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Recently, the ancient art of origami has begun to merge with modern engineering. Origami principles have inspired novel ways of packaging airbags, fashioning heart stents, folding solar sails designed to propel spacecraft, and even collapsible bullet-proof shields. 

Modern research in origami began in 1970 when an astrophysicist named Koryo Miura came up with a simple but elegant fold. Known as the Miura fold, or Miura-ori, he later repurposed the fold as a way to package large, flat membranes for deploying into space. In 1995, a Japanese satellite used the fold to store its solar panels for launch and unfurl them once in orbit.

Today, origami is being used to create strong, rigid panels that can fold themselves in less than a second. These self-folding structures are about the size of a biological cell, which would make them potentially useful for medicine: imagine sending tiny, self-folding robots into the body to attack a virus or a tumor.

With the Imperial era name change, Japan's Foreign Ministry is considering scrapping the use of the era name for calendar years in some of its official documents and switching to the Gregorian calendar, according to sources.

While the ministry will keep using the Japanese era calendar in documents that require consistency with papers of other ministries (including those that are budget-related), it plans to promote the use of the Gregorian calendar for documents without such restrictions.

Recently, a senior Foreign Ministry official said use of the Japanese era calendar may be confusing to other countries. Foreign Minister Taro Kono also pointed to the complexity of calculations needed when converting years between the two era systems. “We’ll make efforts so that there’ll be no mistakes when we go back and forth between the Christian and Japanese era systems,” he added.

Seikatsu Club is a huge food cooperative, founded in 1965 by a group of women in Japan, which has exacting standards on everything from radioactivity levels to the number of additives in food.

Their initial focus was on bringing down the price of milk for households by securing bulk-purchase discounts. Fast-forward five decades and Seikatsu is now a sprawling operation of nearly 400,000 members (90% women) that runs its own milk factory and has food supply agreements with about 200 outside producers. In addition, some of the production is now done by workers collectives that are part of the cooperative.

Distrust in industrial food standards in Japan dates back decades. In 1955, a milk arsenic poisoning case was linked to the deaths of more than 100 children. Minamata disease, discovered in 1956, was connected to the release of mercury in industrial wastewater from a nearby chemical factory. And now the Fukushima power station disaster in 2011 has caused fears of radioactive contamination.

“People were losing trust in food,” says Yuriko Ito, the executive director of Seikatsu Club. Today Seikatsu’s biggest-selling items include milk, eggs and meat, although another favorite is the ketchup. Experts believe the hands-on involvement of members in setting and reviewing the food standards is key to the cooperative’s success.

Much has been made over the years about how mainstream media presents unrealistic beauty standards in the form of photoshopped celebrities or stick-thin fashion models.

Using social media does appear to be correlated with body image concerns. A systematic review of 20 papers published in 2016 found that photo-based activities, like scrolling through Instagram or posting pictures of yourself, were a particular problem when it came to negative thoughts about your body.

In a survey of 227 female university students, women reported that they tend to compare their own appearance negatively with their peer group and with celebrities, but not with family members, while browsing Facebook. The comparison group that had the strongest link to body image concerns was distant peers, or acquaintances.

People generally present a one-sided version of their life online. If you know someone well, you’ll know they’re only showing the best bits – but if they’re an acquaintance, you won’t have any other information to go on.

The Japanese government and the bank of Japan have announced that they will renew the ¥10,000, ¥5,000 and ¥1,000 banknotes in 2024.

The new ¥10,000 note will feature Eiichi Shibusawa, known as the “Father of Japanese Capitalism” on one side and Tokyo Station on the other. Umeko Tsuda, an educator and promoter of female education, will be the face on the ¥5,000 note, while the reverse will have an illustration of wisteria flowers. Finally, the ¥1,000 will feature Shibasaburo Kitasato, who laid the foundation of modern Japanese medicine. The back side of the bill will have "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" from the "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" by artist Hokusai Katsushika.

The new notes will incorporate cutting-edge anti-counterfeiting technologies. Japan will introduce the world’s first 3D hologram technology on bills where the direction of the design will differ depending on the angle it is viewed at.

