Tohoku University researchers found that stimulating the vagus nerve after each practice session gave mice stronger eye-movement learning on later days. The study adds brain blood vessels to the routes by which the stimulation might act, though so far that link rests only on a correlation.
Reality
- Evidence40
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives45
- Confidence40
Japanese chemists say lattice spacing, with cutoffs at 14.62 and 14.72 angstroms, sorts gold-alloy magnetism better than electron count. That gives chemists looking for new magnetic quasicrystals one measurable target, as long as a new alloy's spacing can be predicted from its composition.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence62
Tohoku University researchers and colleagues modelled early Mars's formaldehyde rain, putting about 10 times the global average on Tharsis and Elysium. The prediction links where a raw material for sugars and amino acids landed to the planet's ancient water cycle.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence50
Tohoku and Meijo researchers report a 110% rise in flood-exposed settlement area in Japan's Marumori and blame misplaced trust in levees. Their Meiji-era terrain model shows what levees do to floodwater more firmly than it shows why people built near them.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence45
Tohoku University researchers imaging mice saw brain blood volume start rising about 50 seconds before REM sleep, yet neuronal ATP fell once REM began. The team takes this to mean dreaming uses energy faster than it arrives, though slower ATP production would look the same.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives35
- Confidence50
Researchers at Tohoku University grew spinel iron oxide nanoparticles from iron powder and water under ultrasound alone. The most informative comparison in the paper is the control run without ultrasound.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives45
- Confidence58
A Tohoku University-led team used the XRISM satellite to read iron emission lines around the quasar H1821+643, and measured turbulent hot gas spanning about 300,000 light-years with roughly 100 times the energy earlier estimates allowed.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+28
- Incentives58
- Confidence55
Kyocera and Tohoku University report 13.6 decibels of isolation on a silicon waveguide, roughly a 95 percent cut in reflected light, from garnet crystallised by a laser aimed at one small patch. Lower loss and mass production are still on their list.
Reality
- Evidence48
- Adoption8
- Hype gap+28
- Incentives58
- Confidence55
Conventional X-ray cannot always resolve what sits beneath a multilayer device, so Rigaku and Tohoku have opened an institute in Sendai where the first three years go to soft X-ray methods and to the people who read the data.
Reality
- Evidence30
- Adoption14
- Hype gap+35
- Incentives70
- Confidence45
A Tohoku and Queen Mary team ran acetylene over cerium oxide and grew graphene-based carbon at 300C, where the catalyst's own oxygen loss does the work and the furnace setpoint decides which of three materials comes out.
Reality
- Evidence57
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+28
- Incentives71
- Confidence54