Call it worm power. Takaaki Hirotsu is trying to harness the power of the nematode worm — a tiny, transparent roundworm that lives in soil or water — to detect all forms of cancer at their earliest stages. The use of nematodes for superearly cancer detection ...
Takeshi Imazu's daily tasks are far from what a typical prefectural official handles. For more than half of the week, he goes out to the Inbanuma marsh of Chiba Prefecture either to capture or study snapping turtles, a freshwater species that threatens local biodiversity. Snapping turtles, ...
Entrepreneur Nobu Okada has set off on a mission never before undertaken in the annals of human history — cleaning up Earth's space junk. Man-made space debris comprises everything from defunct satellites to abandoned launch vehicles and even tiny flecks of paint. This floating junk ...
As a child, Noriko Ishizaka was ashamed of her father's company — a waste disposal firm with towering smoke stacks overlooking a small town in Saitama Prefecture. "People would call him 'the garbage collector' ... and I wasn't proud of that," she recalled. But Ishizaka Sangyo ...
When Daichi Konuma was a Hitotsubashi University student, he and his friends used to talk passionately about a future of building a better world. Whether at an investment bank or at a trading company, they had resolved to help small businesses or to focus ...
Imagine you're a hearing impaired person who wants to hire a sign language interpreter. The process is antiquated and lengthy. You have to send a fax to a local municipal government to make a reservation two weeks in advance, and officials then look for ...
A high school teacher in a black coat enters the classroom. "Good morning," he says to the students before starting his lecture, with his right hand busily scribbling something on a blackboard and his left holding a physics textbook. Then, while holding the chalk and ...
From John F. Kennedy's inaugural address in 1961 to Barack Obama's "Yes We Can" speech in 2008, history has been colored by powerful rhetoric that is never forgotten. But behind the epoch-making speeches have been strategists who construct memorable phrases, coach the speakers' stage actions ...
Japanese green tea, known for its health benefits and centuries-old brewing and serving rituals, has won the hearts and taste buds of people around the world. But with the dramatic aging of its society, Japan is seeing a fall in its tea farmer population that ...
Imagine you are standing on the Grand Canyon Skywalk, a horseshoe-shaped bridge suspended 1,200 meters above the Colorado River. You are likely to get dizzy and freeze up at the thought of venturing out onto the 10-cm thick glass. Nevertheless, you step forward and breathe ...
Before venturing to Bangladesh at the age of 18, Mitsuru Izumo had believed that many people in the impoverished country were dying of starvation. But with an internship at Grameen Bank, a nonprofit organization founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus that offers microloans ...
On weekdays, Daisuke Kuramoto, 36, is just another computer engineer who develops education materials for an e-learning content provider. But once a month, he becomes Qramo, organizer of a computer programming workshop for children. "If you say I am 'teaching' programming, that's incorrect," said Kuramoto, who ...
