With a database of over 5,000 scientists, from Nobel prize winners to postdocs and PhD students,
Sense About Science works in partnership with scientific bodies, research publishers, policy makers, the public and the media, to change public discussions about science and evidence.
They make these scientists available for questions from civic organizations and the public looking for scientific advice from experts,
campaign for the promotion of scientific principles in public policy, and
publish neat guides to understanding science intended for laypeople. [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb
on Feb 28, 2013 -
9 comments
"I'm banned," he says. "By whom?" I ask. "My landlord," he says. "And the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority." Jon Ronson on
DIY science.
posted by fearfulsymmetry
on Feb 4, 2012 -
33 comments
It's raining radiation. It's a quiet night. We are well into autumn. And despite the growing sense in the Tokyo metropolitan area that things are now all right -- with train services back to pre-disaster schedules and the regret we once felt over our wasteful consumption of electricity dissipating -- Fukushima remains a war zone. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu
on Oct 12, 2011 -
41 comments
blind is a short film (5:17 - in Japanese w/ English subtitles) set in post-nuclear Tokyo. The film may be viewed at the
blind website, at
Vimeo or at
YouTube.
Parents please be advised: although the film features a young child, viewing by young children is not especially recommended, as they may be frightened.
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Sep 6, 2011 -
29 comments
Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists presents
Fifty Years of Space Nuclear Power
"A plutonium fueled RTG that was deployed in 1965 by the CIA not in space but on a mountaintop in the Himalayas (to help monitor Chinese nuclear tests) continues to generate anxiety, not electricity, more than four decades after it was lost in place. See, most recently,
"River Deep Mountain High" by Vinod K. Jose,
The Caravan magazine, December 1, 2010." (
MeFi previously)
posted by HLD
on Jun 28, 2011 -
8 comments
When programmers kill. [pdf] In 1982, Atomic Energy Canada, Limited, introduced the now-infamous Therac-25, a solely software-driven successor to its earlier medical linear accelerators.
Six patients received massive amounts of radiation, and three died, before AECL was compelled to supplement the (faulty) software-only error-checking with hardware interlocks to prevent overexposure.
[more inside]
posted by enn
on May 20, 2008 -
18 comments
Don't you know that I'm toxic? Toxic has you controlling a clean-suit wearing bomberman across destructible platform mazes in search of glowing green canisters, powerups and enemies to bomb the living bejesus out of. The chiptune soundtrack is pretty nice, too.
posted by boo_radley
on Sep 8, 2007 -
30 comments
Undark and the Radium Girls is the fascinating true story of several female employees of the US Radium Corporation at the turn of the 20th Centry. The women were employed to paint radioactive "Undark", a glow-in-the-dark paint for military application (dials that needed to be seen at night, etc) onto the machinery. The women were given lethal amounts of paint & fine brushes, which they all routinely kept sharp by wetting the tips in their mouths. Twenty years later, as their jawbones disintegrated & the tumors began to spread, they started down the path to figuring out who had murdered them, and how.
posted by jonson
on Jan 2, 2007 -
68 comments
Blighted Homeland. "From 1944 to 1986, 3.9 million tons of uranium ore were dug and blasted from Navajo soil, nearly all of it for America's atomic arsenal. Navajos inhaled radioactive dust, drank contaminated water and built homes using rock from the mines and mills. Many of the dangers persist to this day." A series of articles and photo galleries examines
the legacy of
uranium mining on the
Navajo (previously discussed
here.)
[Via Gristmill, BugMeNot.]
posted by homunculus
on Nov 24, 2006 -
13 comments
Air samples over North Korea show no radiation "It is possible there was no radiological data. That could be the case if: the North Koreans successfully sealed the site; it was such a small detonation and so deep underground there was no escape of nuclear debris; or the test was actually conventional explosives."
posted by Artw
on Oct 13, 2006 -
57 comments
Chilling Out Mr. Radioactive A group of scientists at Germany's
Ruhr University may have a way of cutting down the time it takes for radioactive waste to decay to a safer state. Instead of 1600 years for Radium-226, Prof. Claus Rolfs theorizes that he can cut that down to a mere 100 years, by encasing the materials in metal and then freezing them to very, very low temps to accelerate the
radioactive decay.
posted by fenriq
on Aug 1, 2006 -
28 comments
This is a stunning set of
photographs by Robert Knoth, taken in the regions of Mayak, Semipalatinsk, Chernobyl, and Tomsk-7.
[via]
posted by 327.ca
on Apr 22, 2006 -
37 comments
The BBC
reports that twenty years on "the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power station is teeming with life." Lynx, eagle owl, wild boars, horses, wolves—even signs of bears which haven't been seen here in centuries.
British scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock (recently
discussed here)
speculates whether "small volumes of nuclear waste from power production should be stored in tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by greedy developers."
Lovelock
describes Chernobyl as "a nasty accident that took 45 lives." This article in the New Scientist
claims that that the death toll may ultimately reach 60,000.
posted by 327.ca
on Apr 21, 2006 -
49 comments
The Office of Human Radiation Experiments , established in March 1994, leads the Department of Energy's efforts to tell the agency's Cold War story of radiation research using human subjects. We have undertaken an intensive effort to identify and catalog relevant historical documents from DOE's 3.2 million cubic feet of records scattered across the country. Internet access to these resources is a key part of making DOE more open and responsive to the American public.
posted by Dome-O-Rama
on Feb 16, 2006 -
7 comments
Need a power source for your
electric car?
Be careful
building a nuclear power
plant in
your back yard, or you could be the center of the next suburban
superfund cleanup.
And it is perhaps best that he does not work on the ship's eight reactors, for EPA scientists worry that his previous exposure to radioactivity may have greatly cut short his life. All the radioactive materials he experimented with can enter the body through ingestion, inhalation, or skin contact and then deposit in the bones and organs, where they can cause a host of ailments, including cancer.
posted by b1tr0t
on Jun 28, 2005 -
19 comments
That American forces use depleted uranium in our weapons isn't news, but these statistic are a little spooky. According to Bob Nichols at the
Dissident Voice, we've unleased 4,000,000 pounds of DU in Iraq. That's the radioactive equivalent of
250,000 Nagasaki bombs (pdf) says Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, former chief of Naval Staff in India. And since it's dust...it travels with the wind, which means Europe will see some fallout.
It also turns out that most of the soldiers
didn't know they were using DU, didn't know what DU was, and are now suffering reactions to it.
posted by dejah420
on Apr 6, 2004 -
32 comments
Swan song for a great explorer. Tomorow, the Galileo explorer will make a flyby of Jovian moon
Amalthea ending pehaps the geatest unmanned mission in NASA history. Galileo telemetry may not survive the flyby having already receieved much more radiation than it was designed for. Even if it does survive, this will be its final orbit scheduled to crash into Jupiter in September of next year. In spite of antenna difficulties, the spacecraft returned
many beautiful images of Jupiter's moons, along with coverage of the
Shoemaker-Levy collision and the first atmospheric probe to decend into Jupiter's weather.
posted by KirkJobSluder
on Nov 3, 2002 -
9 comments
Nuclear power for the home... A group of woodcutters found an object that had melted the surrounding snow, so they drag it back home to warm the camp unfortunately turns out it was jam packed full of Strontium90...
posted by zeoslap
on Feb 1, 2002 -
26 comments
