Nissan is pulling the plug on its internal combustion engine development, except for the United States. Ars Technica reports: According to Nikkei Asia, the Japanese automaker has looked at the likely next set of European emissions rules and has decided it would be too expensive to design a new generation of engines that comply. Nissan is also not planning on any new internal combustion engines for Japan or China, although it will apparently keep refining existing engines and continue to work on hybrid powertrains. However, this new policy isn't a global one -- it doesn't apply to the US. That's because here, the automaker expects continuing demand for internal combustion engines, particularly in pickup trucks. If Nikkei Asia's reporting is correct, Nissan is just making explicit the fact that electrification of light passenger vehicles is going to be much more rapid in regions where governments create strong policy incentives.

Toshiba will spend roughly 100 billion yen ($873 million) to build a power semiconductor fabrication facility in Japan, with production expected to begin by March 2025, Nikkei has learned. From the report: The new plant will be built on the grounds of Kaga Toshiba Electronics, a chipmaking subsidiary in Ishikawa Prefecture. Toshiba aims to meet the rise in demand for power chips -- used in automobiles, servers and industrial equipment -- that save energy and contribute to lower carbon emissions. All of the production equipment will be compatible with large 300 mm wafers. Compared with a 200 mm wafer conventionally used for power chips, one 300 mm wafer can produce more chips and boost production efficiency. Kaga Toshiba is also installing a 300 mm wafer production line at one of its existing buildings. The line is expected to begin operation between October 2022 and March 2023. Toshiba's investment for these endeavors totals around 130 billion yen. The 300 mm production lines to be installed in the old and new buildings will more than double the Japanese group's power-chip production capacity.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Quantum computing is still rare enough that merely installing a system in a country is a breakthrough, and IBM is taking advantage of that novelty. The company has forged a partnership with the Canadian province of Quebec to install what it says is Canada's first universal quantum computer. The five-year deal will see IBM install a Quantum System One as part of a Quebec-IBM Discovery Accelerator project tackling scientific and commercial challenges. The team-up will see IBM and the Quebec government foster microelectronics work, including progress in chip packaging thanks to an existing IBM facility in the province. The two also plan to show how quantum and classical computers can work together to address scientific challenges, and expect quantum-powered AI to help discover new medicines and materials. IBM didn't say exactly when it would install the quantum computer. However, it will be just the fifth Quantum One installation planned by 2023 following similar partnerships in Germany, Japan, South Korea and the US. Canada is joining a relatively exclusive club, then.

There may still be cabinets in rows with flashing lights and electronic sounds — but Polygon reports a historic change in the world of videogame arcades: Even though arcades all over the world have been in a steady decline over the past 20 years, owing to the ubiquity of console and PC gaming, they've kept a fairly major place in Japan's gaming culture. However, in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, even Japan's arcades started to falter. In late 2020 Sega sold 85% of its shares in the company's arcades, which are run by the Sega Entertainment division, to Genda. Now, as new variants of COVID-19 crop up and the arcade business continues to struggle, Sega has sold the remaining shares to Genda as well, according to Eurogamer and Tojodojo.

Sega's arcades will be renamed GiGO throughout Japan, according to a tweet from Genda chief executive Takashi Kataoka.
"It's worth noting that although Sega's Entertainment business ran its arcade locations, the company manufactured and sold arcade machines themselves separately and will likely continue to do so," reports Video Games Chronicle.

And "While it is sad to see an era of Sega's history come to an end, this doesn't mean Sega will stop making actual arcade games," notes the Metro, which points out that Sega "has continued to supply arcades with new games right up to the present day."

But Syfy Wire notes the news comes "after a remarkable 56 years maintaining a coin-operated gaming presence from its native Japan." In memory Eurogamer shared it editor-in-chief's posts about visiting Tokyo's iconic arcade and anime district Akihabara.

Twitter revealed on Tuesday that governments' requests for content to be removed from the platform hit a record high in the first six months of 2021. The Hill reports: Governments made 43,387 legal demands for content to be pulled down from 196,878 accounts between January and the end of June. Twitter's latest transparency report showed that 95 percent of the requests came from Japan, Russia, Turkey, India and South Korea. The platform "withheld" access to content or required accounts to take down posts in response to 54 percent of the demands. Twitter's transparency report also showed that government requests to preserve account information fell four percent compared to the previous reporting period, the last six months of 2020. The United States accounted for 57 percent of preservation requests.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: When Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, a mostly submerged volcanic cauldron in the South Pacific Ocean, exploded on January 15, it unleashed a blast perhaps as powerful as the world's biggest nuclear bomb, and drove tsunami waves that crashed into Pacific shorelines. But 3 hours or so before their arrival in Japan, researchers detected the waves of another small tsunami. Even stranger, tiny tsunami waves just 10 centimeters high were detected around the same time in the Caribbean Sea, which is in an entirely different ocean basin. What was going on?

