science Archives - understand-culture

The Controlled Accident

David Alfaro Siqueiros called one of his techniques accidente controlado, the controlled accident. Nitrocellulose lacquers, “también llamadas piroxilinas” (also called pyroxylins), played a central part in it. They were used for car paint and nail varnish. He threw the paint with a brocha de aire, an air brush. Jackson Pollock attended an experimental workshop held in New York.

In 2015, a UNAM team led by Roberto Zenit explained the physics behind the technique, a fluid phenomenon called the Rayleigh-Taylor instability.

Color Television

Guillermo González Camarena developed a system for color television in “un modesto taller-laboratorio en el sótano de la casa de sus padres” (a modest workshop and laboratory in the basement of his parents’ house), according to the ILCE, the Latin American Institute for Educational Communication.

According to the Gaceta UNAM, he patented it in Mexico in 1940 and in the United States two years later. Another source gives 1940 for both patents.

A Thousand Times Too Much Catalyst

Shirakawa Hideki won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000. In his own account, he found the method for making a thin film of polyacetylene by chance, because a catalyst a thousand times as concentrated as usual had been used. A newspaper dates the film to 1967, when he was an assistant at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Shirakawa recalled that he had thought it was a failure.

Umami

The chemist Ikeda Kikunae found that the taste of kombu broth comes from glutamic acid, an amino acid. He invented a way to make an umami seasoning from it and took out a patent. In May 1909, the seasoning went on sale under the name Ajinomoto.

Kansei Engineering

Kansei kōgaku, kansei engineering, is defined by Nagamachi Mitsuo, professor emeritus of Hiroshima University, as a technology that turns kansei, human feeling and sensibility, into concrete design content. The Japan Society of Kansei Engineering was founded in 1998.

Moonshot Goals

Japan’s Cabinet Office runs the Moonshot Research and Development Program. It describes the program as chōsenteki na kenkyū kaihatsu, challenging research and development based on bolder ideas that are not an extension of what came before. The aim is disruptive innovation that starts in Japan. The state itself sets ambitious goals that are meant to fascinate people.

Goal 1 calls for a society, by 2050, in which people are freed from the limits of body, brain, space and time. Goal 6 calls for a fault-tolerant, general-purpose quantum computer by 2050. In February 2021, the Cabinet Office announced that 47 project managers had been chosen for seven goals.

Program Managers for Disruptive Technology

In the supplementary budget for fiscal 2013, the Japanese government set aside 55 billion yen for ImPACT, the Impulsing Paradigm Change through Disruptive Technologies Program. Its stated goal was discontinuous innovation through high-risk research.

Each project was led by a puroguramu manējā, a program manager. The Cabinet Office describes the role as that of a producer who plans, carries out and manages the research, not that of a researcher. Twelve program managers were chosen in June 2014 and four more in September 2015.

Thirty Nobel Prizes in Fifty Years

Japan’s Second Science and Technology Basic Plan, adopted in 2001, set a goal for international science prizes. Japan was to produce winners of prizes such as the Nobel at the level of the major European countries: gojū-nenkan ni Nōberu-shō jushōsha sanjūnin teido, about 30 Nobel laureates in 50 years.

In 2026, a white paper of the Ministry of Education noted that 25 years later, more than 20 Japanese researchers had already won a Nobel Prize.

Super-Kamiokande Group

On the evening of October 6, 2015, Kajita Takaaki of the University of Tokyo spoke to the press after being named for the Nobel Prize in Physics. He said: Watashi no namae wa dashite itadaita ga, Sūpā Kamiokande, soshite Kamiokande no kenkyū gurūpu ga mitomerareta no da to omou. “My name was put forward, but I think it is the research groups of Super-Kamiokande and Kamiokande that were recognized.”

The Power of Microbes

On the evening of October 5, 2015, Ōmura Satoshi spoke to the press after being named for the Nobel Prize. He said: Watashi no shigoto wa biseibutsu no chikara o karite iru dake. “My work only borrows the power of microorganisms.”