Archive for the 'Environment' Category
Japan ‘Dream Project’: 600 Acre Farm with Autonomous Robot Workers
January 7th, 2012Does anyone understand how LEDs are supposed to replace pesticides? Under an agriculture ministry plan, unmanned tractors will work fields where pesticides will have been replaced by LEDs keeping rice, wheat, soybeans, fruit and vegetables safe until robots can put them in boxes. Anyway, this sounds like it could have been lifted right out of […]
DYI Radiation Scanning in Japanese Grocery Store
January 1st, 2012Via: The Japan Times: But on a street just six minutes from JR Kashiwa Station, the Bec-Miru facility that Motohiro Takamatsu opened in October is turning heads by offering residents a chance to scan their own groceries, garden soil and other items for radiation. “To have Kashiwa become contaminated with radiation, that was a big […]
FDA Won’t Regulate Use of Antibiotics in Healthy Livestock Intended for Human Consumption
December 30th, 2011Via: Guardian: Environmental and consumer groups have condemned the US Food and Drug Administration’s move to renege on its long-held policy to regulate the use of human antibiotics in animal feed. Last week, the agency quietly announced it was withdrawing its plan to limit the use of antibiotics fed to healthy livestock intended for human […]
Rootworms Becoming Resistant to Monsanto’s Genetically Modified Corn
December 29th, 2011Via: AP: One of the nation’s most widely planted crops — a genetically engineered corn plant that makes its own insecticide — may be losing its effectiveness because a major pest appears to be developing resistance more quickly than scientists expected.
Taiwanese Rice Headed to Japan
December 28th, 2011Via: Taipei Times: A shipment of Taiwanese rice bound for Tokyo departed central Taiwan yesterday, the second in a series of three deliveries of the biggest rice order received from Japan in eight years. A ceremony was held in Changhua County’s Pitou Township , where the rice supplier, Union Rice Co, is based, to mark […]
FBI Says Activists Who Investigate Factory Farms Can Be Prosecuted as Terrorists
December 21st, 2011Via: Green Is The New Red: The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force has kept files on activists who expose animal welfare abuses on factory farms and recommended prosecuting them as terrorists, according to a new document uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act.
14,000 U.S. Deaths Tied to Fukushima Reactor Disaster Fallout [???]
December 21st, 2011Update: Editor at Scientific American Claims This Research Is Flawed —End Update— Via: Press Release / International Journal of Health Services: An estimated 14,000 excess deaths in the United States are linked to the radioactive fallout from the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan, according to a major new article in the December […]
Russia Will Use Nuclear Reactors Beyond Their Engineered Life Spans
December 14th, 2011Via: The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: In response to the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, countries such as Germany and Switzerland are preparing to phase out aging nuclear power plants. The Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation (Rosatom), however, is taking a very different approach. In 2001, Rosatom began extending the operation of […]
Company Wants to Mine the Moon’s Resources and Leave Trash Behind
December 12th, 2011Via: Los Angeles Times: Most people don’t take it literally when they’re told to shoot for the moon — but thinking small isn’t Naveen Jain’s way. The 52-year-old Internet entrepreneur is a co-founder of Moon Express Inc., one of several companies in the Google Lunar X Prize competition, in which privately funded teams will try […]
Japan Expands Rice Ban
December 8th, 2011Via: Bloomberg: Japan will extend a ban on rice shipments from a third city in Fukushima prefecture after local authorities found more tainted grain, deepening food-safety concerns nine months after a nuclear disaster. The ban will likely cover the Shibukawa area of Nihonmatsu City, about 55 kilometers (34 miles) from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, […]
