ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 23 -- United States Patent no. 12,368,285, issued on July 22, was assigned to Niterra Co. Ltd. (Nagoya, Japan).

"Spark plug" was invented by Ayato Kawabe (Nagoya, Japan), Haruki Yoshida (Nagoya, Japan), Kengo Fujimura (Nagoya, Japan) and Takeshi Sakuma (Nagoya, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A spark plug includes a sealing material disposed around a center electrode in an insulator. On a cross section including a center line of an axial hole, one of long sides of a rectangle is set into the insulator along the center line. The rectangle is divided into 20 equal regions in the insulator by dividing each of short sides of the rectangle into two equal parts and dividi...