Amazon announced a new policy Wednesday requiring third-party sellers in its marketplace to publicly display their names and addresses starting Sept. 1. Geekwire reports: The disclosure is already required in Europe, Japan, and Mexico. Amazon said it is updating its policy to "ensure there is a consistent baseline of seller information to help customers make informed shopping decisions" in a letter to sellers. Amazon has been working to crack down on knockoff sales on its marketplace for years, most recently forming an internal "Counterfeit Crimes Unit." Despite spending more than $500 million in 2019 to fight various forms of fraud, counterfeits and defective or unsafe products continue to be a challenge for the company.

According to Nikkei Asian Review, much of the PlayStation's success can be attributed to an unassuming factory in Japan that is almost entirely operated by robots. From the report: On the outskirts of Kisarazu, a large, white building towers over an otherwise suburban landscape. Once inside, visitors are greeted by the whirring of motors as dozens of robots seamlessly churn out PlayStation 4 consoles. Just a few humans were present to deal with a handful of tasks -- two to feed bare motherboards to the line, and two to package the finished consoles. But the actual assembly is done entirely by articulated robots, supplied by Mitsubishi Electric. The 31.4-meter line, completed in 2018, has the ability to churn out a new console every 30 seconds.

The Kisarazu plant is operated by Sony Global Manufacturing & Operations, or SGMO, the group's manufacturing arm. The unit has worked with video game unit Sony Interactive Entertainment to bring cutting-edge technologies to the facility. One of the plant's crowning achievements is the use of robots to attach wires, tape and other flexible parts to the consoles. Twenty-six out of 32 robots at the Kisarazu plant are dedicated to the task, deftly handling materials most robots would find too finicky. "There's probably no other site that can manipulate robots in this manner," said an engineer. Every process -- all the way to final packaging -- is automated. The blend of robotic and human labor is painstakingly optimized with a priority on return on investment.

Technology firm Fujitsu announced a new "Work Life Shift" program that will offer unprecedented flexibility to its 80,000 workers in Japan. "Staff will be able to work flexible hours, and working from home will be standard wherever possible," reports the BBC. From the report: In a statement sent to the BBC, Fujitsu said it "will introduce a new way of working that promises a more empowering, productive, and creative experience for employees that will boost innovation and deliver new value to its customers and society." Under the plan employees will "begin to primarily work on a remote basis to achieve a working style that allows them to flexibly use their time according to the contents of their work, business roles, and lifestyle." The company also said the program would allow staff to choose where they worked, whether that was from home, a major corporate hub or a satellite office. Fujitsu believes that that the increased autonomy offered to its workers will help to improve the performance of teams and increase productivity.

Microsoft has just announced it will ban players who use the controversial confederate flag in Forza Horizon and Forza Motorsport, which both allow users to personalize their cars with custom designs. The Verge reports: In a statement posted on Twitter last Friday, Microsoft updated its enforcement guidelines to have a zero-tolerance policy for any player using the confederate flag or other symbols that represent "notorious iconography," including Nazi imagery and the rising sun, which can be a symbol of Japanese imperialism. Microsoft will not automatically ban players that create designs with these controversial images; instead, the original designer will need to be reported by submitting a ticket.

AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian: An ambitious project to chart the seabed by 2030 could help countries prepare for tsunamis, protect marine habitats and monitor deep-sea mining. But the challenge is unprecedented. The race officially kicked off in 2017 at the United Nations Ocean Conference in New York City. When it began, around 6% of the ocean was mapped in accurate detail. On June 21, the global initiative -- known formally as the Nippon Foundation-Gebco Seabed 2030 Project -- released its latest edition: it has now mapped one-fifth of the seafloor.

Few countries need accurate maps of the seabed more than Japan, an island nation whose future is uniquely intertwined with the ocean's, and it is the Nippon Foundation , a Japanese non-profit organization run on the gambling proceeds of motorboat racing, that is backing Seabed 2030 with $2m every year. [...] But the mapping is a truly global collaboration, public and free to use, divided among four regional centers. The Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany took the Southern Ocean; Stockholm University and the University of New Hampshire cover the North Pacific and Arctic; New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research are responsible for the South and West Pacific Ocean. That leaves the largest swath, the entire Atlantic and Indian Oceans, to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University -- Ferrini's team. The finished map itself is created by a fifth centre, based in the UK: the British Oceanographic Data Centre in Southampton. It collects the analyzed data from the four centers and compiles it in the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (Gebco). The data is in the public domain, free to use, adapt and commercially exploit.

