English news for Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Hankyu Railway, a train company in Japan, is going to stop putting hanging ads^*1 in its trains. The company announced this on October 14, 2026. The ads are posters that hang from the ceiling inside the train. Hankyu will take them out of all its trains on all its lines. Trains from other companies that run on Hankyu lines will keep their ads.

The last day for the ads is Sunday, April 4, 2027. After the last train that day, there will be no more hanging ads.

The company gave three reasons. Many people now get news and information on their smartphones and other screens. People also spend their time on the train in different ways now. And more people want a quiet and calm ride.

Without the posters, people will be able to see across the train car, and it will feel more open. Hankyu wants the inside of its trains to be more comfortable.

The change will also save paper. The company says it will use about 830,000 fewer hanging ads a year. This number is based on the numbers from 2025.

1. *1 ads: short for advertisements: posters or pictures that tell people to buy something

On October 1, 2026, the school lunch center in Tonami, a city in Toyama Prefecture in Japan, put the day's school lunch on the city's website. The center cooks lunch for the city's schools. It showed the menu^*1 and a photo of the food. It also gave children a short lesson about how to eat bread.

The lunch was a bread roll, milk, meatballs in tomato sauce, a green salad and pot-au-feu^*2.

The center said there are good manners^*3 for eating bread. You should tear off a small piece with your hands and eat it one bite at a time.

The center also explained why it chose these dishes. On days with bread, children often chew less than on days with rice. So the center adds foods like salad or bean dishes to the menu. These foods make children chew more.

1. *1 menu: the list of food for a meal
2. *2 pot-au-feu: a French soup with meat and vegetables cooked for a long time
3. *3 manners: the polite way to do something

A big, bright sign in Osaka, a large city in western Japan, is going to change. The sign shows a man in white running with his arms up. It stands in Dotonbori, a busy shopping and eating area in the city. Many people take photos in front of it.

The sign belongs to Ezaki Glico, a Japanese company that makes sweets and other food. On October 14, the company said that the sign will be turned off at the end of November 2026. Work on a new sign will start in December. The new sign will go up in the spring of 2027.

The sign that stands there now went up in 2014. It is 20 meters high and about 10 meters wide. It is made of about 140,000 small LED^*1 lights. Every day it lights up after the sun goes down and stays on until midnight.

This is not the first time the sign has changed. The first Glico sign went up in 1935. New ones came in 1955, 1963, 1972, 1998, and 2014. The sign that is there now is the sixth one. The new sign will be the seventh.

The sign has done more than show the running man. On World Diabetes Day, it showed videos about staying healthy. It also worked with the Osaka police to give messages that help young people stay out of trouble.

The company says the running man will keep running on the new sign too.

1. *1 LED: a very small electric light that uses little power

A butterfly wing fossil^*1 in Japan has set a world record. It is the oldest fossil in the world of a butterfly species^*2 that is still alive today. The fossil is about 2.5 million^*3 years old. Keio University, a university in Tokyo, the capital of Japan, announced the news on October 13.

The fossil is a front wing about 42 millimeters long. It came from the rock of an old lake in Shin'onsen, a town in Hyogo, a prefecture^*4 in western Japan. About 35 years ago, Masao Baba, a worker at the town office, found it while he was studying the land there. He gave it to the Insect Fossil Museum in the town. The museum is run by the town's board of education^*5, and the fossil has been on show there since then.

A research team studied the wing. Yui Takahashi, a teacher at Keio Yochisha, the elementary school of Keio, led the team. Hiroaki Aiba of Keio and Kotaro Saito of the Research Institute of Evolutionary Biology and the company Koyo Seiki were also on the team. They compared the wing with the wings of about 40 living species in one group of white butterflies. The wing matched one species, Aporia potanini^*6. This butterfly does not live in Japan today. It lives only in northern and northeastern China.

Before this, the oldest fossil of a living butterfly species was about 300,000 years old. That fossil was a different kind of butterfly. It was found in Nasushiobara, a city in Tochigi, a prefecture in eastern Japan. The new fossil is much older. The team's paper^*7 was published online on July 29 in the Journal of Paleontology, a science magazine.

1. *1 fossil: the remains of a plant or animal that lived long ago, kept in rock
2. *2 species: one kind of animal or plant
3. *3 million: 1,000,000
4. *4 prefecture: a large area of Japan with its own local government, like a state
5. *5 board of education: the office of a town or city that looks after its schools and museums
6. *6 Aporia potanini: the science name of one kind of white butterfly
7. *7 paper: a report in which scientists write what they found