Stories by Tim Hornyak

Japan’s LignoSat will test wood’s resilience in space and could lead to a new era of more sustainable, less polluting satellites

Some Japanese researchers feel that AI systems trained on foreign languages cannot grasp the intricacies of Japanese language and culture

Clusters of decentralized units could be used in search and rescue operations or drug delivery

Mice that lack these genes do not engage in rapid eye movement sleep

Researchers are intent on decoding body-brain nerve signals to diagnose ailments

The water is tainted, the wreckage is dangerous, and disposing of it will be a prolonged, complex and costly process

In a rethink of personalized medicine, researchers turn to banks of donor-derived 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

Shrugging off massive costs, Japan pursues space-based solar arrays

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

A machine-listening system that understands three speakers at once

No batteries needed: Pumps driven by heart cells

Brain-machine interface turns robots into gamers

Hiroshi Ishiguro makes perhaps the most humanlike robots around--not particularly to serve as societal helpers but to tell us something about ourselves

Japan builds a ship to drill to the earth's mantle