Researchers led by Professor Yasuo Nihei of Tokyo University of Science, with Mr. Ryutaro Otsuka and Mr. Kengo Ohno, modeled a real 2023 flood in the Ichinomiya River Basin, where drainage channels extend into mountainous areas. They simulated rainfall runoff, river flow, and flooding under different drainage channel configurations and assessed effects on water levels, discharge, and the basin’s overall water balance.

“In typical large-scale flood analyses, rivers are primarily modeled explicitly, while the influence of smaller channels and drainage pathways upstream is often represented indirectly through runoff parameters. However, since channels play a crucial role in draining rainwater into rivers, we believed that directly reflecting them in the model would allow us to reproduce water movement within the basin more closely to real-world conditions while reducing reliance on parameter adjustments,” says Prof. Nihei.

The Ichinomiya River Basin covers 203 km2 in Chiba Prefecture, Japan, and has experienced repeated typhoon-related flooding. After severe flooding caused by Typhoon Bualoi in 2019, flood-management measures were developed under the RBDRSA project. In 2023, Typhoon Yun-yeung caused another flood while these measures were still being implemented, providing a real event for the researchers to model.

The team divided the watershed into cells representing the land surface, small drainage channels, and larger rivers, and defined drainage channels using a minimum upstream drainage area (Amin), a threshold determining which parts of the watershed are represented as channels. They ran the model with seven configurations, using Amin values from 1.00 to 0.025 km2, with lower values progressively adding smaller channels.

The drainage network strongly affected water movement. Including more small channels provided additional pathways for rainwater to reach rivers, reducing water retained on slopes and inundation depth in flooded areas. It also increased water volume in channels and rivers and caused river water levels and discharge to rise earlier during the initial flood stage, highlighting the importance of drainage configuration in determining both the magnitude of simulated flooding and the timing of water-level rises.

Of the seven configurations, an Amin of 0.1 km2 was sufficient to reproduce the main drainage channels, while values between 0.1 and 0.2 km2 provided good accuracy for reproducing river water levels. This threshold range was identified for the Ichinomiya River Basin and the September 2023 flood; appropriate values may differ depending on watershed topography, drainage channel characteristics, and modeling conditions. Including even smaller channels did not always improve the model and could reduce accuracy by representing channels that do not actually exist.

According to the researchers, the threshold upstream drainage area may be a more appropriate measure than conventional drainage density for determining how far upstream channels should be represented, particularly when topographical characteristics of the watershed are important. However, the appropriate value depends on watershed characteristics, and further validation across different river basins and flood events is necessary.

“The Amin method for designing waterway networks presented in this study can be used to improve models that comprehensively evaluate rainfall runoff, river flow, and flooding across an entire watershed,” says Prof. Nihei. These findings could help the RBDRSA project improve evaluation of flood-management measures, contribute to more reliable flood risk assessments, and support quantitative evaluation of basin-wide measures. Further validation in other watersheds and under different flood conditions could support more quantitative assessments of their effectiveness under future climate change, although this study did not directly simulate future climate scenarios.

The study, titled “Impact of drainage channel network on hydrologic and hydraulic responses over the entire basin,” was made available online on September 30, 2026, and will be published in Volume 68 of the Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies on December 1, 2026. The work was supported by the River Fund from the Japan River Foundation, and the authors declare no known competing financial interests.

The question of how much detail a drainage network requires in a flood model touches on a long-standing challenge in hydrology. Watersheds are intricate systems in which rainwater follows countless paths before reaching a main river, and no model can represent every one of those paths explicitly. Modelers therefore face a trade-off: representing more channels captures more of the real drainage structure but demands more computational resources and more detailed input data, while representing fewer channels forces the model to compensate through calibrated parameters that may not hold under different flood conditions. The approach tested in the Ichinomiya River Basin offers a way to navigate this trade-off by letting a single, physically meaningful threshold decide where explicit channel representation begins.

The concept of a minimum upstream drainage area has deep roots in terrain analysis. When digital elevation models are used to trace the flow of water across a landscape, every point in the watershed accumulates drainage from the land upstream of it. Setting a threshold on that accumulated area effectively draws a line between hillslope and channel: cells draining areas larger than the threshold are treated as channels, while the rest are treated as land surface. Lowering the threshold pushes that line further upstream, extending the modeled network into progressively smaller headwater hollows. This is why the seven configurations tested by the researchers produced networks of increasing extent as the threshold dropped from 1.00 km2 to 0.025 km2.

