Japan now has more than 100,000 people aged 100 or older, marking the first time the country’s centenarian population has reached that level.
There were 107,677 people at least 100 years old as of Sept. 1, according to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. That’s 7,914 more such people than the previous year and the 56th consecutive year the number has increased. Japan also has the highest national population of centenarians in the world, according to The Independent. Japan is also the first country to surpass 100,000 centenarians, according to Scientific American.
The United States had an estimated 101,000 centenarians in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That figure is a projection rather than a current census count, so it is not directly comparable with Japan’s 2026 figure.
Women account for the overwhelming majority of Japan’s centenarians. The ministry counted 94,298 women and 13,379 men aged 100 or older.
The milestone comes as Japan faces a growing demographic challenge: More people are living into old age while fewer children are being born. The combination is putting pressure on public resources and the country’s ability to care for its older population, Scientific American reported.
Why do so many people in Japan live to 100?
Japan has long been known for its high life expectancy, and researchers have pointed to several factors that may help explain residents’ longevity.
Scientific American reported that researchers have linked Japan’s long life expectancy to relatively low obesity rates, healthy diets, widespread health screenings and affordable health care. Those factors are associated with lower death rates from conditions including heart disease and cancer.
The BBC also reported that Japanese diets often feature fish, vegetables and rice, while older adults commonly remain active by walking, cycling, using public transportation and stretching.
Japan’s centenarian population has grown substantially since the government began tracking it. There were 153 people 100 or older in 1963. The number passed 1,000 in 1981 and 10,000 in 1998, according to BBC.
Health Minister Kenichiro Ueno said the increase is a positive sign, telling reporters he was pleased that so many people were able to remain active and healthy for so long, according to CNN.
Japan faces challenges as its population ages
The growing number of centenarians comes with a larger demographic challenge.
Japan’s lower birth rate and shrinking working-age population are putting additional pressure on public resources and making it more difficult to support an increasingly older population, according to Scientific American.
Jay Olshansky, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago, told Scientific American that longer lives also raise an important question about how healthy people remain during those additional years.
“What’s really critical about this is quality of life,” Olshansky said.
Japan’s health ministry also cited improvements in living conditions, diet and nutrition, as well as advances in medical technology, as factors behind the increase in the number of people reaching 100. The ministry said sustaining Japan’s social security system will become increasingly important as the population continues to age.
Reporter Anthony Thompson can be reached at ajthompson@usatodayco.com, or on X @athompsonUSAT.

My favorite part of wearing the Specs, Snap’s new augmented reality glasses, was playing dominoes. Sitting across the table from a Snap employee wearing the same pair of chunky glasses, I could select a virtual domino with a pinch and then move my hand to drop it in place, watching the tile snap down in front of us on a real table. It was unlike anything I’ve tried in other VR headsets or smart glasses — the ability to sit with another person and have a shared digital experience.
Snap really believes in AR glasses. The company has spent more than half a decade developing the technology, producing two generations of glasses that only ever shipped to a small number of developers. The company seems to want to untether itself from the limitations of being just one app in a big store and instead pioneer the next great platform.
Now, Snap is nearly ready to launch its first pair of AR glasses for consumers, the Specs, sometime this fall. That suggests Snap thinks these meet its vision well enough for regular people to enjoy using the $2,195 glasses. They’re certainly full of big ideas. But after an afternoon of testing at Snap’s offices this week, I’m skeptical of whether they’ll be fully ready for primetime.
The Specs are big, black, bold glasses that come in two lens sizes, 47mm and 52mm. Part of why they’re so bold is almost certainly to make a statement — there’s no mistaking these for a regular pair of glasses, like you might with Meta’s Ray-Bans. (They’re a little too conspicuous for me personally; my glasses style is squarely “Elder Millennial Who Shops At Warby Parker.”) But they’re also so chunky because they house all the hardware necessary to let the Specs function as a standalone computer, meaning they don’t need to be tethered to a phone, compute puck, or external battery.
They may be chunky, but the Specs aren’t quite as heavy as they look. They’re heavier than my Warby Parker glasses, of course, which I can comfortably wear for most of the day. But the Specs didn’t drag on my face like a full-on VR headset. The Specs felt sturdy, too: I shook my head around and they didn’t fall off or even really slip. I wouldn’t suggest playing pickup basketball in these, but they’ll stay on your face while walking around. They made my ears sag just a little, though. And I wasn’t able to use the Specs enough to tell you if they’d start to feel uncomfortable over the course of a full four-hour battery cycle.
Actually using the Specs is kind of like using a hybrid of smart glasses and a VR headset. In front of your eyes, you can see menus, app windows, and elements of whatever app (“lens”) you’re using, like the digital dominoes. Those elements appear over whatever you’re looking at with your eyes through the lenses of the glasses, which have waveguide displays that can show “16 million colors” and “sharp, high-resolution visuals” (Snap hasn’t specified the exact resolution).
