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It can be hard to feel much sympathy for bats. Like snakes or spiders or sharks or bunnies (OK, maybe the last one is just me), there’s something primordially alarming about bats, something that activates the lizard part of the brain and shutters empathy. Bats aren’t actually “flying rodents,” but you likely won’t see them [...]
Finally, some good news for environmentalists. China has become the second most dominant publisher of scientific research in the world and within a few years will overtake the U.S., according to a new report. The People’s Republic published 163,000 of the world’s 1.5 million research papers in major peer-reviewed journals in 2008, compared to the [...]
UPDATE, 3 p.m. Thursday: GoDaddy competitor Namecheap has launched a campaign to woo away offended GoDaddy customers. Our colleagues at Techland have the full story: Switch business now, and Namecheap is offering to make elephant donations on your behalf. We all shoot vacation videos, but most of us choose to keep them to ourselves — [...]
Last March, President Barack Obama gave a speech on energy security at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. In it, Obama offered what might be called a “grand compromise” on energy—in exchange for expanded offshore drilling, including in previously untouched areas like north Alaska and the Atlantic, he called for support of alternative power and [...]
Flatulent cows are not a laughing matter. (Pause.) OK, they are a laughing matter. And flatulent sheep and goats are almost as funny — though not to the chickens and pigs in the pen next door. But pull-my-hoof livestock are a problem too. The emissions produced by nature’s woodwind section contain a nasty mix of [...]
On March 23, Dr. Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, a Research Scientist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies saw a report by Kyodo news agency that caught his eye. It reported that Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) had observed a neutron beam about 1.5 km away from the plant. Bursts of neutrons in large quantities can only [...]
The world is finely attuned to nuclear disaster. In the past two weeks, global monitoring stations designed to detect the detonation of atomic bombs began alerting the world to what it already knew: a disaster was unfolding at Fukushima nuclear power plant, and radioactive particles had escaped. Radioactivity is a devilish thing to track: it’s [...]
People signal contrition in a lot of ways, and few countries are better at it than the Japanese — a culture rich in the art of social protocols and interpersonal gesturing. It was not for nothing, then, that when Prime Minister Naoto Kan spoke before parliament this week about the country’s ongoing crisis at the [...]
Reports that plutonium had been detected at five locations inside the grounds of the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant set off a flurry of activity on blogs and twitter accounts today. But the truth is that plutonium around the facility was to be expected–and the levels found do not pose a threat to human health.
Each day at the stricken Fukushima power plant seems to bring a new piece of troubling news—today, reports surfaced that three workers at the Fukushima plant had been hospitalized after radiation levels reported at the plant spiked to “10,000 times above normal.” There were also reports that the No. 3 reactor vessel had been damaged, [...]
