Latest News Releases 3 March

How we take actions to balance between openness and security for scientific research appropriately. On March 12, JST holds the symposium aiming to create an opportunity to deepen discussion on efforts necessary to protect research freedom. The event is hybrid, allowing attendees to join on-site or online webinar.

This study found that bean inoculation with Rhizobium alone or in combination with P application, can increase grain yield of the two common bean cultivars. This indicates that recommending these agronomic inputs for use by resource-poor farmers in Ethiopia will be very helpful to increase the local common bean yield. Compared with the Ibbado, Hawassa Dume has a higher yield. Therefore, Hawassa Dume could be recommended for adoption by farmers in combination with the Rhizobium inoculant strain HB-429 and P at 20 kg·ha⁻¹ P in Ethiopia.

The virtual teaching and research section for database courses proposes an open community-based operating model, founded on the core concepts of "openness, dedication, competition, and orderliness." It establishes a hierarchical organizational structure and working group operation mechanism.

A recent review has unveiled an innovative method for monitoring fossil fuel CO₂ emissions using satellite observations of co-emitted NO₂. This approach promises to provide more precise and efficient emission tracking compared to traditional ground-based methods, overcoming significant challenges in distinguishing human-made emissions from natural sources. By capitalizing on the short atmospheric lifespan and high detectability of NO₂, this method enhances the ability to monitor emissions at a variety of scales, from individual power plants to entire nations. This new technique plays a vital role in bolstering global climate change mitigation efforts and ensuring countries meet their commitments under the Paris Agreement.

A groundbreaking primer design tool from the Zhang Liye Laboratory automates the search across entire genomes for pathogen detection, significantly enhancing the speed and accuracy of infectious disease diagnosis

A research team led by Professor Jia Pan and Professor Yifan Evan Peng from the Department of Computer Science and Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering under the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), in collaboration with the researcher at Australian National University, has recently developed a groundbreaking neuromorphic exposure control (NEC) system that revolutionizes machine vision under extreme lighting variations. Published in Nature Communications, this biologically inspired system mimics human peripheral vision to achieve unprecedented speed and robustness in dynamic perception environments.

A team of researchers from the School of Biological Sciences, The University of Hong Kong (HKU), addressed these questions in a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), USA, by compiling information on nearly 15,000 funded projects focused on species conservation. Professor Benoit GUÉNARD, the lead author of the study, noted that, “Our first conclusion is that funding for species conservation research remains extremely limited with only US$ 1.93 billion allocated over 25 years in the projects we assessed.”