Traditional drainage density, defined as the total length of channels per unit area of the basin, has long served as a summary measure of how finely dissected a landscape is. However, drainage density is a single aggregate number that says little about where channels sit within the basin or how the network connects hillslopes to the main river. The researchers’ suggestion that a threshold drainage area may be more appropriate than drainage density reflects the fact that flood response depends not just on how much channel exists, but on where it exists. In steep, forested headwaters, the upstream extent of the network determines how quickly rainwater is collected and delivered to larger channels, which in turn shapes the timing of downstream water-level rises.

The finding that adding ever smaller channels can degrade model accuracy deserves particular attention. It might seem intuitive that more detail is always better, but the drainage networks derived from elevation data are only as good as the data themselves. At fine thresholds, the extracted network can include features that do not correspond to real channels on the ground, introducing artificial flow pathways that route water in ways the actual landscape does not. In effect, the model can become over-specified, representing a drainage system that exists only in the digital terrain data rather than in the watershed itself. This means the goal is not maximum detail but the right level of detail, matched to both the terrain and the quality of the underlying data.

The timing effects observed in the simulations carry practical weight for flood forecasting. River water levels that rise earlier in a simulation give forecasters an earlier signal of an emerging flood, and the study showed that the configuration of the drainage network directly controlled when simulated levels and discharge began to climb during the initial stage of the Typhoon Yun-yeung flood. A model whose network is too sparse may delay the simulated response, potentially underestimating how quickly a river will react to intense rainfall. Because the researchers modeled an actual flood event, their results provide a concrete demonstration that network design influences not only how much flooding is predicted but when it is predicted to begin.

The Ichinomiya River Basin offers a useful setting for this kind of test precisely because its drainage channels extend into mountainous terrain, where the question of upstream extent is most acute. In lowland basins, channels are typically well mapped and their representation is less ambiguous. In mountainous and forested headwaters, however, the network can stretch far upstream, and the point at which it should be truncated is far less obvious. The threshold range of 0.1 to 0.2 km2 identified for this basin gives modelers working in similar terrain a starting point, while the authors’ caution that appropriate values depend on watershed topography and channel characteristics underscores that the threshold should be validated locally rather than transferred blindly.

The study’s limitations frame the scope of its conclusions. The threshold range was derived from a single basin and a single flood event, and the researchers note that further validation across different river basins and flood conditions is necessary before the method can be applied with confidence elsewhere. The work also did not directly evaluate early warning systems or evacuation decisions, even though more reliable flood simulations could ultimately inform such applications, and it did not simulate future climate change scenarios. What the study does establish is a principled, transferable framework: by tuning a single physically interpretable parameter against observed water levels, modelers can determine how far upstream a drainage network needs to be represented to reproduce basin-wide hydrologic and hydraulic behavior without relying on arbitrary choices or excessive parameter adjustment.

For basin-wide flood management programs such as RBDRSA, the practical implication is that the fidelity of the drainage network is not a secondary modeling detail but a first-order control on simulated flood behavior. As computational models take on a larger role in evaluating flood-management measures before they are built, ensuring that those models represent the watershed’s drainage structure at an appropriate level of detail becomes a prerequisite for trustworthy quantitative assessment.

Subject of Research: Flood modeling

Article Title: How much of a basin’s drainage network should flood models capture?

Article References: How much of a basin’s drainage network should flood models capture?. Original publication (Bibliographic details unavailable.)

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: flood modeling, drainage network, Ichinomiya River Basin, hydrology, Tokyo University of Science, rainfall runoff, river discharge, inundation, RBDRSA, watershed, much, basin

Moral distress was first introduced by ethicist Andrew Jameton, and it has now been studied for more than four decades. Despite this long history, most existing research has rested on a largely unexamined assumption: that clinicians already recognize what they ought to do, and that the real problem begins only when external forces prevent them from doing it. Far less attention has been paid to a more fundamental question. How do healthcare professionals come to recognize that a situation is ethically significant in the first place? By overlooking this question, researchers have left the concept of moral distress somewhat blurry, difficult to distinguish from ordinary workplace stress, occupational burnout, disagreements about the appropriate course of care, or conflicts over professional roles and responsibilities.

