Bob Holmes, consultant
The possibility of exposure to nuclear radiation can trigger public fear far out of proportion to the actual risk, and the Japanese reactor crisis is no exception. In particular, people living near the Pacific coast of the US and Canada are quickly buying up stocks of potassium iodide,
news agencies are reporting. That is almost certainly a complete waste of time and money.
For people immediately downwind of a reactor accident, potassium iodide, or KI, can be a lifesaver. Ingesting a daily dose of KI keeps the body from absorbing dangerous doses of radioactive iodine released from the damaged reactor, and its use in nearby residents after the Chernobyl accident could have helped prevent thousands of cases of thyroid cancer in the decades since.
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission now
recommends that disaster planners consider giving KI to anyone within 16 km of a serious reactor accident.
Residents of North America, thousands of kilometres from the failing Japanese reactors, live much too far away - and will receive far too little radiation exposure - to need KI pills.
1304 GMT, 15 March 2011
Andy Coghlan and Wendy Zukerman, reporters
Japanese soldiers, mobilised to wash away radioactive material emitted from a nuclear power plant damaged by Friday's earthquake, put on protective gear on their arrival in Nihonmatsu, Fukushima prefecture, today (Image: AP Photo/PA)
A fire which erupted in a spent fuel storage pond at Unit 4 of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant - and which has caused the largest radiation leak of the crisis so far - was extinguished at 11 am local time (0200 GMT) this morning, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has confirmed.
The fire was associated with a large increase in radiation levels at the plant, according to the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum (PDF), with radiation monitors detecting 400 millisieverts/hour in the vicinity of the plant's reactor no. 3 shortly before it burnt out. It's unclear how this has changed subsequently, but the IAEA says this measurement was the trigger for the decision to evacuate non-essential staff from the site. A 1000 millisievert dose is enough to cause radiation sickness, although it would not ordinarily prove fatal.
1920 GMT, 13 March 2011
Sumit Paul-Choudhury, editor, newscientist.com and Rowan Hooper, news editor
(Image: NHK)
Update 0815 GMT 14 March 2011: An explosion has destroyed the building housing reactor No. 3 at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant, injuring eleven people. However, Japanese authorities say the reactor containment vessel has remained intact, as it did at reactor no. 1, which suffered a similar explosion on Saturday. Radiation levels in the area remain low. However, cooling systems have now failed at the plant's No. 2 reactor, which is now being cooled with seawater in the same way as the plant's other two reactors (see below).
Three days after a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and ensuing tsunami struck Japan, killing an estimated 10,000 people and leaving many more destitute, the country is still struggling to avert nuclear disaster, with problems reported at four separate nuclear power plants.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) is continuing attempts to cool down two reactors at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant 240 kilometres north-east of Tokyo, where a dramatic explosion destroyed the roof of the building housing reactor No. 1 on Saturday. Seawater mixed with boric acid has been introduced to reactors Nos. 1 and 3 in an attempt to cool the reactors' cores and kill the nuclear fission reaction more quickly.
Jessica Hamzelou, reporter
Cigarettes will be hidden behind shop counters and their packets stripped of suggestive colours and wording, according to recent UK government white paper.
But will the changes have an effect on smokers?
The
Department of Health has published its tobacco control plan for England - a series of promises to change the way tobacco products are sold with the aim of cutting the number of the country's adult smokers by 210,000 by the end of 2015.
The plan was released yesterday to coincide with the UK's
national no smoking day.
In the document, the government says it will bring in legislation to end tobacco displays in large stores by April 2012 and other stores by April 2015. It also
promises to:
Consult on options to reduce the promotional impact of tobacco packaging, such as using plain packaging by the end of the year
Jessica Hamzelou, reporter
(Image: Davi D. Bock, Wei-Chung Allen Lee and colleagues/Nature)
This overlapping rainbow of connecting cells represents new insights into how mammalian brains work. The techniques used to create this three-dimensional map of a tiny chunk of mouse brain could help neuroscientists understand the connections that make up our own brains.
To create this map - which shows the neurons in a piece of mouse visual cortex just 8 thousandths of a cubic millimetre in volume - Clay Reid and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School in Boston combined two imaging techniques.
Jessica Hamzelou, reporterA computer program that promises to speedily and accurately diagnose Alzheimer's disease is being used in NHS hospitals in the UK for the first time.
The program, developed jointly by the
Maudsley Hospital in London,
King's College London and the
Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, compares a patient's brain scan to a database of 1200 images taken from the brains of people at various stages of Alzheimer's disease. It is currently being field tested in NHS memory clinics in the London area.
Wendy Zukerman, Australasia reporter
In the New Zealand city of Christchurch authorities are scrambling to restore water supplies and sewage systems which were severely damaged by last week's 6.3-magnitude earthquake.
Canterbury medical officer of health Alistair Humphrey told New Zealand Doctor that 40 per cent of Christchurch doesn't have running water and the entire city's water supply is "compromised".
(Image: Jamie Ball/Rex Features)
Isolated cases of measles and gastroenteritis have been reported. According to Humphrey the gastro cases were likely to have been water-borne and the result of people brushing their teeth with contaminated water - rather than spread through human contact.
But, a Canterbury District Health Board spokeswoman told the New Zealand Herald: "There is an underlying potential for there to be a measles outbreak. There's a chance of an outbreak of gastro diseases."
Jessica Hamzelou, reporter
Before you pop that painkiller, you might want to focus on how much better you'll feel afterwards. Positive thinking could double your pain relief.
So say Ulrike Bingel and her colleagues at the University of Oxford, who investigated how people would respond to a potent analgesic when they were told it would increase, decrease or have no effect on their pain.
Debora MacKenzie, contributor
In 2001, just after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, someone mailed highly purified anthrax spores to two US senators in Washington DC, and several media outlets. They infected 22 people; five died.
Horrifyingly, the spores turned out to be the US military's favourite strain, and they triggered massive funding for biodefense research - and possibly the longest scientific crime investigation in history.
In 2009 the US Department of Justice asked several dozen top US scientists to review that investigation. But then in February 2010 it decided it was sure enough to close the case without the scientists' conclusions. It agreed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which announced in 2008 that a prominent anthrax researcher at the US Army's infectious disease lab in Maryland, Bruce Ivins - who had just committed suicide - was solely responsible.
Now the snubbed scientists have published their report, and they are not so sure. Some of the evidence against Ivins, they say, is "not as definitive" as claimed.