Have you ever felt awkward staring into a person's eyes while holding up a conversation? It turns out that there is a good scientific reason why some of us struggle with this. Research tells us that staring while trying to come up with the right words actually uses the same mental resources as sustaining eye contact.

Scientists from Kyoto University in Japan put this to the test in 2016 by having 26 volunteers play word association games while staring at computer-generated faces. When making eye contact, the participants found it harder to come up with links between words, suggesting that there is interference between these processes.

The volunteers were tested while looking at both animations of faces making eye contact and animations of fac ...

The periodic table has been given four new elements, changing one of science’s most fundamental pieces of knowledge. Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 will now be added to the table’s seventh row and make it complete, after they were verified by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry on December 30th. The new elements were discovered by team from Japan, Russia and the USA, who will all get to name their own new elements.

All of the four new admissions are man-made. The super-heavy elements are created by shoving lighter nuclei into each other and are found in the radioactive decay - which only exists for a tiny fraction of a second before they decay into other elements.

The elements have been worked on since at least 2004, when st ...

Cherry blossom stones are entirely natural, containing complex mineral deposits that look just like gold and pink flowers when they're broken in half. And believe it or not, these incredibly rare stones are only found in one place on Earth - Japan.

The Eshima Ohashi bridge in Japan has a 6.1% grade ramp up! The bridge is also the third largest ridge bridge in the world and stretches about a mile long with a height of about 144 feet.

A restaurant in Japan has created a new dish where the squid comes “back to life” and “dances” on your plate. The dish is called Odori don. Basically the dish is a rice bowl topped with a whole fresh squid (minus the head). When soy sauce is poured on the squid, a chemical reaction occurs that causes the squid’s tentacles to squirm around in the bowl, making the squid appear as if it is dancing a jig!

The International Court of Justice has just ruled Japan's whaling program illegal and not for scientific purposes. The ruling of this case, which was brought against Japan by Australia, means Japan must cease all special permits and refrain from issuing any more.

Japanese farmer, Hiroichi Kimura, has perfected growing the heart-shaped watermelon.

A promising new drug called baloxavir marboxil (Xofluza) developed in Japan has been shown to stop the flu virus from spreading 24 hours after intake.

The drug interferes with influenza A and influenza B's main replication process instead of inhibiting the neuraminidase enzyme, as accomplished by previous drugs such as oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and zanamivir (Relenza). As shown in the illustration, viral neuraminidase sits on the surface of influenza viruses and enables it to be released once reproduced within the infected host cell.

Xofluza accomplishes its mode of action by inhibiting the cap-dependent endonuclease activity of the viral polymerase. It achieves this by inhibiting the process known as cap snatching, which is a mechanism expl ...