Olympus, once one of the world's biggest camera brands, is selling off that part of its business after 84 years. The firm said that despite its best efforts, the "extremely severe digital camera market" was no longer profitable. From a report: The arrival of smartphones, which had shrunk the market for separate cameras, was one major factor, it said. It had recorded losses for the last three years. The Japanese company made its first camera in 1936 after years of microscope manufacture. The Semi-Olympus I featured an accordion-like fold-out camera bellows, and cost more than a month's wages in Japan. The company continued to develop the camera business over the decades, becoming one of the top companies by market share. "There's a huge amount of affection for Olympus, going right back," says Nigel Atherton, editor of Amateur Photographer magazine. The 1970s was a high point, with their cameras advertised on television by celebrity photographers such as David Bailey and Lord Lichfield. "Those cameras were revolutionary - they were very small, very light, they were beautifully designed, had really nice quality lenses," adds Atherton.

A Japanese supercomputer has taken the top spot in the biannual Top500 supercomputer speed ranking. Fugaku, a computer in Kobe co-developed by Riken and Fujitsu, makes use of Fujitsu's 48-core A64FX system-on-chip. It's the first time a computer based on ARM processors has topped the list. From a report: Fugaku turned in a Top500 HPL result of 415.5 petaflops, 2.8 times as fast as IBM's Summit, the nearest competitor. Fugaku also attained top spots in other rankings that test computers on different workloads, including Graph 500, HPL-AI, and HPCG. No previous supercomputer has ever led all four rankings at once. While fastest supercomputer rankings normally bounce between American- and Chinese-made systems, this is Japan's first system to rank first on the Top500 in nine years since Fugaku's predecessor, Riken's K computer. Overall there are 226 Chinese supercomputers on the list, 114 from America, and 30 from Japan. US-based systems contribute the most aggregate performance with 644 petaflops.

Researchers have found that soap bubbles can carry pollen grains and deposit them on flowers. CNET reports: "It sounds somewhat like fantasy, but the functional soap bubble allows effective pollination and assures that the quality of fruits is the same as with conventional hand pollination," said Eijiro Miyako, associate professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and lead author of a study published in the journal iScience on Wednesday.

The researchers first worked out that soap bubbles could indeed carry pollen. They then tested out different bubble formulations and settled on lauramidopropyl betain, a compound sometimes used in shampoos, as a good vehicle. Now comes the fun part. The researchers used a bubble gun on a pear orchard, "producing fruit that demonstrated the pollination's success," iScience publisher Cell Press said in a release. They also tested out the use of a drone to direct bubbles at flowers, which proved to be an accurate way to deliver the bubbles. The early experiments are promising, but there are still some hurdles around figuring out the most precise way to aim the bubbles and how to deal with potential weather issues like rain or wind.

"Scientists in Japan successfully triggered a hibernation-like state in mice by activating a specific group of brain cells," reports UPI, which points out that entering a hibernation-like state "could help astronauts conserve food and water, as well as avoid the ill-effects of microgravity, on long journeys through space." The research, published this week in the journal Nature, suggests even animals that don't naturally sleep through the winter are capable of hibernation...

Hibernation isn't simply prolonged sleep. When food gets scarce and winter approaches, hibernating animals begin to slow down their metabolism and drop their body temperature. During their prolonged slumber, hibernating animals quiet their brains and slow their heart rate and breathing. As a result, bears, snakes, turtles and other hibernating species are able to conserve energy. When spring arrives, the animals wake having lost a little weight, but are otherwise healthy.

Mice don't hibernate in the wild. But in the lab, researchers were able to coax mice into a hibernation-like state by activating a type of brain cell called Q neurons... During their approximately weeklong hibernation, the mice had slower heart rates, reduced oxygen consumption and slower respiration.