Researchers say there is only one reasonable explanation: The explosion's staggeringly powerful shock wave, screaming around the world close to the speed of sound, drove tsunamis of its own in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It's the first time a volcanic shock wave has been seen creating its own tsunamis, says Greg Dusek, a physical oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who documented the phenomenon using a combination of tide and pressure gauges around the world. But, "It's almost certainly happened in the past," says Mark Boslough, a physicist at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. The discovery suggests the shock waves generated by explosive eruptions in Earth's history, and by other violent cataclysms, like the airbursts of comets or asteroids colliding with the planet's atmosphere, may have also created transoceanic tsunamis, perhaps with considerably bigger waves.

nickwinlund77 shares a report from SciTechDaily: UNSW Sydney-led research paves the way for large silicon-based quantum processors for real-world manufacturing and application. Australian researchers have proven that near error-free quantum computing is possible, paving the way to build silicon-based quantum devices compatible with current semiconductor manufacturing technology. [...] [The researcher's] paper is one of three published today in Nature that independently confirm that robust, reliable quantum computing in silicon is now a reality. This breakthrough is featured on the front cover of the journal.

[Professor Andrea Morello of UNSW, who led the work] et al achieved 1-qubit operation fidelities up to 99.95 percent, and 2-qubit fidelity of 99.37 percent with a three-qubit system comprising an electron and two phosphorous atoms, introduced in silicon via ion implantation. A Delft team in the Netherlands led by Lieven Vandersypen achieved 99.87 percent 1-qubit and 99.65 percent 2-qubit fidelities using electron spins in quantum dots formed in a stack of silicon and silicon-germanium alloy (Si/SiGe). A RIKEN team in Japan led by Seigo Tarucha similarly achieved 99.84 percent 1-qubit and 99.51 percent 2-qubit fidelities in a two-electron system using Si/SiGe quantum dots.

The UNSW and Delft teams certified the performance of their quantum processors using a sophisticated method called gate set tomography, developed at Sandia National Laboratories in the U.S. and made openly available to the research community. Morello had previously demonstrated that he could preserve quantum information in silicon for 35 seconds, due to the extreme isolation of nuclear spins from their environment. But the trade-off was that isolating the qubits made it seemingly impossible for them to interact with each other, as necessary to perform actual computations. Today's paper describes how his team overcame this problem by using an electron encompassing two nuclei of phosphorus atoms. The three papers from the UNSW team, Delft team and RIKEN group in Tokyo can be found at their respective links.

According to NASA researchers, the power of a massive volcanic eruption that took place on Saturday near the island nation of Tonga was equivalent to around 10 megatons of TNT. "That means the explosive force was more than 500 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II," reports NPR. From the report: The blast was heard as far away as Alaska and was probably one of the loudest events to occur on Earth in over a century, according to Michael Poland, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. "This might be the loudest eruption since [the eruption of the Indonesian volcano] Krakatau in 1883," Poland says. That massive 19th-century eruption killed thousands and released so much ash that it cast much of the region into darkness.

But for all its explosive force, the eruption itself was actually relatively small, according to Poland, of the U.S. Geological Survey. Unlike the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which spewed ash and smoke for hours, the events at Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai lasted less than 60 minutes. He does not expect that the eruption will cause any short-term changes to Earth's climate, the way other large eruptions have in the past. In fact, Poland says, the real mystery is how such a relatively small eruption could create such a big bang and tsunami.

To say that Big Tech controls the internet might seem like an exaggeration. Increasingly, in at least one sense, it's literally true. From a report: The internet can seem intangible, a post-physical environment where things like viral posts, virtual goods and metaverse concerts just sort of happen. But creating that illusion requires a truly gargantuan -- and quickly-growing -- web of physical connections. Fiber-optic cable, which carries 95% of the world's international internet traffic, links up pretty much all of the world's data centers, those vast server warehouses where the computing happens that transforms all those 1s and 0s into our experience of the internet. Where those fiber-optic connections link up countries across the oceans, they consist almost entirely of cables running underwater -- some 1.3 million kilometers (or more than 800,000 miles) of bundled glass threads that make up the actual, physical international internet. And until recently, the overwhelming majority of the undersea fiber-optic cable being installed was controlled and used by telecommunications companies and governments. Today, that's no longer the case.

