Clearing the Radioactive Rubble Heap That Was Fukushima Daiichi, 7 Years On
The water is tainted, the wreckage is dangerous, and disposing of it will be a prolonged, complex and costly process
Stories by Tim Hornyak
Waiting to Reprogram Your Cells? Don't Hold Your Breath
In a rethink of personalized medicine, researchers turn to banks of donor-derived stem cells
Turning Back the Cellular Clock: A Farewell to Embryonic Stem Cells?
Shinya Yamanaka discovered how to revert adult cells to an embryonic state. These induced pluripotent stem cells might soon supplant their embryonic cousins in therapeutic promise
Farming Solar Energy in Space
Shrugging off massive costs, Japan pursues space-based solar arrays
RFID Power
Radio-frequency identification tags label all kinds of inventoried goods and speed commuters through toll plazas. Now tiny RFID components are being developed with a rather different aim: thwarting counterfeiters
Playing It by Ear
A machine-listening system that understands three speakers at once
Microchips with Heart
No batteries needed: Pumps driven by heart cells
Thinking of Child's Play
Brain-machine interface turns robots into gamers
Android Science
Hiroshi Ishiguro makes perhaps the most humanlike robots around--not particularly to serve as societal helpers but to tell us something about ourselves
The Biggest Dig
Japan builds a ship to drill to the earth's mantle