A new study seeks to close that gap by returning to the philosophical foundations of the concept. Professor Tomohide Ibuki from the Institute of Arts and Sciences at Tokyo University of Science and Dr. Keiichiro Yamamoto from the Department of Clinical Research Management at the Center for Clinical Sciences, Japan Institute for Health Security, revisited moral distress from a philosophical perspective. Their paper, published online in the journal Nursing Ethics on July 9, 2026, draws on the work of the contemporary philosopher John McDowell to propose a new way of understanding how healthcare professionals develop moral sensitivity and why moral distress arises when that sensitivity collides with institutional reality.

The philosophical core of the paper rests on McDowell’s account of perception, second nature, and the space of reasons, including his discussion of Bildung, or ethical formation. On this view, moral sensitivity in healthcare is not an innate trait that some clinicians happen to possess and others lack. Instead, it is a cultivated capacity, developed through education and clinical experience, to perceive the ethically significant features of a clinical situation as reasons for action. Through years of training and practice, professionals learn to perceive a patient’s pain, a compromised sense of dignity, or an unmet need for care not as neutral clinical facts but as ethical reasons that call for a response. Perception itself, in this framework, is already moral.

This account allows the authors to philosophically reconstruct moral distress in a way that departs from the standard psychological picture. Rather than treating moral distress merely as stress or frustration at being blocked from acting, they describe it as a form of normative suffering. It occurs when a morally sensitive professional recognizes ethically significant reasons for action but is prevented by external constraints from responding to them. The distinction matters because it separates moral distress from general psychological distress. Ordinary stress can arise from workload, fatigue, or interpersonal conflict. Moral distress, by contrast, arises specifically when clinicians recognize ethical reasons for action but are unable to respond because of institutional or organizational constraints. The suffering is tied to the perceived ethical demand itself.

From this reconstruction flows one of the paper’s central and most striking claims, which the authors call the paradox of moral distress. As they explain, paradoxically, healthcare professionals with greater moral sensitivity may be more likely to recognize ethical problems and, under organizational and institutional constraints, more likely to experience moral distress. In other words, the clinicians who suffer most may not be those who are weakest or least able to cope, but those whose ethical perception is sharpest. Moral distress, on this reading, may sometimes be a sign of strong ethical awareness rather than personal weakness or an inability to handle the demands of the job.

The authors are careful to note that this relationship between sensitivity and distress is a conceptual proposal that remains to be examined empirically. The framework does not yet rest on data showing that more morally sensitive clinicians report more distress, and future studies will be needed to test whether the paradox holds in practice. Even so, the proposal offers a clearer foundation for that research than the concept has previously enjoyed. By specifying how moral sensitivity is formed and how it relates to the experience of being constrained, the framework gives researchers a more precise target for empirical investigation, survey design, and intervention studies across different clinical settings.

If supported by future research, the work could reshape how healthcare organizations approach the problem. Rather than focusing only on helping individuals become more resilient or better able to cope with stress, healthcare systems should also examine whether clinicians are given the opportunity, resources, and institutional support to act on the ethical concerns they identify. The authors argue that hospitals should combine ethics education with organizational support, including opportunities for ethical discussion, accessible ethics consultation, responsive leadership, adequate staffing and resources, and decision-making processes that ensure clinicians’ ethical concerns are heard and addressed. On this view, an organization that treats moral distress purely as an individual wellness issue risks missing the structural conditions that produce it.

The implications for ethics education are equally significant. If moral sensitivity is a cultivated capacity, then education should deliberately foster the ability to recognize ethically significant situations. But the authors emphasize that such education must be paired with organizational cultures that encourage ethical discussion and shared decision-making. Training clinicians to see ethical reasons for action while leaving them powerless to respond would, on the framework’s own logic, deepen rather than relieve the problem. Education and institutional reform therefore need to advance together, so that the capacity for ethical perception is matched by genuine opportunities to act on it.

