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Men jam their feet into high-heeled shoes and walk back and forth, some falteringly, others with unlikely confidence. Some women watch, gauging the men’s reactions while sympathizing with each other’s stories about wearing the torturous items masquerading as fashion.

They were all participants in a recent event in Tokyo held to highlight the plight of women forced to wear heels in the workplace, in an extension of the #KuToo online movement. Organizers of the event gave the men stilettos with 5-centimeter-high heels and asked them to quite literally walk in a woman’s shoes. The experience allowed the men to understand the discomfort and inconvenience that come from walking with one’s heels raised.

Right after returning from the three-day trip to China, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe welcomed the Indian leader Narendra Modi to his vacation home at the foot of Mount Fuji.

They agreed on resuming a currency swap accord to the tune of $75 billion and more than ¥300 billion in yen loans to finance India’s infrastructure projects including a high-speed railway using Japan’s Shinkansen system.

The key for Japan-India relations going forward will be whether the two countries can elevate their ties to new stages on the basis of their latest agreements, instead of as a counterweight to China’s rise. Abe hailed Japan-India ties as having “the largest potential for development for any bilateral relationship anywhere in the world.”

Whether the two countries can realize that potential will be tested from now.

Recently, the ancient art of origami has begun to merge with modern engineering. Origami principles have inspired novel ways of packaging airbags, fashioning heart stents, folding solar sails designed to propel spacecraft, and even collapsible bullet-proof shields. 

Modern research in origami began in 1970 when an astrophysicist named Koryo Miura came up with a simple but elegant fold. Known as the Miura fold, or Miura-ori, he later repurposed the fold as a way to package large, flat membranes for deploying into space. In 1995, a Japanese satellite used the fold to store its solar panels for launch and unfurl them once in orbit.

With the Imperial era name change, Japan's Foreign Ministry is considering scrapping the use of the era name for calendar years in some of its official documents and switching to the Gregorian calendar, according to sources.

While the ministry will keep using the Japanese era calendar in documents that require consistency with papers of other ministries (including those that are budget-related), it plans to promote the use of the Gregorian calendar for documents without such restrictions.

Recently, a senior Foreign Ministry official said use of the Japanese era calendar may be confusing to other countries. Foreign Minister Taro Kono also pointed to the complexity of calculations needed when converting years between the two era systems. “We’ll make efforts so that there’ll be no mistakes when we go back and forth between the Christian and Japanese era systems,” he added.

Seikatsu Club is a huge food cooperative, founded in 1965 by a group of women in Japan, which has exacting standards on everything from radioactivity levels to the number of additives in food.

Their initial focus was on bringing down the price of milk for households by securing bulk-purchase discounts. Fast-forward five decades and Seikatsu is now a sprawling operation of nearly 400,000 members (90% women) that runs its own milk factory and has food supply agreements with about 200 outside producers. In addition, some of the production is now done by workers collectives that are part of the cooperative.

A lot of people thought the internet would help democratize the world.

More people and groups would have access to information, and the ability to mobilize from the ground up would gradually undermine concentrations of power—that was the idea, at least.

But the reality has been quite different: Instead of democratizing the world, the internet has destabilized it, creating new cleavages and reinforcing the power structure at the same time.

This is the story sociologist Jen Schradie tells in her new book The Revolution That Wasn’t. Schradie argues that technology is not only failing to level the playing field for activists, it’s actually making things worse by “creating a digital activism gap.” The differences in power and organization, she says, have undercut working-class movements and bolstered authoritarian groups.

Sarah’s Instagram feed is pretty typical for a 21-year-old model-slash-influencer living in Florida. There’s one important difference: In all of her pictures, she’s wearing scrubs.

Being a "nursefluencer," a term that I have admittedly made up but that describes a growing population, is similar to being a regular influencer.

For Sarah, and many young health care professionals like her, a sizeable Instagram following is a salve for a litany of problems experienced by those in the field: burnout, odd hours, and a lack of a creative outlet, to start. So it’s not surprising that within the past few months, tons of accounts like hers have popped up, gaining huge followings — largely made up of fellow medical professionals — by posting an insider’s view of the industry.

It’s also raised questions about the ethics of being a health care influencer. After all, isn’t the only person who should be influencing anyone’s health their own doctor?

“Ultra-lightweight space blankets have been around for decades, but the key drawback is that the material is static," said Alon Gorodetsky, UCI associate professor of chemical & biomolecular engineering. "We've made a version with changeable properties so you can regulate how much heat is trapped or released."

The researchers took design cues from various species of squids, octopuses and cuttlefish that use their adaptive skin to thrive in aquatic environments.

The skin cells can instantly change from minute points to flattened disks. "We use a similar concept in our work, where we have a layer of these tiny metal 'islands' that border each other," said Erica Leung, a UCI graduate student in chemical & biomolecular engineering.

In an eye-blinkingly brief ceremony at the Imperial Palace, Naruhito, 59, officially succeeded Akihito, 85, an enormously popular monarch who brought the royal family much closer to the people as he emphasized a message of peace in a country haunted by the legacy of war.