In less than a decade, four tech giants -- Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, Meta (formerly Facebook ) and Amazon -- have become by far the dominant users of undersea-cable capacity. Before 2012, the share of the world's undersea fiber-optic capacity being used by those companies was less than 10%. Today, that figure is about 66%. And these four are just getting started, say analysts, submarine cable engineers and the companies themselves. In the next three years, they are on track to become primary financiers and owners of the web of undersea internet cables connecting the richest and most bandwidth-hungry countries on the shores of both the Atlantic and the Pacific, according to subsea cable analysis firm TeleGeography. By 2024, the four are projected to collectively have an ownership stake in more than 30 long-distance undersea cables, each up to thousands of miles long, connecting every continent on the globe save Antarctica. In 2010, these companies had an ownership stake in only one such cable -- the Unity cable partly owned by Google, connecting Japan and the U.S.

Yahoo Japan is telling its 8,000 employees they can work anywhere in the country -- and even be flown into work when the job requires it -- bucking the trend of companies looking to return workers to offices in the third year of the coronavirus pandemic. The Japan Times reports: The program takes effect April 1 and allows employees to commute by plane, which wasn't previously an option, the company said in a statement Wednesday. While Yahoo is best known for its internet portal in Japan, it's a unit of SoftBank Group's Z Holdings, which also owns the Line messaging app and PayPay mobile payments service. Ninety percent of the company's employees are now working remotely, according to President Kentaro Kawabe, who tweeted that an overwhelming majority of them said their performance has held steady or improved at home. "So we're allowing Yahoo employees to live anywhere in Japan. This doesn't mean we're denying the benefits of the office -- you'll be able to fly in when needed," he added.

Yahoo is setting a commuting budget of $1,300 per month per worker and lifting its previous daily cap. In-person communication will still be encouraged as the initiative is also aimed at bolstering morale and well-being, with social gatherings to be subsidized by [$44] per employee a month. The company has had an "office anywhere" remote work system in place since 2014, however it had capped the number of work-from-home days before the virus took hold to five days a month.

Panasonic has announced plans to offer a four-day workweek to employees in Japan in an effort to improve productivity and attract better workers, according to a new report from Nikkei Asia. From a report: The move comes after the Japanese government made official recommendations to private employers in 2021 that included a shorter workweek. The four-day workweek has been floated around the world in various forms from Finland to New Zealand. Sometimes, the shorter weeks just mean that employers make the four days of work longer, while maintaining something close to 40 hours. Other times the companies will actually be offering a shorter week with fewer total hours, so that people can pursue more leisure time or more education.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Human sexual activity affects cognitive function, health, happiness and overall quality of life -- and, yes, there is also the matter of reproduction. The huge range of benefits is one reason researchers have become alarmed at declines in sexual activity around the world, from Japan to Europe to Australia. A recent study evaluating what is happening in the U.S. has added to the pile of evidence, showing declines from 2009 to 2018 in all forms of partnered sexual activity, including penile-vaginal intercourse, anal sex and partnered masturbation. The findings show that adolescents report less solo masturbation as well.

The decreases "aren't trivial," as the authors wrote in the study, published on November 19 in Archives of Sexual Behavior. Between 2009 and 2018, the proportion of adolescents reporting no sexual activity, either alone or with partners, rose from 28.8 percent to 44.2 percent among young men and from 49.5 percent in 2009 to 74 percent among young women. The researchers obtained the self-reported information from the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior and used responses from 4,155 people in 2009 and 4,547 people in 2018. These respondents to the confidential survey ranged in age from 14 to 49 years. The study itself did not probe the reasons for this trend. Scientific American spoke with the study's authors, Debby Herbenick and Tsung-chieh (Jane) Fu, about underlying factors that might explain these changes. Among the young, the researchers say social media, gaming and "rough sex" may contribute to this trend. The grief, health challenges, job loss and financial strain of the pandemic can all influence sexual interest and sex drive, too.

The International Space Station's operations have been extended through 2030, NASA announced on Friday. "Though it was never in doubt that the U.S. would continue its near-term commitment to the ISS," reports Engadget, "NASA's announcement comes amid heightened tensions with Russia, one of several nations sharing access to the Space Station. 2021 also saw Russia deepen its cooperation in space with China, another US adversary, as The New York Times noted in June."