Thanks to hand-tracking tech in the Specs, you can pinch and drag to manipulate parts of the interface, such as resizing a window or moving a domino onto the game board, and Snap says you can even snap your fingers to take a picture in the Specs’ Snapchat app. Clever. You can also have windows follow along as you move your head, in case you want to keep a window in your vision no matter where you’re looking. You can access a home button, a Control Center-like menu, and status information like the time by holding up your palm in a setup that reminds me of the ill-fated Humane Pin.
In my limited testing, it was all rather finicky. I often had to pinch a few times or make sure my hand was placed in just the right spot to get something to work the way it should. I never quite nailed the two-part action of flipping my hand up and then using my other hand to press the home button. While standing in the sun, it was much harder to see the augmented reality graphics.
Snap has beaten competitors like Meta to shipping a pair of glasses with displays in both lenses, letting it deliver a true AR effect and not just another flat screen. But by putting the AR display dead center in your vision, the Specs’ 51-degree field of view becomes a major limitation. It meant that digital elements kept slipping out of sight during my demos, which ruined the illusion that they were actually in the real world. While watching Lanterns on HBO Max in a browser in a moving car, I had to shrink the window to make it easier to see in front of me. While playing dominoes, I had to keep physically turning my head to see my dominoes and the playing board and back again.
Because it’s 2026, the Specs also have a dedicated AI chatbot assistant, but in my limited experience it was slow and inconsistent. With a “Hey Specs” command, I asked it to show me funny cat videos on YouTube, as suggested by a Snap rep. I had to ask it twice because it didn’t pick up the command the first time. When the command worked, it then took about 15 seconds for the Specs to pull up a YouTube page with search results for funny cat videos.
Watching that video also revealed to me a bizarre social interaction that people will have to come to grips with if AR glasses gain any sort of traction. On that YouTube page, I picked some random cat video collection, and it played in the background while the Snap rep kept talking to me. Even though the Specs were playing audio through the onboard speakers, the Snap rep standing right next to me said they couldn’t hear anything. That made me feel weird — these glasses theoretically let you watch and listen to a private video while staring somebody else straight in the eye. Even when I wasn’t watching the video, I found myself constantly distracted from the in-person conversations I was having during the demo because my eyes were caught up with what they were looking at while my hands were focused on arcane gestures for tasks that only I could see. I didn’t feel very present.
Like Meta glasses, which are currently grappling with a “pervert” glasses reputation, the Specs also let you take photos and record video. They too have a privacy indicator light, and it’s arguably more prominent than Meta’s take: Instead of a light that’s off to the side, the Specs’ light is right in the center of the glasses. But I don’t know if, given the growing pushback against Meta’s glasses, a blinking light is enough to deter concerns about potential unwanted recording.
In 2024, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told The Verge that there is an opportunity for computers to evolve to “support the ways that humans have long interacted socially by looking at each other eye to eye with much more natural interaction.” Today, Snap has a simpler message: It says that its vision with Specs is to “make computing more human.” But even in my controlled demos, I found that Specs were actually more computer than other hardware; the glasses are unmissable on my head, and the digital content that only I could see was getting in the way of me interacting with the other people in the room.
Still, these headsets are coming. Meta is working on a pair, Google has a new glasses initiative, OpenAI has reportedly considered smart glasses, and Apple is apparently planning to announce Ray-Ban Meta-like smart glasses next year (and it’s worth noting that former Apple CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly praised AR in the past). It’s clear they all see the next frontier as glasses with tech like cameras and screens that sit on your head. Specs will be the first real test of what AR glasses can be. But even after Snap’s years of work, they still might be coming out too soon.

The US Congress has passed a sweeping bill allowing Donald Trump to raise tariffs on top buyers of Russian energy and issue other punishing sanctions against the Kremlin following a pitched battle between lawmakers backing Ukraine and sceptics worried the bill gives the president too much power.
The Lindsey O Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 passed in a 262-159 vote on the last day before Congress goes on recess ahead of the midterm elections. Graham, who died earlier this year, co-authored and submitted the bill more than a year and a half ago.
The long delay in the vote was widely considered to be scepticism from the Trump administration, which had opposed additional sanctions and then recently changed its stance to support tabling the bill as efforts to negotiate with the Kremlin to end the war have yielded few results.
However the bill faced last-minute hurdles in Congress as members of the Republican party’s isolationist wing were joined by Democrats who warned that Trump could use the bill’s new tariffs authority against allies instead.
The bill would mandate new sanctions on Russian political and military officials, and foreign networks helping to supply Russia’s war machine and evade existing sanctions. It would also target Russia’s so-called fleet of “shadow tankers”, which have allowed the country to continue to ship crude around the world despite sanctions on its energy exports.
