Rowan Hooper has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Sheffield University, UK, and he worked as an insect biologist in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, for five years before spending a two-year period at The Japan Times in Tokyo. He is now news editor for New Scientist magazine, based in London.
For Rowan Hooper's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
It’s the most celebrated and notorious fish in the world, certainly in culinary circles. Now the puffer fish — one of Japan’s most enigmatic creatures — meets some of biology’s deepest questions: Why did sex evolve? Why are there two sexes? Why is the ...
Have you ever woken up but been unable to move; felt a powerful pressure holding you down, gripping you tight? Haruki Murakami has, and he describes it like this: “I was having a repulsive dream — a dark, slimy dream. … After I awoke, ...
It was hardly the result the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) hoped for, or expected. In a survey of 1,200 Japanese people across the country, conducted in October 2012 by the Nippon Research Center, more people supported the hunting of whales than opposed ...
At age 56, Toshinobu Horiuchi was a desperate man. He had suffered kidney failure and needed a transplant. As a doctor, based in Tokyo, he knew better than most that he faced a long wait. In Japan, nearly 13,000 people, according to the Japan ...
It’s easy to take for granted the epic scale of what some scientists are attempting these days. When the news broke a couple of weeks ago that Japanese scientists had turned normal cells from a mouse into eggs, and then fertilized them and seen ...
In this month’s column I am going to claim an audacious link with that great “god of manga,” Osamu Tezuka. Though he is most famous for the nuclear-powered, peace-loving robot child he named Tetsuwan Atomu (known to English-speaking fans as Astro Boy) — a ...
I’ll preface this column by admitting that it is fairly common, among journalists on the science and health beats, that after they personally reproduce they experience a burning desire to write about the science of childbirth. Seasoned editors know to expect that postnatal reporters ...
I like to think of myself as a rational human being most of the time, but I have to suppress a shudder if someone opens an umbrella indoors, and I’d probably comment if a black cat crossed my path. Most people are like this, ...
Where is Japan’s equivalent of Elon Musk? Where’s the young entrepreneur with a huge bank balance and dreams to match? Where is that someone raised in these isles on sci-fi manga and space movies who wants to make human travel in space a reality? ...
Before March last year, if you’d asked a child in Japan about nuclear radiation you would probably have been told about Godzilla, the monster powered by mutations caused by radiation, or Tetsuwan Atomu, aka the nuclear-powered robot Astro Boy. Not any more. As Japan ...
