A forest reserve area of about 240,000 hectares will be established in national forests extending from the Daisetsu to Hidaka mountain ranges in Hokkaido next month, it has been learned.
The planned conservation area will be the largest of its kind in the nation. It will increase by 2.5 times the current area of such reserves, to an area greater than that of Tokyo, which is about 220,000 hectares.
The Forestry Agency will designate the zones as forest biodiversity protection areas to protect old-growth forests with abundant biodiversity.
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Japan successfully launched a satellite Saturday to improve car navigation and other services using the global positioning system.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched the quasi-zenith satellite Michibiki at 8:17 p.m. from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture, using an H2A rocket. The 4-ton Michibiki — 3 meters long, 3 meters wide and 6 meters high — was separated from the rocket 28 minutes after the launch.
The launch of the satellite is intended to boost the accuracy and coverage of GPS services in Japan by complementing a U.S. satellite network.
Japan’s …

Japan on Monday said it has detected its first case of an antibiotic-resistant "superbug" that surfaced in South Asia and has triggered a global health alert.
A hospital linked to the Dokkyo Medical University in Tochigi prefecture north of Tokyo detected a drug-resistant "superbug", a bacterium carrying the New Delhi metallo-lactamase-1 (NDM-1) gene, in a patient last year, a hospital official told AFP.
The case follows a warning from the World Health Organization (WHO) last month calling on global health authorities to monitor the drug-resistant superbug that is believed to have spread …

Turn on the TV in Japan and you’re bound to see someone slicing up a tuna on a cooking show while commentators ooh and aah. It’s no wonder, then, that during the current heat wave frying Tokyo, people are heading north for chills and eye candy in the form of giant fish popsicles.
The Kori no Suizokukan (Ice Aquarium) in Kesennuma, northeastern Japan, packs about 450 specimens of marine life frozen in large columns of ice bathed in blue light. Some 80 species, including saury, octopuses, crabs, and skipjack, are preserved …

A company employee in Nagano Prefecture calculated the value of pi to five trillion digits this month using a self-made personal computer, beating the record set by a French engineer who calculated it to about 2.7 trillion digits late last year.
To calculate the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, to an undetermined number of digits, Shigeru Kondo, a 55- year-old resident of Iida, assembled a computer with 32 terabytes of hard-drive capacity and used an application made by Alexander Yee, a 22-year-old student at a U.S. …

An amateur astronomer in Kumamoto Prefecture said Sunday that he had recorded video of a flash of light that was apparently produced when an astral body collided with Jupiter.
Junichi Watanabe, a professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, said the observatory reported the incident to the International Astronomical Union after receiving a report about the video recording taken by Masayuki Tachikawa early Saturday morning.
"This kind of light is seldom filmed," Watanabe said.
The astral body that hit Jupiter was probably less than 1 km wide because no trace of it …

Thousands of people flocked to an exhibition in Japan on Sunday to see a capsule from the Hayabusa space probe which was hoped to have brought asteroid dust to Earth.
Some 1,800 people were queuing in Tokyo to see the heat-proof pod, which had traveled in space with the unmanned craft for seven years, even before the exhibition opened in the morning, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) spokesman said.
More than 7,000 had visited the first public showing of the capsule by early evening, he said, adding that the space agency …

A Kyoto University team has developed a method to efficiently generate induced pluripotent stem cells that is less likely to lead to tumor development than the conventional method.
iPS cells are able to transform into the cells of any organ.
The new research, representing a step forward in putting iPS cells into practical use in regenerative medicine, was reported in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of the United States of America on Tuesday.
Generally, iPS cells are produced by introducing four types of genes into skin and other …

JAPAN is looking at sending a wheeled robot to the moon in five years and building a lunar base by 2020.
The robots would set up solar panels to generate energy and have an observation device to gather geological samples. The materials would then be sent back to Earth by rocket.
The robots would work from the lunar base at the moon’s south pole from 2020.
The plans are part of a year-long study backed by a panel of experts yesterday that will be recommended to Japan’s Government.
But it has been estimated the …

A rare flower that has bloomed after a gap of almost 20 years has attracted thousands of visitors to the botanical garden in Tokyo.
Standing at more than 5ft (1.52m) tall, the Amorphophallus titanum is native to Indonesia’s Sumatra island.
At full bloom the plant emits a pungent smell which one visitor described as “like raw garbage that had grown rotten”. It thrives at the edges of rainforests near open grasslands. Though found in many botanic gardens around the world it is still indigenous only to the tropical forests of Sumatra. Due …