Dharkfiber shares a report: Honda has confirmed a cyberattack that brought parts of its global operations to a standstill. The company said in a brief statement Tuesday that the attack caused production issues outside of its headquarters in Japan. "Work is being undertaken to minimize the impact and to restore full functionality of production, sales, and development activities," according to the BBC. It follows a tweet from the company, now pinned to the top of its Twitter feed, stating that its customer service and financial services are "unavailable" due to the attack. Honda is one of the largest vehicle manufacturers in the world, employing more than 200,000 staff, with factories in the U.K., North America, and Europe.

Writing for Quanta magazine, an adjunct professor of neuroscience at the University of Maryland described an intriguing study led by MIT neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai: Incredible as it may sound, the researchers improved the brains of animals with Alzheimer's simply by using LED lights that flashed 40 times a second. Even sound played at this charmed frequency, 40 hertz, had a similar effect.... Exposing the mice to both stimuli, a light show synchronized with pulsating sound, had an even more powerful effect, reducing amyloid plaques [a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease] in regions throughout the cerebral cortex, including the prefrontal region, which carries out higher-level executive functions that are impaired in Alzheimer's.

I was amazed, so just to make sure I wasn't getting unduly excited about the possibility of using flashing lights and sounds to treat humans, I talked to Hiroaki Wake, a neuroscientist at Kobe University in Japan who was not involved with the work. "It would be fantastic!" he said. "The treatment may also be effective for a number of neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson's disease and ALS," where microglia also play a role... Tsai's team has just begun assessing their strobe-light method on patients, and they're sure to be joined by others as more researchers learn of this promising work.
According to the article, another study at the Georgia Institute of Technology is investigating a specific mechanism with which doctors "could potentially treat different diseases just by varying the light and sound rhythms they use.

"The different stimuli would rock the neurons into producing appropriate brain wave frequencies, causing nearby microglia to release specific types of cytokines, which tell microglia in general how to go to work repairing the brain."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new study published in Scientific Reports reveals that crystalline rocks, such as granite, have a natural self-sealing mechanism, capable of keeping fluids locked away for millions of years. Careful analysis of the chemistry and structure of granites from Japan and the UK revealed that when fluid did enter the rock (via fractures), it travelled a few centimeters at most. The scientists believe that calcium in the rock reacted with carbonate in the fluid to create tiny crystals of calcite that plugged all the gaps and prevented further flow. "This amount of calcite would never be expected in a granite, and the distribution of it indicates it almost certainly formed from small quantities of fluid trying to move through the rock," says Roy Wogelius from the University of Manchester. Greater understanding is needed before we finalize our radioactive waste disposal strategies, but this is a promising step forward.

The Diet enacted a bill Wednesday to create "super cities" where artificial intelligence, big data and other technologies are utilized to resolve social problems. The Japan Times reports: The bill revising the national strategic special zone law passed the House of Councilors by a majority vote with support mainly from the ruling coalition. The revision stipulates procedures to speed up the changing of regulations in various fields to facilitate the creating of such smart cities. The government hopes to utilize cutting-edge technologies to address issues such as depopulation and the aging of society. In such cities, data-linking platforms to collect and organize various kinds of data from administrative organizations and companies will be established for autonomous driving, cashless payments, telemedicine and other services.

Under the revised law, local governments to be selected will launch forums with the central government and private companies, draw up city development plans and make applications to the state after winning understanding from local residents. The government hopes to realize such city development plans swiftly after discussions at related government agencies.

Prime minister Shinzo Abe has declared victory for the "Japan model" of fighting coronavirus as he lifted a nationwide state of emergency after seven weeks [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: Speaking at a press conference on Monday evening in Tokyo, Mr Abe said that Japan had avoided an explosive increase in cases without the compulsory lockdowns used in Europe or the US. The ending of the state of emergency in the last five prefectures it covered -- Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba and Hokkaido -- will mean that the world's fourth-largest economy can start to reopen for business. "In a characteristically Japanese way, we have all but brought this epidemic under control in the last month and a half," said Mr Abe. "Surely, it shows the power of the Japan model." Japan's constitution prohibits a compulsory lockdown but, under the state of emergency that began on April 7, the government requested voluntary social distancing and business closures. Under that regime, the number of new Covid-19 cases fell from 600-700 a day in mid-April to about 20-30 a day last week. The country has diagnosed 16,581 cases of coronavirus with 830 deaths -- many fewer than similar-sized populations in Europe or the US.

