Word: kubodera
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...Hisashi Kubodera could have had his pick of universities. But the Japanese student, who speaks three languages and has an aptitude for applied mathematics, knew that getting a degree in his home country was the last thing he wanted - Japanese schools are just too easy, he says. Now a freshman at Yale, he recalls sitting in on a lecture at a Hokkaido-based college to get a feel for the place. The class was "so boring and terrible," Kubodera says, he can't even remember the lecture topic. "In Japan, if you get into college you can graduate no matter...
...Kubodera may be an exceptional student, but his decision to seek higher education overseas is all too common among Japanese youth these days. Japan's universities have fallen on hard times, their reputations so dented that many ambitious students no longer consider them even as a last resort. Beset by international competition, hampered by outmoded curriculums and cloistered, change-resistant administrations, universities are seeing enrollment and tuition revenues decline. The total number of higher-ed students in Japan fell from 2.87 million in 2005 to 2.83 million last year, a loss of some 37,000, according to Japan's Education...
...size of a human head shouldn't be that hard to find. But scientists have never caught a glimpse of a live giant squid in the wild. The cephalopod's reign as the Greta Garbo of the undersea world, however, is over: last week two Japanese scientists?Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori?published the first photographs of a giant squid in action, captured by a robotic camera 900 m below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. For obsessive squid hunters, it's the scientific equivalent of Captain Ahab finally getting his white sperm whale...
...around two weeks every year, lowering into the waters a digital camera and weighted hooks baited with common squid and mashed shrimp. Depth mattered: the giant squid were believed to live about 1,000 m down. "At that point, our squid-watching turned unmistakably into squid-hunting," says Kubodera. No squid took the bait until Sept. 30, 2004, when an 8-m giant with a taste for prawns impaled itself on the hook. For the next four hours the camera clicked while the squid struggled to free itself, swimming back and forth until one of its 5.5-m-long tentacles...
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