Ultimately, the researchers hope their work will encourage healthcare institutions to rethink moral distress and to see it as a signal that organizational conditions may be standing in the way of ethical care. As they put it, their framework could help create workplaces where healthcare professionals can more readily express ethical concerns and could inform educational and organizational improvements that support better patient care. The authors also suggest that addressing moral distress requires greater attention to organizational ethics and institutional reforms, rather than relying solely on individual coping strategies. If the paradox they propose proves correct, the most ethically attuned members of a healthcare team may be its most valuable early-warning system, and listening to them may be one of the most effective ways to protect both clinician well-being and the quality of patient care.

Subject of Research: A philosophical reconstruction of moral distress and moral sensitivity in healthcare practice

Article Title: New philosophical framework reframes moral distress in healthcare

Article References: New philosophical framework reframes moral distress in healthcare. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: moral distress, healthcare ethics, nursing ethics, moral sensitivity, John McDowell, burnout, clinician well-being, organizational culture, ethics education, patient care, normative suffering, Tokyo University of Science

The research, led by Associate Professor Isao Shitanda of the Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry in the Faculty of Science and Technology at Tokyo University of Science, was published online in ACS Omega on September 21, 2026. Co-authored by second-year master’s student Takuma Fujisawa, the study describes a fully integrated system: screen-printed ion-selective electrodes for sodium and potassium, a printed liquid-junction reference electrode, a fabric-based sample transport layer, and custom digital electronics packaged in a wristwatch form factor that can process, store, and transmit data. The work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B), Grant Number 24K02819.

To understand why this integration matters, it helps to look at how wearable ion sensors actually work. Most of them are potentiometric devices, which means they do not measure a concentration directly. Instead, they measure a voltage that changes predictably with the concentration of a specific ion in the sample touching the electrode. An ion-selective electrode is designed to respond preferentially to one ion species, such as sodium or potassium, generating a potential that tracks that ion’s activity in sweat. But a single electrode cannot give a meaningful reading on its own. Every potentiometric measurement is a comparison against a second, unchanging potential, and that is the job of the reference electrode.

The reference electrode is the quiet workhorse of electrochemistry, and it is also the weak link in many printed wearable sensors. Conventional printed reference electrodes can take considerable time to stabilize before they deliver a steady potential, and until they do, the readings from the ion-selective electrodes are unreliable. For a device meant to be strapped on and used immediately, whether on a factory floor or a running trail, a long pre-adjustment period is a serious practical obstacle. Continuous monitoring in dynamic, real-world contexts demands a reference electrode that is ready almost as soon as the sweat arrives.

The Tokyo University of Science team attacked this problem with a liquid-junction reference electrode built by screen printing. The key ingredient is silica gel embedded in the liquid junction, which facilitates water permeation into the electrolyte layer. That permeation allows the reference electrode to reach rapid initial stabilization, dramatically shortening the time between putting on the device and obtaining trustworthy measurements. Because the electrode is printed rather than assembled from bulky conventional components, it fits naturally into a flat, flexible, low-profile sensor that can sit against the skin on the wrist.

Getting sweat to the electrodes is its own engineering challenge, and the researchers addressed it with a dedicated sample transport layer. This layer consists of fabric and superabsorbent fiber placed over the electrodes. Its job is twofold: it helps wet the sensing area as sweat is produced, and it facilitates transport of the sample through the sensing region so that fresh sweat, carrying up-to-date ion information, continuously reaches the electrodes. Without such a layer, a wearable sensor can sit dry against the skin or read stale, pooled fluid, either of which undermines the goal of real-time monitoring.

The sensing elements alone do not make a wearable device, so the team integrated them with digital electronics in a wristwatch-type package. The custom device processes the signals from the sodium- and potassium-selective electrodes, transmits them wirelessly to a host computer, and simultaneously stores them locally on a micro-SD card. That combination of live transmission and onboard storage is important for field use, where wireless links can drop or where data may need to be reviewed after the fact. The wearer gets continuous monitoring without any interruption to their activity, and the researcher or safety officer gets a complete record.