It would also allow Trump to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the top purchasers of Russian energy, including China, as well as other countries helping the Kremlin evade sanctions.
Senior Democrats voiced opposition to the bill during a heated floor debate. “Why in the world would this Congress give this president additional authority to visit that kind of economic harm on the American people?” said Hakeem Jeffries, the leading Democrat in the House, during a speech on Wednesday, adding he would vote against the bill.
Democratic staffers supporting the bill said that it offered a “last chance” to increase sanctions on Russia before Ukraine entered a “long winter”. Russia has improved the drone technology it has used to strike Ukrainian infrastructure as Kyiv has suffered a shortage of anti-air missiles, leaving the country in a dire position.
Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican supporting the bill, called it the US Congress’ “Churchill vs Chamberlain Moment on Russia”.
“Choking off the money funding a war of conquest in Europe is exactly what that authority should be used for, and Congress deciding to do that is Congress doing its constitutional job,” he said, rejecting arguments by Democrats that the bill gave Trump too much authority to slap tariffs on foreign countries.
The bill passed the Senate last month in a landslide 86-11 vote. However it faced more pushback in the House of Representatives. A Tuesday rule vote allowing consideration of Senate amendments to the bill passed by just 214-211, with two renegade Democrats joining Republicans to vote in favour of what they said was an act of support for Ukraine. That vote led to senior Democrats holding terse talks with their fellow party members.
“I’m proud to represent one of the largest Ukrainian communities in America – people who have lost fathers, mothers, sons and daughters in the fight to defeat fascism,” wrote Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, one of the two Democrat representatives, in a statement on Tuesday.
“I’ll always stand with my community’s values, and am grateful for the 86 senators who voted to send this bill to the House. My vote today gets us one step closer to enacting these sanctions into law and I look forward to voting tomorrow to cut off the flow of Russian oil money fuelling this war.”
The Ukrainian government has said it supported the bill, and hundreds of pro-Ukrainian activists calling for tougher sanctions on Russia held advocacy talks in Washington DC in the days leading up to the vote.
“We support any initiative that is in the interest of Ukraine and Ukrainians,” said Denys Sienik, the Chargé d’Affaires at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC. “So if we are talking about the possibility of putting more pressure on Russia so that it holds the Russian war machine, of course, we are there, and we are grateful to every senator, to every congressman and congresswoman for their voice and, and for their support.”

WASHINGTON — Under pressure to act on unpopular data centers, the House on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed bipartisan legislation aimed at shielding consumers from higher energy costs when new data centers are built in their communities.
The vote was nearly unanimous, 417-3, with the only opposition coming from progressive Reps. Summer Lee, D-Pa., Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. Because GOP leaders brought the bill to the floor under a fast-tracking procedure known as suspension, support from two-thirds of voting lawmakers was required.
The bill, dubbed the Ratepayers Protection Act, is the only legislation related to artificial intelligence that was scheduled for a vote this week as Congress considers its response to dire warnings from some former AI employees about its dangers.
With the House holding its final votes before the midterm elections on Wednesday evening, and the Senate only staying in Washington a few more weeks, not much more is expected to get done to address the AI issue until at least the post-election lame-duck session.
The data center bill was co-sponsored by Reps. Gabe Evans, R-Colo., and Kathy Castor, D-Fla., both members of the Energy and Commerce Committee.
It aims to put the onus and responsibility on tech and data center companies — rather than consumers — to pay for power upgrades required to operate new large data centers.
Specifically, the legislation would create a federal standard for state utility regulators to consider when creating rules for large, high-power data centers to cover the costs of power generation, transmission lines and other infrastructure upgrades needed to power these facilities, according to Evans.
Data centers provide the computing power and storage for artificial intelligence. The Evans-Castor bill, however, does not address any of the recent warnings from AI researchers: that the fast-moving technology could cause human extinction. And it’s unclear what the Senate will do with the bill, if anything. The upper chamber has its own set of data center bills, but it hasn’t moved any.
“Hardworking families should not have to subsidize the energy demands of data centers,” Evans said in a statement after the vote. “America needs the infrastructure to lead the world in AI and outcompete Communist China, but we cannot have that growth at the expense of hardworking families, farmers, seniors, and small businesses.”
Evans, in his first term, is one of the most vulnerable House Republicans of the cycle; Cook Political Report characterized his race against Democratic state Rep. Manny Rutinel in Colorado as a “toss-up.”
Evans and other at-risk lawmakers had been pressing GOP leaders for a vote on data centers, which have emerged as a key campaign issue in the November midterm elections.
President Donald Trump has fully supported the construction of new data centers, saying they are critical for U.S.-based AI companies to compete with China. But voters in swing districts and swing states have argued that data centers are springing up across America too fast, and they’ve begun mobilizing against their construction in many places.
