Daily Archives: March 18, 2011

Japan quake, tsunami, nuke news 05

… continued …

Ana’s Feed

Starting about midnight, March 17th

Today’s chopper missions over Daiichi have been canceled.

The IAEA has asked Japan to cooperate with the international community. Kan says he will do the utmost to overcome the crisis – vows to disclose more info to the int’l community. -kyodo news

The new electrical cables are on site, but radiation may prevent the workers from connecting them. Readings of 20mSv/hr. are regular. – NHK

2 more fire trucks and 1 borrowed US pump truck have cycled through . -NHK

4AM March 18th

“High radiation detected 30km from nuke plant” – NHK

“Japan has raised the accident level at a stricken nuclear plant from four to five on a seven-point international danger scale for atomic accidents.” -BBC

รข??”renewed nuclear chain reaction feared”

5PM March 18th

TEPCO is very sorry about this disaster of mother nature.

News Links

Fukushima one week on: Situation ‘stable’, says IAEA: Shameful media panic very slowly begins to subside

The situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant in Japan, badly damaged during the extremely severe earthquake and tsunami there a week ago, continues to stabilise. It is becoming more probable by the day that public health consequences will be zero and radiation health effects among workers at the site will be so minor as to be hard to measure. Nuclear experts are beginning to condemn the international hysteria which has followed the incident in increasingly blunt terms.

GE defends reactors in Japan nuclear crisis

‘Minuscule’ Amounts of Radiation From Japan Detected by California Station

Japan still ‘racing against the clock’ to prevent nuclear meltdown at Fukushima

L.A. says it’s prepared for radiation from Japan, though no problems are expected

Rand Paul’s budget eliminates agency that regulates nuclear safety

Union of Concerned Scientists Releases Report on the NRC and Nuclear Plant Safety in 2010

Japan’s death toll climbs to nearly 7,000

Current Status of the Nine Nuclear Reactors Damaged in Japan’s Earthquake and Tsunami

For more information and essays about the Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Reactor problems in Japan CLICK HERE.

i-af727314bb91def34a44e4261c14ccca-PleaseClickOnThisStuff.jpg

An Evolutionary Tale about Genes and Art: “Waking Sleeping Beauty”

Join artist Lynn Fellman and Professor Perry Hackett for a science and art presentation at Hennes Art Gallery in Minneapolis. It’s an evolutionary tale about an ancient fossil gene discovered by Hackett’s Lab at the University of Minnesota. The lab awakened the gene from an evolutionary sleep and named it “Sleeping Beauty”. Intrigued by the science and the metaphor behind a 14 million year old gene, Lynn created a dimensional art titled “Waking Sleeping Beauty”

i-1e0451b28b732c6d95b9bbdf532d0657-fellman_fish.jpg

In a lively exchange, the artist and scientist tell the bench-to-bedside story how the gene was developed as a valuable biomedical tool. Lynn will show the creative process from sketches to science poster to the dimensional art. The art is on display along with Lynn’s DNA Portraits and other work currently handled by Greg Hennes at Hennes Art Company. Read more about “Waking Sleeping Beauty” here.

Who: Lynn Fellman, artist and Professor Perry Hackett, geneticist
What: Presentation and conversation about evolution, genes, and art
When: Thursday, March 31st, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. Presentation begins at 7 pm.
Where: Hennes Art Company, 1607 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis, MN, 55403
RSVP: Reserve by Tuesday, March 29th. Click here to email

Lynn Fellman
is a visual artist who also speaks and writes about the intersection of art and science. See her work at FellmanStudo.com.

Dr. Perry Hackett, professor of genetics, cell biology and development at the University of Minnesota, has practiced genetic engineering in animals for the past three decades with the motto “no organism is too insignificant”.

Current Status of the Nine Nuclear Reactors Damaged in Japan’s Earthquake and Tsunami

Nine of ten nuclear reactors at two locations at Fukushima, Japan, have problems ranging from damaged cooling systems to partial meltdowns, and spent fuel storage facilities at several of these reactors are severely damaged. In some cases, facilities seem to have been shut down safely. In other cases, there is a strong suspicion of serious damage but the degree of damage is uncertain.
Continue reading Current Status of the Nine Nuclear Reactors Damaged in Japan’s Earthquake and Tsunami

Random sn and tech news

There will not be a Mark Zuckerberg action figure.

After being told it can no longer sell its Apple CEO Steve Jobs action figure, M.I.C. Gadget has been ordered to kill off its Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg action figure as well. The lifelike Zuckerberg doll was available for $70 online, but now Facebook has had it banned, just like Apple did for the Jobs doll.

This time around, M.I.C. Gadget made a point to call the action figure the “Poking Inventor” and not “Mark Zuckerberg.” It wanted to avoid Facebook getting involved, since Apple threatened it with legal action if it didn’t stop selling the Steve Jobs version.

17 year old kid wins Intel science prize, nets 100 large.

A California teenager who cracked a complex mathematical equation has been awarded the Intel Science Talent Search’s $100,000 first-place prize. Evan O’Dorney, 17, won the prize for “his mathematical project in which he compared two ways to estimate the square root of an integer. [He] discovered precisely when the faster way would work,” Intel announced Wednesday.

He is the first Bay Area student to win what is considered the high school equivalent of a Nobel Prize and the sixth from California since the contest started in 1942. He appears to be the first homeschooled winner as well, according to organizers. Evan, 17, beat out 39 other Intel Science Talent Search finalists from across the country with a mathematics entry summarized as “Continued Fraction Convergents and Linear fractional transformations.”


C
heck out this new kind of microscope.

In some cases, looking at a living cell under a microscope can cause it damage or worse, can kill it. Now, a new kind of microscope has been invented by researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that is able to non-invasively take a three dimensional look inside living cells with stunning results. The device uses a thin sheet of light like that used to scan supermarket bar codes and could help biologists to achieve their goal of understanding the rules that govern molecular processes within a cell.

Weather Forecast for Titan: Methane Rain

For the first time, rain has been observed falling at low altitude on this moon of Saturn.

Extensive rain from large cloud systems, spotted by Cassini’s cameras in late 2010, has apparently darkened the surface of the moon. The best explanation is these areas remained wet after methane rainstorms. The observations released today in the journal Science, combined with earlier results in Geophysical Research Letters last month, show the weather systems of Titan’s thick atmosphere and the changes wrought on its surface are affected by the changing seasons.

“It’s amazing to be watching such familiar activity as rainstorms and seasonal changes in weather patterns on a distant, icy satellite,” said Elizabeth Turtle, a Cassini imaging team associate at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Md., and lead author of today’s publication. “These observations are helping us to understand how Titan works as a system, as well as similar processes on our own planet.”

Details and numerous pictures