The most striking demonstration came not in the laboratory but at an active construction site. One construction worker wore the wristwatch device through a normal workday, including breaks, hydration, and meals, while carrying out usual tasks around the site. Over approximately two hours and forty-five minutes, the device acquired sodium- and potassium-responsive signals in real time as the worker moved and worked. The measurements were successfully transmitted wirelessly to a host computer and simultaneously stored on the device, showing that the integrated system could acquire and relay ion-responsive signals under the messy, moving, sweaty conditions of genuine fieldwork rather than the controlled stillness of a lab bench.

Dr. Shitanda emphasized that the breakthrough is one of integration rather than novel materials. According to the researchers, the central achievement of the work lies not in proposing a new electrode material, but in combining a printed electrode, a sample transport mechanism, and a wireless measurement circuit, and demonstrating the feasibility of that combination in a real-world environment. This framing matters for anyone following the wearable-sensor field: elegant chemistry in a paper is common, but a printed, wireless, wrist-worn system that survives a full shift on a construction site is rare, and it is exactly the kind of systems-level proof that turns laboratory concepts into practical technology.

The researchers are careful about what has and has not been proven. Quantitative sweat analysis will require controlled sweating experiments and further validation, so the device should be understood today as a demonstration of field feasibility for an integrated wearable electrolyte-sensing system rather than a finished clinical or occupational health product. Even so, the implications are broad. Because the electrodes can be fabricated using printing technology, the approach lends itself to low-cost manufacturing and large-scale production, which is essential if wearable electrolyte monitors are to move from research demonstrations to devices worn by thousands of workers and athletes. Dr. Shitanda noted that the technology could serve as a foundation for acquiring information about ions contained in sweat without interrupting work or exercise in construction sites, manufacturing plants, sports, and outdoor activities, and that in the future, by combining this information with data such as sweat volume and water intake, it could be applied to health management and hydration support in hot environments. As heat stress grows into an ever more pressing occupational and athletic concern, a printed wristwatch that quietly reads the body’s electrolyte story as it unfolds may prove to be one of the more consequential wearables on the horizon.

Subject of Research: Wearable potentiometric sweat sensors for real-time sodium and potassium monitoring

Article Title: Wristwatch-type wearable sensor enables real-time monitoring of sodium and potassium

Article References: Wristwatch-type wearable sensor enables real-time monitoring of sodium and potassium. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: wearable sensor, sweat analysis, sodium, potassium, ion-selective electrode, reference electrode, screen printing, potentiometry, real-time monitoring, hydration, occupational health, Tokyo University of Science

The study was led by Assistant Professor Farid Labib of the Research Institute for Science and Technology at Tokyo University of Science, together with Associate Professor Kazuhiro Nawa of the Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials at Tohoku University and Professor Ryuji Tamura of Tokyo University of Science. The team focused on Tsai-type compounds, a class of multi-shell cluster-based structures in which moment-bearing rare-earth atoms occupy an icosahedral site. In these materials, nested atomic shells, including the rhombic triacontahedron, icosidodecahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron, and an inner tetrahedron, build up a cluster architecture whose rare-earth icosahedral shell carries the magnetic moments responsible for the compounds’ magnetic response.

Historically, materials chemists have relied on chemically tunable parameters to organize the magnetic properties of complex intermetallics. The most influential of these is the valence-electron concentration, commonly expressed as the electron-per-atom, or e/a, ratio. In metallic systems such as Heusler alloys and approximant crystals, the e/a ratio has been widely used to classify magnetic ground states. In gold-based Tsai-type approximant crystals specifically, the e/a ratio was found to control whether the compounds developed long-range antiferromagnetic order, long-range ferromagnetic order, or a spin-glass state in which the magnetic moments freeze in random orientations. But the predictive power of e/a has a serious limitation: it does not transfer cleanly across different alloy families and constituent elements.

That limitation matters because quasicrystal-based intermetallics are considered promising platforms for exploring emergent magnetic phenomena and quantum states not found in ordinary periodic crystals. Without a reliable, experimentally accessible parameter to guide the search, researchers have lacked a systematic way to identify which compositions are worth synthesizing. As Dr. Labib explained, quasicrystals are among the most uniquely structured materials discovered to date and are expected to exhibit novel magnetic states and quantum phenomena not found in ordinary crystals, yet until now there has been no unified guideline for systematically exploring these phenomena in quasicrystals and their approximant crystals.