NASA's announcement emphasized it would continue work with the space agencies of Europe, Japan, Canada, and Russia "to enable continuation of the groundbreaking research being conducted in this unique orbiting laboratory through the rest of this decade." From NASA.gov: "The International Space Station is a beacon of peaceful international scientific collaboration and for more than 20 years has returned enormous scientific, educational, and technological developments to benefit humanity...." said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "As more and more nations are active in space, it's more important than ever that the United States continues to lead the world in growing international alliances and modeling rules and norms for the peaceful and responsible use of space...." Nearly 110 countries and areas have participated in activities aboard the station, including more than 1,500,000 students per year in STEM activities.

Instruments aboard the ISS, used in concert with free-flying instruments in other orbits, help us measure the stresses of drought and the health of forests to enable improved understanding of the interaction of carbon and climate at different time scales. Operating these and other climate-related instruments through the end of the decade will greatly increase our understanding of the climate cycle.

Extending operations through 2030 will continue another productive decade of research advancement and enable a seamless transition of capabilities in low-Earth orbit to one or more commercially owned and operated destinations in the late 2020s. The decision to extend operations and NASA's recent awards to develop commercial space stations together ensure uninterrupted, continuous human presence and capabilities; both are critical facets of NASA's International Space Station transition plan.
NASA's announcement also points out that the Space station has hosted "more than 3,000 research investigations from over 4,200 researchers across the world."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The Kyoto University in Japan has lost about 77TB of research data due to an error in the backup system of its Hewlett-Packard supercomputer. The incident occurred between December 14 and 16, 2021, and resulted in 34 million files from 14 research groups being wiped from the system and the backup file. After investigating to determine the impact of the loss, the university concluded that the work of four of the affected groups could no longer be restored. All affected users have been individually notified of the incident via email, but no details were published on the type of work that was lost.

At the moment, the backup process has been stopped. To prevent data loss from happening again, the university has scraped the backup system and plans to apply improvements and re-introduce it in January 2022. The plan is to also keep incremental backups -- which cover files that have been changed since the last backup happened -- in addition to full backup mirrors. While the details of the type of data that was lost weren't revealed to the public, supercomputer research costs several hundreds of USD per hour, so this incident must have caused distress to the affected groups. The Kyoto University is considered one of Japan's most important research institutions and enjoys the second-largest scientific research investments from national grants. Its research excellence and importance is particularly distinctive in the area of chemistry, where it ranks fourth in the world, while it also contributes to biology, pharmacology, immunology, material science, and physics.

Japan revised the schedule of its space exploration plans on Tuesday, aiming to put a Japanese person on the moon by the latter half of the 2020s. From a report: "Not only is space a frontier that gives people hopes and dreams but it also provides a crucial foundation to our economic society with respect to our economic security," Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told a meeting to finalise the plan. According to the draft schedule of the plan, Japan aims to put the first non-American on the moon as part of the Artemis programme, a U.S.-led initiative that aims to return astronauts to the moon. The plan also spells out Japan's aspirations to launch a probe to explore Mars in 2024, as well as to find ways to generate solar electricity in space.

Japan will compensate companies to keep secret patents with potential military applications under proposed legislation, the Nikkei reported on Sunday, without citing sources. Reuters: The patents under review in the proposed economic security legislation will include technology that can help develop nuclear weapons, such as uranium enrichment and cutting-edge innovations like quantum technology, the financial daily said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Months have gone by, and the great resignation keeps rolling along. Some people thought that people would come flocking back to the office once generous unemployment benefits ended. Nope. Wrong. Months after Republican states cut the $300-a-week Federal benefit and other benefits expired, there has been no rush to return to the workforce. There are many reasons for this. People don't want to catch COVID-19; people are sick of bad jobs; early retirement; and the one I care about today, bosses still think they can force skilled workers to return to offices. I've said it before; I'll say it again. That's not going to happen. People with talent and high-value skills, like most technology workers, aren't returning to traditional offices. You don't have to believe me, though. Look at the numbers being reported.

A Hackajob survey of 2,000 UK tech workers and employers found not quite three-quarters (72%) of tech workers said having the ability to do remote work was very important to them. All, and by the way, just over one in five were looking for new jobs with remote work. A more recent Microsoft survey found UK techies felt even stronger about the issue. In this survey, they found over half of the employees would consider quitting if you tried to force them back into the office. It's not just the UK. The Future Forum Pulse survey found IT workers in the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany, and Japan all had one thing in common: Most want to work at least part of the time remotely. To be precise, 75% want flexibility in where they work, while 93% want flexibility in when they work. Why? The top reason: "Better work-life balance."

