Latest news with #UniversityOfOsaka
NHK
29-05-2025
- Politics
- NHK
Japanese university to accept researchers affected by Trump's policies
The University of Osaka in western Japan has announced that it will accept up to about 100 US-based researchers, regardless of nationality. The move comes in response to restrictive academic policies under President Donald Trump's administration. The administration's measures include banning Harvard University from enrolling international students. The University of Osaka announced the plan on Wednesday, saying it will allocate a budget of about 4 to 7 million dollars for the program. The university provided details at a news conference on Thursday. It said it will begin accepting applications within three months. Eligible candidates are postdoctoral researchers working at US universities who have faced research funding cuts or dismissal since the start of the Trump administration. They will be employed at the university's Graduate School of Medicine for one year. There will be no restrictions on the field of expertise. The school will assign them to suitable laboratories based on their preferences. Dean Ishii Masaru of the graduate school expressed hope that recruiting talented researchers from different countries will contribute to the advancement of the university and science in Japan. The University of Osaka is also considering measures to assist international students who now face difficulties continuing their studies in the US. The support may include tuition waivers and assistance with travel-related procedures.
Japan Times
26-05-2025
- Health
- Japan Times
Study links poor chewing to higher obesity risk in children
Children who chew poorly and eat quickly are significantly more likely to be obese, according to a study by researchers at the University of Osaka's Graduate School of Dentistry. The study, which surveyed more than 1,400 fourth-grade students, is among the first to demonstrate a clear link between eating behavior and obesity risk in children specifically. The findings were published in an international medical journal in March. The research team, including professor Kazunori Ikebe, assessed the chewing ability of 1,403 elementary school students in the city of Osaka during fiscal 2023. Participants were asked to chew a specially designed piece of gum, with researchers analyzing the color mixing and saliva output to gauge masticatory performance. The students also completed a questionnaire on their eating habits, which was then analyzed against their obesity levels. The study found that 167 children, or about 12% of the total, were classified as obese. Researchers calculated the odds ratios to assess risk: children with low chewing ability were 1.5 times more likely to be obese compared with their peers. Those who ate quickly had a 1.73 times greater risk, and those who routinely stuffed their mouths while eating had a 1.29 times higher likelihood. Notably, children who both ate quickly and had poor chewing ability showed a strong correlation with obesity across both sexes. Among boys, the odds of being obese were three times higher than those of other students. 'Both chewing ability and eating behavior are clearly linked to childhood obesity,' Ikebe said. 'Going forward, we'd like to monitor how these factors evolve as children grow.' Translated by The Japan Times
Gizmodo
21-05-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
Scientists Just Caught Lightning Firing Off a Gamma-Ray Blast
For the first time, scientists have caught lightning in the act of unleashing a powerful burst of gamma radiation known as a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF). Researchers at the University of Osaka led the work—an intimate look at one of the most powerful and mesmerizing natural phenomena on our planet. The work also marks a step forward in the quest to understand how thunderstorms manage to pump out radiation we generally associate with the universe's most extreme objects: black holes and neutron stars. The team's study describing the observation was published today in Science Advances. Using a cutting-edge multi-sensor system in Kanazawa City, Japan, the team observed a lightning discharge split between two paths—one descending from a thundercloud, the other arcing up from a ground-based transmission tower. The scientists found that a gamma flash occurred just 31 microseconds before the two discharges met in the air. 'Most TGFs have been detected by satellites, but spaceborne observations can provide limited information,' said lead author Yuuki Wada, a researcher at the University of Osaka, in an email to Gizmodo. 'In this research, we performed a ground-based observation to see TGFs in detail.' TGFs were first detected from space in the 1990s, but despite more than two decades of research, their exact origin has remained elusive. Last year, a pair of papers in Nature revealed gamma-ray 'glows' and flickering flashes during tropical thunderstorms—radiation that scientists recorded by flying a retrofitted spy plane directly into storm systems. That research hinted at a wider family of radiation events lurking inside thunderclouds, with TGFs representing some of the briefest and most intense bursts. While those plane-based observations revealed where and when TGFs occur, the Osaka team's setup reveals the conditions in which they form. The gamma burst in this case appeared just before the two lightning leaders collided, indicating that a supercharged electric field accelerated electrons to near light speed, producing the energetic event. 'The recent Nature papers are based on airborne observations,' Wada said. 'They are also very interesting, but ground-based observations can be achieved much less expensively.' And unlike the weaker 'flickering gamma-ray flashes' recently discovered in tropical skies, this TGF was tightly synchronized with a lightning strike. While the previous papers provided a sweeping overview of how many gamma-ray events occur in a given tropical thunderstorm, the recent paper scrutinized one particular event to understand how lightning produces enough energy to generate gamma rays. 'The multi-sensor observations performed here are a world-first; although some mysteries remain, this technique has brought us closer to understanding the mechanism of these fascinating radiation bursts,' said co-author Harufumi Tsuchiya, a researcher at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, in a University of Osaka release. Studying TGFs could help illuminate one of the most remarkable and powerful natural phenomena in our skies—so intense it was once attributed to the gods. The recent study shows that there's more to lightning than meets the eye—its might produces radiation associated with some of the universe's most powerful explosions.