To close that gap, the team synthesized a family of gold-based 1/1 approximant crystals containing aluminum or gallium and the rare-earth elements terbium, dysprosium, and holmium, and then systematically measured their structural and magnetic properties. Approximant crystals are periodic structures whose local atomic environments closely mimic those of true quasicrystals, making them experimentally tractable stand-ins for the quasiperiodic originals. The measurements revealed a nearly monotonic inverse correlation between the e/a ratio and the lattice parameter, meaning that as the electron concentration per atom rises, the physical size of the cubic unit cell shrinks in a regular, predictable way.

The researchers then extended their experiments to non-Heisenberg Tsai-type compounds containing terbium, dysprosium, and holmium. These compounds are called non-Heisenberg because their magnetic moments do not behave as simple, freely rotating spins; instead, the crystal electric field generated by the surrounding lattice imposes strong uniaxial magnetic anisotropy that favors specific orientations of the moments. Under these conditions, the team observed characteristic whirling antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic orders, in which the constrained moments arrange themselves in swirling patterns dictated by the interplay of anisotropy and the conduction-electron-mediated interactions between rare-earth moments on the icosahedral shell.

When the researchers plotted the magnetic ground states against the lattice parameter, the result was striking. The compounds organized with high accuracy according to the size of the unit cell, whereas the conventional e/a classification showed systematic shifts depending on which rare-earth element was present and what the alloy composition was. The phase boundaries were sharply defined. Compounds with lattice parameters above approximately 14.72 angstroms adopted the whirling antiferromagnetic state. Those with lattice parameters between 14.62 and 14.72 angstroms became whirling ferromagnets. And those with lattice parameters below approximately 14.62 angstroms froze into spin-glass states. These well-defined thresholds establish the lattice parameter as a unified and experimentally accessible structural descriptor for predicting magnetic ground states in the Tsai-type family.

The physical interpretation is that structural length scales, alongside electron concentration, must be explicitly considered when understanding the conduction-electron-mediated magnetic interactions in these complex alloys. In rare-earth intermetallics, the magnetic moments communicate with one another indirectly through the conduction electrons, and the strength and sign of that communication depend sensitively on the distances between the moment-bearing atoms. A change in the lattice parameter therefore directly reshapes the geometry of the magnetic interaction network on the icosahedral shell, which in turn determines whether the system settles into antiferromagnetic whirling, ferromagnetic whirling, or glassy freezing. The e/a ratio captures part of this physics but conflates it with element-specific electronic effects, which is why it fails to produce a single, element-independent classification.

The practical implications extend well beyond classification. Because the lattice parameter can be tuned through alloy composition and measured with routine structural characterization, it offers materials designers a direct control knob for targeting a desired magnetic ground state. Dr. Nawa noted that the unified magnetic phase diagram constructed in the study can serve as a practical roadmap for the systematic exploration of new magnetic quasicrystals and approximant crystals exhibiting novel magnetic orders and quantum phenomena, and that it can provide a guideline for designing new magnetic materials with targeted magnetic ground states, opening new opportunities for discovering unconventional magnetism in quasiperiodic and complex intermetallic systems.

The study was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science through multiple Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, by the Murata Science and Education Foundation, and by the Japan Science and Technology Agency through its CREST program. The authors declared no competing interests. For a field that has spent decades cataloguing the exotic magnetism of quasiperiodic materials one compound at a time, the message of this work is unusually clean: in the Tsai-type family, the size of the atomic cage appears to decide the fate of the spins inside it. If the lattice-parameter thresholds hold across further alloy families, the search for new magnetic quasicrystals may become far less of a treasure hunt and far more of an engineering exercise, with the next generation of unconventional magnets designed first on paper, in angstroms.

Subject of Research: Lattice-parameter control of magnetic ground states in Tsai-type quasicrystals and approximant crystals

Article Title: Lattice parameter as a unified parameter governing magnetic ground states in Tsai-type compounds

Article References: Lattice parameter as a unified parameter governing magnetic ground states in Tsai-type compounds. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: quasicrystals, Tsai-type clusters, lattice parameter, magnetic ground states, antiferromagnetism, ferromagnetism, spin glass, rare-earth intermetallics, electron-per-atom ratio, magnetic anisotropy, approximant crystals, Tokyo University of Science