Discussion topics

“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.

In the early 1800s in England, football and rugby existed as different variations of the same game. Aristocratic boys came up with the shortened terms “rugger” and “soccer” to differentiate between Rugby Football (from Rugby School, in Warwickshire, England) and Association Football.

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.

The annual Australian Football League Mark of the Year competition is a sporting award that celebrates each season's best "mark." A mark is the action of a player cleanly catching a ball that has been kicked and has traveled more than 15 meters through the air without hitting the ground.

A spectacular mark, also known as a "specky," is a mark in Australian rules football that typically involves a player jumping up on the back of another player.

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.

Takashi Murakami's work on Billie Eilish's new video for "You Should See Me in a Crown" is the latest example of Western music's ongoing love affair with Japanese anime. It’s also exciting to see the art form embraced by Lil Uzi Vert, Soulja Boy and so many other artists in the world of hip-hop.

More and more people are feeling both tired and lonely at work. In analyzing the General Social Survey of 2016, close to 50% of people say they are often or always exhausted due to work.

What’s more, there is a significant correlation between feeling lonely and work exhaustion: the more exhausted people are, the lonelier they feel.

PwC and EY told a panel of British lawmakers they would mirror a change already underway at another Big Four accounting firm, KPMG, in a bid to end a “perception” of conflict between selling audit and consulting work to the same customer.

Consulting is better paid than audit work, raising concerns that an accountant won’t challenge a company’s management properly regarding an audit for fear of losing more lucrative advisory work.

Sex is supposed to be simple, at least at the molecular level. X + X = female and X + Y = male.

But as science looks more closely, it becomes increasingly clear that a pair of chromosomes is not always sufficient to distinguish girl/boy—either from the standpoint of sex (biological traits) or of gender (social identity).

In the cultural realm, this shift in perspective has received a wide embrace, with “nonbinary” definitions of gender—transfeminine, genderqueer—having already entered the vernacular. Less visible are the changes taking place in the biological sciences.

Aril Fools' Day is an annual celebration commemorated on April 1 by playing practical jokes and spreading hoaxes. Here are three of the best of all time.

The Japanese city of Osaka has been selected to host the World Expo in 2025, an event expected to draw millions of visitors and showcase the local economy and culture. The theme for the 2025 World Expo is finding solutions to challenges facing humanity.

Harajuku has become a catwalk for jendaresu-kei (or "genderless style"). Although women who dress in a more stereotypically masculine way may also identify as "genderless," in Japan, the term jendaresu-kei refers to males who are not interested in the typical male dress code of dark suits and dress shoes.

Matching colorfully patterned fabrics and fingernails with "kawaii" (cute) hats and purses, they signal a vibrant new masculine style. But they may also represent wider changes in the way male roles are perceived in Japanese society. 

What if you could live longer just by doing more of what you love to do most?

It's an attractive theory that finds its evidence in Ogimi, a community on the island of Okinawa that's nicknamed the Village of Longevity because its residents have the highest life expectancy in the world. They also largely share a devotion to a Japanese philosophy known as ikigai, a concept that is, at times, used synonymously with purpose, passion, meaning, mission, vocation and drive.

A small cylinder called Le Grand K has defined the kilogram for more than a hundred years.

Le Grand K was forged in 1879 and is held in a locked vault outside Paris—revered and kept under lock and key because its mass, a little over 2 pounds, is the official definition of the kilogram.

If Le Grand K gets heavier or lighter—or absorbs atoms of something from the air—the definition of the kilogram literally changes.

The minister in charge of cybersecurity said he doesn't use computers.

Yoshitaka Sakurada, who just last week was criticized for stumbling over basic questions during Diet deliberations, found himself once again in hot water Wednesday after making it known that he doesn't use computers even though he is a deputy head of the government panel on cybersecurity and is tasked with overseeing policies on such matters.

Think about what you look for when you’re deciding on the perfect travel destination. Is it rich history? Cultural experiences? Lots of delicious food or shopping opportunities? Comfortable and unique places to stay? Or, perhaps, you just want to go somewhere with truly breathtaking views that you can’t get anywhere else in the world.

Guess what? You can find all of this and more in Japan.

The internet today isn’t what Tim Berners-Lee pictured when he invented the World Wide Web nearly three decades ago.

Berners-Lee says the web is “at a tipping point” as it faces threats like market concentration, data breaches, user frustration with ads and privacy, hate speech and so-called “fake news.”

“If you’d asked me 10 years ago, I would have said humanity is going to do a good job with this,” he said. “If we connect all these people together, they are such wonderful people they will get along. I was wrong.”

Japan's Cabinet has approved a draft bill that would allow the entry of more foreign blue-collar workers as the country's rapidly aging population faces labor shortages.

The bill is a major revision of Japan's policy on foreign labor. The country has long resisted accepting foreign workers, except for doctors, teachers and others in highly skilled fields. The proposed legislation would create two new visa categories for foreigners employed in more than a dozen sectors facing labor shortages, such as nursing, farming, construction and services.

An attendant at a popular garden in the heart of Tokyo has cost the facility millions of yen because he was “too frightened” to ask foreign visitors to pay the admission fee.

Every aging society faces distinct challenges. But Japan has been dealing with one it didn’t foresee: senior crime. Complaints and arrests involving elderly people, and women in particular, are taking place at rates above those of any other demographic group. Almost 1 in 5 women in Japanese prisons is a senior. Their crimes are usually minor, with 9 in 10 senior women being convicted of shoplifting.