A deadly conflict between bears and humans is playing out across Japan, where authorities have deployed the military to protect locals who are using drone-based alert and surveillance systems to track the bears. Since April this year, at least 13 people have been killed and more than 100 have been injured in bear attacks in the country, according to an October report by the Ministry of Environment. The ministry added that the death toll is the highest since Japan began keeping records of bear attacks in 2006. It is also home to Asiatic black bears - also known as Moon bears - which are smaller in size, weighing between 80-200kg (176-440 pounds), and are found on the mainland, which is more densely populated. Both types of bear have been involved in incidents this year, and both are dangerous to humans to varying degrees.

KYOTO – A proof by mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki of a major conundrum in number theory that went unresolved for over 30 years has finally been validated, Kyoto University said Friday following a controversy over his method, which was often labeled too novel or complicated to understand. Accepted for publication by the university's Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences was Mochizuki's 600-page proof of the abc conjecture, which provides immediate proofs for many other famous mathematical problems, including Fermat's last theorem, which took almost 350 years to be demonstrated. The abc conjecture, proposed by European mathematicians in 1985, is an equation of three integers a, b, and c composed of different prime numbers, where a b c, and describing the relationship between the product of the prime numbers and c. "There are a number of new notions and it was hard to understand them," Masaki Kashiwara, head of the team that examined the professor's theory, said at a news conference. He proved the abc conjecture with a "totally new, innovative theory," said fellow professor Akio Tamagawa. "His achievement creates a huge impact in the field of number theory."

In a report posted online last week, Peter Scholze of the University of Bonn and Jakob Stix of Goethe University Frankfurt describe what Stix calls a "serious, unfixable gap" within a mammoth series of papers by Shinichi Mochizuki, a mathematician at Kyoto University who is renowned for his brilliance. Posted online in 2012, Mochizuki's papers supposedly prove the abc conjecture, one of the most far-reaching problems in number theory. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences. Despite multiple conferences dedicated to explicating Mochizuki's proof, number theorists have struggled to come to grips with its underlying ideas. His series of papers, which total more than 500 pages, are written in an impenetrable style, and refer back to a further 500 pages or so of previous work by Mochizuki, creating what one mathematician, Brian Conrad of Stanford University, has called "a sense of infinite regress."