RIKEN made the headlines in various international publications in the first two weeks of January.
A study published in the journal Neuron on January 3 (see also a press release) showing a link between retrotransposons — also called jumping genes — in the brain and schizophrenia led by Tadafumi Kato of the RIKEN Brain Science Institute was covered in the magazines Science, The Scientist and Scientific American, the online newspaper The Huffington Post and the French daily newspaper Le Monde among others.
A PET molecular imaging study of macaque brains published in Translational Psychiatry on January 8 (press release for this study) reveals that the drug ketamine may act as an antidepressant by boosting serotonin activity in brain areas involved in motivation. The study was picked up by various publications including the German website Gehirn und Geist and American magazine US News and World Report.
Japanese supercomputers are another popular topic among foreign newspapers and have been featured in a number of articles. The recent news about the development of a new exascale computer to be managed by RIKEN was reported in the Time magazine technology pages, the Nikkei Asian Review covered the creation of a new supercomputer dedicated to protein structure analysis, and the 2013 announcement of the simulation of the largest neural network to date appeared in the British daily newspaper The Telegraph.