We will need a comprehensive strategy to reduce the sort of interactions that can lead to more infections. The Atlantic: COVID-19 has mounted a sustained attack on public life, especially indoor life. Many of the largest super-spreader events took place inside -- at a church in South Korea, an auditorium in France, a conference in Massachusetts. The danger of the indoors is more than anecdotal. A Hong Kong paper awaiting peer review [PDF] found that of 7,324 documented cases in China, only one outbreak occurred outside -- during a conversation among several men in a small village. The risk of infection indoors is almost 19 times higher than in open-air environments, according to another study [PDF] from researchers in Japan. Appropriately, just about every public indoor space in America has been shut down or, in the case of essential businesses such as grocers, adapted for social-distancing restrictions. These closures have been economically ruinous, transforming large swaths of urban and suburban life into a morbid line of darkened windows.

Today, states are emerging from the lockdown phase of the crisis and entering a queasy period of reopening. But offices, schools, stores, theaters, restaurants, bars, gyms, fitness centers, and museums will have no semblance of normalcy until we learn how to be safe -- and feel safe -- inside. To open these spaces, we must be guided by science and expertise. Fortunately for us, researchers are discovering the secrets of how COVID-19 spreads with a combination of clever modeling and detective work. Before we review the relevant studies and draw out lessons for the future of the great indoors, a brief word of humility. Our understanding of this disease is dynamic. Today's conventional wisdom could be tomorrow's busted myth. Think of these studies not as gospels, but as clues in a gradually unraveling mystery.

"High school students who took Advanced Placement exams online this week may have to do it again next month because of a technical glitch," writes CNN, sharing some of the students' horror stories. With 45 seconds left in her exam, 11th-grader Maggie McLauchlin of Jacksonville, Florida, took a video of what appears to be a black screen as she tried to upload her exam answers as instructed by The College Board. "I'm trying to take the picture but there's just black and I only have 45 seconds left," Maggie says tearfully. "It's not working..."

Jamye Smith is an AP US History teacher at Fort Zumwalt North High School in O'Fallon, Missouri. She told CNN 27 of her students signed up to take the test. So far she's heard from three students who were unable to submit their exams due to a variety of errors, none of which they caused, she said. Smith said her colleagues teaching other subjects also said their students struggled to do the same.
Because of time zone differences, one American student in Japan had to take his four tests at 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. — only to discover that two of them weren't submitted, CNN reports.

"Unfortunately, there isn't another way to submit," the College Board admitted on Twitter, saying they believed the primary cause was outdated web browsers. They told CNN Friday that "After the first few days of testing, our data show the vast majority of students successfully completed their exams, with less than 1 percent [of 1.64 million students] unable to submit their responses..."

"We share the deep disappointment of students who were unable to complete their exam — whether for technical issues or other reasons."

A reader shares a report from Live Science: There's no use sugar coating it: According to one scribe in medieval England, A.D. 1110 was a "disastrous year." Torrential rainfall damaged crops, famine stalked the land -- and, as if that wasn't bad enough, on one fateful night in May, the moon simply vanished from the sky. "On the fifth night in the month of May appeared the moon shining bright in the evening, and afterwards by little and little its light diminished," the unnamed scribe wrote in the Anglo-Saxon manuscript known as the Peterborough Chronicle. "As soon as night came, it was so completely extinguished withal, that neither light, nor orb, nor anything at all of it was seen. And so it continued nearly until day, and then appeared shining full and bright."

