The chairman of the International Whaling Commission on Thursday proposed allowing Japan to hunt 120 minke whales a year in Japanese coastal waters for 10 years. The proposal also calls for cutting Japan's annual catch quota of minke whales in the Antarctic Ocean to 400 over the next five years, and gradually reducing the quota to 200 over the subsequent five years. The IWC seeks to obtain approval for the proposal at its annual meeting in Morocco in June.

The reactivation of the Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor in Fukui Prefecture, expected to take place in early May more than 14 years after its shutdown due to a sodium coolant leak and fire in 1995, will most likely get off to a rocky start. The lapse of 14 years has provoked safety worries among analysts who point to a lack of operating experience among Monju's technicians. The prototype fast-breeder reactor is designed to produce more mixed plutonium-uranium oxide fuel than it consumes.

Looking largely to inspire dreams of space among the Japanese, a manufacturing cooperative named Astro-Technology SOHLA announced on April 27th that they are planning to create and send a two-legged humanoid robot to the moon, have it draw the Japanese flag on the surface, and then hopefully get it back to the Earth, all by the year 2015. Making inspirational ideas about space technology a reality is not new to the Osaka-based cooperative of six small and medium sized enterprises. SOHLA had previously built a small-scale satellite, named Maido-1, as a demonstration of the ability of SMEs to re...

Local residents and groups across the nation are stepping up efforts to have their areas certified as global geoparks, where rare landscapes useful for learning how the Earth was formed will be preserved and utilized as natural parks. Preparations are under way in eight areas, such as Muroto in Kochi Prefecture, to follow in the footsteps of Itoigawa river in Niigata Prefecture, which became the nation's first global geopark last year. Associations to promote areas as global geoparks have been established in 20 regions, including the Chichibu area in Saitama Prefecture. Geoparks are areas that...

A group of engineers in Japan have begun planning a two-legged humanoid robot designed to walk to the surface of the moon, according to Japanese press reports. "We decided on a human-like robot because it's more fascinating and stimulating for us," said association director Hideo Sugimoto to the Daily Yomiuri newspaper. "We'll make an attractive robot to carry our dreams to the universe." The engineers are part of a manufacturing cooperative called Astro-Technology SOHLA, which is based in Osaka Prefecture, a local governing unit in the Kansai region on Honshu - the main island of Japan.