In addition to the change in the traditional Japanese eras from Heisei to Reiwa, there is an expectation for related demand and hope that this will help revitalize the economy.

The key to inclusion is understanding who your employees really are, particularly those in underrepresented groups. One of the best practices for this is to segment employee engagement survey results by minority groups.

Many organizations conduct employee engagement surveys, but most neglect to segment the data they collect by criteria such as gender, ethnicity, generation, geography, and role in the organization. By only looking at the total numbers, employers miss out on opportunities to identify issues among smaller groups that could be leading to employee turnover, as the views of the majority overpower those of minorities.

In 2015, 52% of the new associate class at global law firm Baker McKenzie were women, but only 23% of the firm’s 1,510 partners were female. To find out what was keeping women from advancing to senior roles, researchers segmented the results of a firm-wide engagement survey to examine responses from women lawyers. Based on that data, they learned that many of the female associates weren't as motivated as their male counterparts to become partner.

A follow-up survey to get a better understanding revealed four things that would make partnership more attractive to women:

1. more flexibility about face time and working hours,
2. better access to high-profile engagements,
3. greater commitment to the firm’s diversity targets, and
4. more women role models.

Those four things became the basis for an action plan that included, for example, a firm-wide flexible work program that promoted remote working. By 2018, the percentage of women promoted to partner had risen to 40%, up from 26% in 2015.

“Ultra-lightweight space blankets have been around for decades, but the key drawback is that the material is static," said Alon Gorodetsky, UCI associate professor of chemical & biomolecular engineering. "We've made a version with changeable properties so you can regulate how much heat is trapped or released."

The researchers took design cues from various species of squids, octopuses and cuttlefish that use their adaptive skin to thrive in aquatic environments.

The skin cells can instantly change from minute points to flattened disks. "We use a similar concept in our work, where we have a layer of these tiny metal 'islands' that border each other," said Erica Leung, a UCI graduate student in chemical & biomolecular engineering.

In an eye-blinkingly brief ceremony at the Imperial Palace, Naruhito, 59, officially succeeded Akihito, 85, an enormously popular monarch who brought the royal family much closer to the people as he emphasized a message of peace in a country haunted by the legacy of war.

Naruhito is taking the throne at a time when Japan faces numerous challenges, including a low birthrate and a declining, aging population. The country is making efforts to open itself to foreign workers, change the country’s brutal, entrenched work culture and reduce gender inequality.

Educated at Oxford University, Naruhito, along with his wife, Masako, a former diplomat with a degree from Harvard, represents a cosmopolitan outlook in an often insular Japan. In his limited public statements, Naruhito has indicated he believes the monarchy should adjust to modernity.

The new era has been named Reiwa.

It was only about 40 years ago that plastic bags became standard at U.S. grocery stores. This also made them standard in sewers, landfills, rivers and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. They clog drains and cause floods, litter landscapes and kill wildlife. The national movement to get rid of them is gaining steam, with more than 240 cities and counties passing laws that ban or tax them since 2007. But these bans may be hurting the environment more than helping it.

According to research by economist Rebecca Taylor, the introduction of plastic bag bans in California in 2016 reduced the state's plastic waste by 40 million pounds per year. But people who used to reuse their shopping bags for other purposes, like picking up dog poop or lining trash bins, still needed bags. "What I found was that sales of garbage bags actually skyrocketed after plastic grocery bags were banned," she says.

Trash bags are thick and use more plastic than typical shopping bags. "So about 30 percent of the plastic that was eliminated by the ban comes back in the form of thicker garbage bags," Taylor says. On top of that, cities that banned plastic bags saw a surge in the use of paper bags, which she estimates resulted in about 80 million pounds of extra paper trash per year.

A bunch of studies find that paper bags are actually worse for the environment. They require cutting down and processing trees, which involves lots of water, toxic chemicals, fuel and heavy machinery. Together with the uptick in plastic trash bags and huge increase of paper, banning plastic shopping bags actually increases greenhouse gas emissions. That said, at least these bans reduce non-biodegradable litter.