So, what made the moon disappear in an already dismal year? According to a study published April 21 in the journal Scientific Reports, the explanation for both the moon's mysterious vanishing act and the rain-ravaged summer that followed may be one and the same -- volcanoes. "The spectacular atmospheric optical phenomena associated with high-altitude volcanic aerosols have caught the attention of chroniclers since ancient times," the study authors wrote. "Careful evaluation of ice core records points to the occurrence of several closely spaced volcanic eruptions," which may have occurred in Europe or Asia between A.D. 1108 and A.D. 1110.

Those volcanic events, which the researchers call a "forgotten cluster" of eruptions because they were sparsely documented by historians at the time, may have released towering clouds of ash that traveled far around the world for years on end. Not only could a high-altitude veil of volcanic aerosols blot out the moon while leaving many stars unobscured, as the Peterborough writer described, but a series of large eruptions could have also disrupted the global climate, the researcher wrote, causing or exacerbated the cold, wet weather that made life so miserable in A.D. 1110. One such eruption, which occurred in Japan in A.D. 1108, could be to blame, the team said.

An anonymous reader writes: You really can't make this stuff up, but Americans across the country, out of fear of "murder hornets," have begun killing all kinds of bees en masse. According to Doug Yanega, senior museum scientist for the Department of Entomology at UC Riverside, a national panic has led to the needless slaughter of native wasps and bees, beneficial insects whose populations are already threatened...

"Folks in China, Korea and Japan have lived side by side with these hornets for hundreds of years, and it has not caused the collapse of human society there. My colleagues in Japan, China and Korea are just rolling their eyes in disbelief at what kind of snowflakes we are..."

"I don't want to downplay this — they are logistically dangerous insects. But having people in Tennessee worry about this is just ridiculous. The only people who should be bothering experts with concerns about wasp IDs are living in the northwest quadrant of Washington (state). And really, right now, nobody else in the country should even be thinking about this stuff," he continued.
"The facts are, experts said, two dead hornets were found in Washington last December, a lone Canadian live nest was found and wiped out last September and no live hornets have yet been seen this year," reports the Associated Press.

And when they spoke to the Washington Agriculture Department entomologist working on the state's response, he issued an additional correction for all the journalists covering this story. "They are not 'murder hornets.' "They are just hornets."

NASA and SpaceX's most defining moment of our current space era is coming up at the end of this month, with its Demo-2 mission on May 27. The mission will be the first ever launch for SpaceX with humans on board, and for NASA, it'll mark the first return to U.S.-based astronaut launches since the Shuttle program flew its last flight in 2011. On Friday, representatives from both SpaceX and NASA briefed the media on the mission and the specifics of what it will involve when astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley board the Crew Dragon for its debut crewed performance. From a report: The first thing to note about this mission is that it's still technically a test, as noted in the "demo" name. This is the capstone demonstration in a series of such missions that will fully human-rate the SpaceX Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 for operational use. As noted during today's press briefings, a big chunk of the actual human rating process occurs during this final mission -- in fact, the majority of the actual final human rating happens on this flight, despite the many years of preparation and live tests to date, including the Demo-1 mission which was essentially a full round-trip flight, just without any astronauts on board. Even though it's technically a demonstration, the stakes couldn't be higher -- SpaceX has a lot to prove here, and it bears the utmost responsibility in terms of keeping Behnken and Hurley safe for the duration of the mission. Which, it turns out, is actually going to be longer than originally planned: NASA says the mission will last anywhere between 30 days and 119 days, depending on a few different factors, the most significant of which being how quickly the agency ends up being able to launch the first operational Commercial Crew mission, Crew-1, which will carry four astronauts, including two from NASA and one from Japan's space agency.

Nintendo is telling partner developers it's not going to hold one of its Nintendo Direct video events in June. From a report: The publisher has had a June Direct to correspond with E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) every year since 2013. And before that, it held annual stage presentations. But complications brought about from Japan's work-from-home order as part of its attempts to mitigate COVID-19 are forcing Nintendo to push back its schedule. Nintendo was putting together a June event. The company was lining up partners and was planning to unveil its first-party schedule for the rest of 2020. That included highlighting the Mario franchise's 35th anniversary, which it's going to celebrate with the release of some classic 3D Mario games on Switch, according to various reports. But now, the company is far less certain. If it holds another Direct, it may not come until the very end of summer.