Archive for the 'Environment' Category
Fukushima: Outdoor Radiation Reading 25 Sieverts Per Hour
December 9th, 2013Via: news.com.au: WELCOME to Fukushima, where the radiation’s so bad it can be fatal within 20 minutes. The tsunami may have happened some 33 months ago, but the fallout just keeps getting worse. Japanese media is reporting that the intensity of radiation levels in the nuclear powerplant devastated by the earthquake – and subsequent tidal […]
Vast, Nonrenewable Freshwater Reserves Found Beneath the Oceans
December 9th, 2013So let’s just get this straight: The same expensive equipment that’s used to drill for oil would be used to drill… for water. Man, sometimes, I just love coming to work at Cryptogon for the comedy factor alone. Oh yeah, these are nonrenewable aquifers and prone to damage by drilling operations. Maybe buy some canned […]
Birds Will Attack Amazon’s Delivery Drones
December 7th, 2013Amazon is just one potential operator. Once the rules are formalized in 2015, tens of thousands of organizations are going to be operating similar aircraft. Via: Slate: Birds already cause a lot of problems for other things in the airspace. The FAA has tracked more than 121,000 instances of bird-aircraft collisions since 1990. These are […]
Typhoons Spread Fukushima Fallout
November 29th, 2013Via: AFP: Typhoons that hit Japan each year are helping spread radioactive material from the Fukushima nuclear disaster into the country’s waterways, researchers say. Contaminated soil gets washed away by the high winds and rain and deposited in streams and rivers, a joint study by France’s Climate and Environmental Science laboratory (LSCE) and Tsukuba University […]
Atmospheric Electricity Powers Small Motor
November 27th, 2013Update: Atmospheric Powered Motor 2.0 Via: LaserHacker: — Via: Laser Hacker:
Fukushima Plant Fuel Rod Removals to Begin Today
November 17th, 2013Via: Blomberg: Tokyo Electric Power Co. will begin removing spent fuel today from the wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear facility, an early milestone in decommissioning that could threaten another crisis if mishandled. Removal of the first of the 1,533 fuel-rod assemblies at the plant’s No. 4 reactor building is scheduled to begin at about 3 p.m., […]
Qatar: Sahara Forest Project
November 12th, 2013Via: Science: A project to “green” desert areas with an innovative mix of technologies—producing food, biofuel, clean water, energy, and salt—reached a milestone this week in the Gulf state of Qatar. A pilot plant built by the Sahara Forest Project (SFP) produced 75 kilograms of vegetables per square meter in three crops annually, comparable to […]
Philippines Typhoon: At Least 10,000 Dead?
November 9th, 2013Via: Reuters: One of the most powerful storms ever recorded killed at least 10,000 people in the central Philippines province of Leyte, a senior police official said on Sunday, with coastal towns and the regional capital devastated by huge waves. Super typhoon Haiyan destroyed about 70 to 80 percent of the area in its path […]
Mob Illegally Dumped Nuclear and Industrial Waste Around Southern Italy
November 5th, 2013Via: Daily Mail: Toxic nuclear and industrial waste, dumped illegally by the Neapolitan mafia, is responsible for a surge in cancers in southern Italy, it is feared. The Italian Senate is investigating a link between buried pollutants and a rise of almost 50 per cent in tumours found in the inhabitants of several towns around […]
Ecosystems in 66-Foot-Tall Test Tubes
November 5th, 2013Via: Popular Science: The outdoors is a horribly inconsistent place to do science. That’s why many ecologists work in laboratories, where they can exactly replicate an experiment many times over, although with the understanding that their results may not fully reflect what would happen in nature. But on Lake Stechlin in Germany, researchers at the […]
