Japan

Heatherwick Studio has completed a new district in Tokyo. Named Azabudai Hills, it showcases the firm's penchant for inserting lush greenery into its projects and is defined by complex dramatically curving latticed forms.

The Japanese have a history of producing outside-the-box ideas to help people grab a few z's, but even for that part of the world the Giraffenap is an oddity. It allows office workers to literally sleep on the job in an upright standing position.

It was second time lucky for Japan as it successfully launched its first lunar lander on September 6 at 23:42 GMT atop a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIA rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center 25 miles (40 km) south of Kyushu.

An intriguing new glue can basically be switched on and off on demand. The adhesive sticks together when hit with one wavelength of light, and breaks apart with another, allowing it to be removed and reused easily – potentially, even underwater.

More than 12 years after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that cost Japan 20,000 lives, the IAEA has formally approved Japan's plan to release treated radioactive water from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station into the sea.

Japanese company PowerX is moving ahead with its strange plan to build a "mobile power station" in the form of a 140-meter (460-ft) electric "battery tanker," which will carry 241 megawatt-hours of renewable energy across the sea over short distances.

Beer from a can just ain't the same as beer from a tap, and a lot of it's about the foam. The Japanese take their beer foam pretty seriously, it would seem, and a design team reckons it's worked out how to deliver the perfect pour using an extra tab.

Whether they’re hacking the brains of bugs or mining gold, fungi are craftier than we give them credit for. Now researchers in Japan have studied how forest mushrooms communicate with each other, and found that they're mostly chatty when it rains.

Japan's attempt to put a privately-owned spacecraft on the Moon appears to have ended in failure. Scheduled to land at 16:40 GMT, the Hakuto-R lander lost contact with Mission Control in Nihonbashi, Tokyo shortly before the planned touchdown.

The next World Expo fair won't begin until 2025, but initial architectural designs are already being revealed. This attractive example will consist of a top-heavy spiraling structure that pays homage to the Czech Republic's glassmaking tradition.

Japan may soon join a very exclusive club as its privately-led Hakuto-R Mission 1 lunar lander went into orbit around the Moon on March 21 at 10:24 JST after completing a controlled main engine burn in anticipation of a landing attempt in late April.

Northrop Grumman and Tokyo-based IHI Corporation are teaming up to develop small, highly maneuverable Space Domain Awareness (SDA) satellites for Japan to protect commercial satellites from potentially hostile spacecraft.