developed a computational framework for robust and personalized real-time HRV analysis, adapted for clinical applications. The framework integrates each patient’s HRV indices with a mechanism to manually annotate artifact-prone periods, making the analysis accurate and patient-specific.

Rivers are the primary pathways of microplastics and mesoplastics (MMPs) input into the ocean. Most studies have examined MMP concentration in rivers during low-flows, overlooking high-flow or flooding situations, wherein large amounts of plastic can be transported. To address this gap, researchers investigated how MMP concentration changes during floods in four rivers in Japan, offering valuable new insights. The findings show that overlooking high-flow conditions can lead to severe underestimation of annual plastic load.

When running a fever during infection, we often feel chills, which prompt us to take action to warm ourselves, such as turning on a heater or adding layers of clothing. Increased body temperature helps inhibit pathogen growth and boosts immune cell activity. Researchers in Japan identified the neural mechanism behind chills and the instinct to increase body temperature during infection.