The problem? Many executives and owners haven't gotten the clue yet. 44% said they wanted to work from the office daily. Employees? 17%. Three-quarters of bosses said they at least wanted to work from the office 3-5 days a week, versus 34% of employees. Can we say disconnect? I can. And, here's the point. Today, for the first time in my lifetime, workers, not employers, are in the driver's seat. [...] But, that doesn't mean that you must give up the traditional office entirely. You don't. In the Dice State of Remote Work report, there's a remote work spectrum. Sure, some workers never want to cross the office transom again, but others like a flexible work schedule where they can work outside of the office a set number of days per week or month. By Dice's count, only one in five workers are bound and determined to never come into the office again. 75% would be fine with flex work. But, pay attention folks, only 3% want to go back to the old-school 9 to 5, every weekday at the office. I repeat a mere 3% want to return to the office as most of you knew it in the 2010s. Indeed, 7% of respondents said they would even take a 5% salary cut to work remotely.

Just over a year after Japan's Hayabusa2 mission returned the first subsurface sample of an asteroid to Earth, scientists have determined that the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu is a pristine remnant from the formation of our solar system. From a report: This was the first material to be returned to Earth from a carbon-rich asteroid. These asteroids can reveal how our cosmic corner of the universe was formed. The organic and hydrated minerals locked within these asteroids could also shed light on the origin of the building blocks of life. Ryugu is a dark, diamond-shaped asteroid that measures about 3,000 feet (1 kilometer) wide. Hayabusa2 collected one sample from the asteroid's surface on February 22, 2019, then fired a copper "bullet" into the asteroid to create a 33-foot wide impact crater. A sample was collected from this crater on July 11, 2019. Then, Hayabusa2 flew by Earth and dropped the sample off in Australia last December.

The C-type, or carbonaceous, asteroid is much darker than scientists originally thought, only reflecting about 2% of the light that hits it, according to one study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. After opening the sample, scientists were surprised to find that the spacecraft collected 5.4 grams from the asteroid -- much more than the single gram they were expecting, said Toru Yada, lead study author and associate senior researcher at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. In the second study, also published Monday in Nature Astronomy, the researchers determined that Ryugu is made of clay and other hydrated minerals, with a number of carbonates and organics inside the sample.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Social media and search engine operators in Japan will be required to specify the countries in which users' data is physically stored, under a planned tweak to local laws. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications this week announced it plans to submit the revision to the Telecommunications Business Law early next year. The amendment, if passed, requires search engines, social media operators and mobile phone companies with over 10 million Japanese users to disclose where in the world they store data, and identify any foreign subcontractors that can access the data. The proposed law applies to overseas companies that operate in Japan -- meaning the likes of Twitter and Facebook will need to disclose their storage choices publicly. Oddly, search engines that just cover travel and food get a pass and don't have to comply. "The move is in part a reaction to Japan's hugely popular homegrown freeware instant communication app, LINE, which had several recent snafus related to data storage and protection," the report adds.

In March, the Japanese government said it was investigating LINE's parent company after a local newspaper reported that engineers at one of the app's Chinese contractors accessed the messages and personal details of LINE users. And just a couple weeks ago, the company announced that around 133,000 users' payment details were mistakenly published on GitHub between September and November of this year.

"The New York Times has an obituary for Masayuki Uemura, designer of the first Nintendo Entertainment System console," writes Slashdot reader nickovs. Here's an excerpt from the report: Video game consoles had a moment of popularity in the early 1980s, but the market collapsed because of shoddy quality control and uninspiring software that failed to provide the thrills of arcade hits like Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Truckloads of unsold game cartridges ended up in landfills, and retailers decided that home gaming systems had no future. But in 1985, the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States changed the industry forever. The unassuming gray box with its distinctive controllers became a must-have for an entire generation of children and prompted Nintendo's virtual monopoly over the industry for the better part of a decade as competitors pulled out of the market in response to the company's dominance. "The NES was not the first video game console," adds nickovs. "The quality of the games that became available for the NES, including titles like Super Mario Brothers, made it much more appealing than pervious boxes and that lead to its commercial success. These games would not have been possible without the hardware that Uemura designed."