Regardless of whether it is ideal or not, our current society consumes a large amount of materials as necessary goods, while at the same time discharging a large amount of unnecessary materials as by-products and waste. Various efforts are being made to effectively use the earth's limited resources and energy, and to reduce the burden on the global environment as much as possible. As part of these efforts, this presentation will outline recent efforts to recycle metal materials, especially steel materials. About 25% of the crude steel (material for various steel products) produced in Japan is supplied by refining steel scrap generated in Japan and abroad. The steel production process using steel scrap as a raw material presents various challenges that differ from the conventional steel production process using iron ore and coal as raw materials. How are the unique impurities originating from steel scrap controlled and how are they treated? An overview of the material flow focusing on steel scrap reveals that various elements are actually moving through the world together with steel materials.

　In recent years, the human genome has been sequenced on a scale of tens of thousands, but many mysteries still remain. In this talk, I will explain these mysteries and introduce observational and informatics technologies for their elucidation.

　The polar regions are strongly affected by global warming, but the current impact on sea ice is quite different. In the Arctic, summer sea ice has been decreasing year by year, making resource development and shipping routes more feasible. On the other hand, sea ice in Antarctica is not decreasing and reached its largest extent ever in 2014. For the purpose of accumulation and analysis of Japan's long Antarctic observation data, students of the new field have been participating in the Antarctic Research Expedition since 2013, with the main purpose of measuring navigation performance in ship ice and the secondary purpose of sea ice observation. In this lecture, the significance of this observation and the observation activities will be introduced.