A recent NBC News Decision Desk poll powered by SurveyMonkey found that nearly 70% of respondents oppose the construction of AI data centers in their neighborhood; 45% said they were strongly opposed.
The ratepayer bill was just one of a handful of energy-related bills the House took up in its final week in session before the Nov. 3 midterm elections. The votes come as oil remains above $100 a barrel and the high cost of living and inflation remain the top issues heading into Election Day.
Many Democrats supported the measure, saying they didn’t view the bill as harmful, but they panned it as weak.
“Our communities and the people in our districts are so outraged, and they are understandably very angry that Congress isn’t doing enough” on data centers, Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, who represents El Paso, told NBC News before the vote. “I’m going to vote yes, but it is truly the bare minimum. In fact, it’s kind of pathetic that all we’re going to do is make them pay their own energy costs.”
“These data centers are going into communities like mine that don’t want them,” she added. “My community does not want data centers, loudly and clearly, and I agree with my community.”
Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell, who heads Democrats’ policy and communications arm, voted yes but said, “It’s not enough in any way, shape or form.”
And former Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who also supported the bill, pointed to Trump’s comments this week that the AI industry doesn’t need guardrails and that serious safety warnings about AI are a “hoax.”
“This is the same party that has a president that says that the AI threat is a hoax, and so I am worried about just allowing this to be, ‘Oh, we’ve solved it,’” Jayapal said. The effort “is a direct contradiction to what their president is continuing to say in opposing any real regulation.”

Apple has released two smartwatches which can record ambient sound. This comes amid discussions about smart glasses and their security.
Apple also announced on September 9 two smartwatches that can listen to, remember and summarize different sounds and conversations.
Apple Watch Series 12 & Apple Watch Ultra 4 will be available in October. They feature Apple’s Audio Intelligence, powered by AI. The features are activated by the user and include music and sound recognition. They can detect sounds such as sirens, doorbells, alarms, and other noises to alert the user or identify the title of the music in the background.
Live Rewind is also part of Audio Intelligence. It allows a user to tap on the watch, and the audio from the previous 15 seconds will be summarized in text. Apple Support states that when Live Rewind has been activated the smartwatch will play a sound and display a mic animation in order to alert the user as well as others around them.
Siri Recap is a new feature that “ambiently takes notes” throughout the day and creates AI-generated summaries of conversations. Apple Support states that Siri Recaps automatically delete after collecting for seven days.
Apple Watch: How to disable the ‘always-listening’ feature
Apple Support states that all Audio Intelligence functions are optional, which means the user has to manually activate them. These features do not come on automatically.
The Watch App on an iPhone allows users to adjust the Audio Intelligence setting.
What audio can the Apple Watch record, save and collect?
Apple Support states that Audio Intelligence does not record audio.
Apple Support continues: “Audio is pumped into a buffer protected by the Secure Exclave of the S11 chip, a piece of hardware which processes data independently from the rest the system,” Apple Support continues that this data can’t be analyzed or processed by Apple, Apple Watch, or the operating system of the smartwatch.
Apple Support states that users who activate iCloud and enable two-factor authentication can save and sync Siri Recaps, Live Rewind text and other texts with encryption from end to end across all devices. Apple Support states that only the account holder can view this information on the devices connected to the iCloud.
New audio features pose security questions
Apple’s Audio Intelligence feature has raised concerns about security.
Reddit users in the sub-Reddit for technology said that Apple Watch’s AI features normalize the notion of technology always listening. Another user commented, “Just because something can be done does not mean that it should.”
Meta’s smart glasses that can capture video and photos have received criticism in recent weeks. The LED capture light that is located on the frame of the smart glasses was removed by some users. This led indicates whether the wearable is recording. The light is essential to let others know that the wearables are recording. Meta has released an update to disable the glasses when the light “physically is tampered or destroyed”.
Apple Watch users can opt in to the Audio Intelligence feature, which includes Live Rewind, and other features such as Live Rewind that alert users with an audible chime or visual display, before recording. However, there are still some who are not sure.
I will have to ask every person sitting next me, “Is your Apple Watch off?” A Reddit user in the sub-Reddit for technology said, “What an insane feature!”
Apple refused to comment further when USA TODAY contacted them on September 16.
Which devices can be used with the “always Listening” feature?
Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 are the only Apple Watches that support Audio Intelligence. Apple Support states that iPhones capable of supporting the feature include
iPhone 16
iPhone 16 Plus
iPhone 16 Pro
iPhone 16 Pro Max
iPhone 17
iPhone 17
iPhone 17 Pro
iPhone 17 Pro Max
iPhone Air
iPhone 18 Pro
iPhone 18 Pro Max
iPhone Duo