via BoingBoing:
Norwegian landscape photographer Terje Sorgjerd spent one week around Kirkenes and the Norway-Russia border, in -25 Celsius temperature, to make this magnificent time-lapse video of the Aurora Borealis.
Satellite images show tsunami-ravaged Japan coast
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Image courtesy of RapidEye AG, DLR, Google Earth, and ZKI
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On the heels of the earthquake, tsunami heights of 7.3 meters were reported in Soma. A day later floodwaters stretched several kilometers inland. Soma is a port village of 38,000 people located about 150 kilometers southwest of the magnitude 9.0 quake's epicenter and 40 kilometers north of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. As of March 20, more than 100 residents of Soma have been confirmed dead.
These satellite images were provided by the International Charter—Space and Major Disasters, a 20-member multinational agreement among space agencies and other organizations that operate satellites to contribute data to aid the management of large-scale natural disasters and technological accidents. The organization is on 24-hour alert and can be activated by a phone call from any of the member agencies and other authorized organizations. The Charter was activated on March 11 on request of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency; the images here were shared by the German Aerospace Center.
Since its founding in 2000 the International Charter has provided satellite images of 289 disasters, including the recent earthquakes in Pakistan and Haiti as well as the 2010 massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
—Nina Bai
Robots Arrive at Fukushima Nuclear Site with Unclear Mission
Generally, bots have proved effective operating in high-radiation environments, but Japan's nuclear crisis poses new challenges
By
Larry Greenemeier
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Concrete pump trucks sprayed about 130 tons of water into Daiichi's No. 4 reactor on Wednesday, Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) reported (pdf). Meanwhile, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCo) injected about 35 tons of seawater into the spent fuel pool of the No. 3 reactor to keep the fuel rods there from overheating, according to NISA, which also observed "slightly blackish" smoke generated from the building housing that reactor. Seawater is also being injected into the No. 1 reactor as well as the spent fuel pool of the No. 2 reactor.
TEPCo summoned a small corps of military-grade robots last week from iRobot Corp. in Bedford, Mass. Japan's Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding Co. last week sent its Disaster Monitoring Robot, or Moni-Robo, to the Daiichi site as well. Other robotics companies, including Canada's Inuktun Services, are also fielding inquiries about how their technology might be of use. Each of the robots of interest moves on tracks and features a mechanical hand that can be used to lift and manipulate objects.
The roles that robots might play in Japan will depend upon the emergency responders' priorities, whether this includes handling intensely hot or radioactive materials or, later removing sludge from the site or drilling core samples to determine how deeply radiation may have penetrated the facility's walls and floor, says William "Red" Whittaker, a Carnegie Mellon University robotics professor and director of the Field Robotics Center at the school's Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh. Whittaker and several Carnegie Mellon colleagues built robots in the late 1970s and early 1980s to inspect and perform repairs in the basement of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station following the near meltdown there in 1979.
The robots
Mitsui's 600-kilogram Moni-Robo is reportedly on site at Daiichi. The one-armed robot is designed to be operated remotely—from as far as a kilometer away—and includes a camera that can take video as well as 3-D thermographic images. The 150-centimeter-tall Moni-Robo rolls along on tracks and also features sensors for measuring radioactivity and detecting combustible gases.
Inuktun, based in Nanaimo, British Columbia, specializes in making remote-controlled video cameras and "crawler" robots in a variety of sizes, ranging from the Versatrax 100 (which fits in a pipe 10 centimeters in diameter) to the Versatrax 450 TTC (which is 38 centimeters in diameter). These crawler bots are used primarily to inspect confined spaces such as pipes and sewers. "We have not sent any equipment to Japan specifically for the earthquake or Daiichi reactor site, but we do have a representative company in Tokyo that has some of our demonstration equipment," Inuktun president Colin Dobell says. "We believe it is being deployed, but we have not been able to confirm anything."
Four iRobot systems—two Packbots and two Warriors—reached Tokyo Monday night along with six of the company's engineers, who spent Tuesday unpacking the bots, installing batteries and running tests, says Tim Trainer, iRobot's vice president of operations. Given that the Packbot is designed primarily for explosive ordinance disposal and the Warrior is a prototype that will not be commercially available until this summer, iRobot's engineers still need to discuss the robots' capabilities, operation and limitations with TEPCo personnel, he adds.
The 68-kilogram iRobot Warriors were modified so they could carry a 6.4-centimeter fire hose should more water be needed somewhere. Each unit features an arm that can lift up to about 100 kilograms as well as an adjustable track system that allows it to climb stairs and travel up to 12.9 kilometers per hour.
One of the Packbots was fitted with a sensor that can detect radioactivity. Each 10.9-kilogram Packbot is equipped with a three-link arm that can lift up to about 13.6 kilograms, move debris and potentially relocate hazardous materials. In addition to being able to negotiate stairs, the Packbot can travel at up to 9.3 kilometers per hour and climb grades as steep as 60 degrees.
Undefined mission
It is unclear what role, if any, the Packbots and Warriors will play in TEPCo's efforts to restore power to its nuclear reactors and cool its on-site nuclear fuel rods. "We sent the robots without a defined mission in place but to assist where appropriate, whether this means delivering water to the fuel rods, moving equipment within the facility or cleaning up the facility once fuel has become stable," Trainer says.
Ultimately, the goal is to send the robots into the hazardous environment and keep those controlling the robots at a safe distance. "What we don't know is, what are the environments that we're talking about, can the robot sustain operations in those environments and, if they can, what value will they provide to the effort?" Trainer says. "Those things are all being figured out right now as the team is on the ground in Japan over the next several days."
All told, iRobot estimates that it is spending about $500,000 to $1 million worth of robots and spare parts to Japan, as well as several days' access to the company's engineers. Trainer made it clear that those engineers will pass along their knowledge of the robots to TEPCo and will not be going into the nuclear exclusion zones surrounding the reactors.
Radiation woes
Electronics can be made more radiation tolerant in a number of ways, Whittaker says. One is to keep the conductors and insulators on a device's silicon chips farther apart so that heat can more easily dissipate and the chip is more resilient. Another approach to keeping a system functioning in high-radiation environments is to implement redundant systems so it can function even if one of those systems is damaged.
As with most military equipment, the iRobot's units have integrated electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding to cover the wiring, circuit boards and anywhere else the robot might be susceptible to such interference. The company was concerned that the robots might not be able to operate wirelessly due to radiation interfering with radio signals to and from the robots, so it added fiber-optic tethered spoolers so the Packbots and Warriors could be tele-operated from up to 220 meters and 500 meters, respectively, Trainer says.
With the exception of its charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras and embedded electronics, Inuktun's crawlers are capable of operating in a medium-level radiation field and dosage, says Dobell. For high-radiation situations, the company typically installs radiation-tolerant cameras on its crawler equipment in order to get into the more dangerous areas. The robots themselves are built using stainless steel, which Dobell says allows for easier decontamination.
Water world
It is common in nuclear recovery to operate in shallow water, where a robot might need to be able to withstand being submerged, Whittaker says. This was the case in the basement of the Three Mile Island facility, where several hundred thousand liters of heavily contaminated cooling water had washed through the reactor, he adds. Even if the robot is not completely submerged in water, it will be working in a very wet environment. "In order to interface with humans [again] these robots also have to able to tolerate a high-pressure wash down," he says
Inuktun makes several submersible models. Neither the Packbot nor the Warrior was designed to work in extreme heat or to be submerged in water, though they are able to function in up to meter or so of water, Trainer says. These limitations could pose challenges, especially given TEPCo's ongoing efforts to deliver water to its overheated fuel rods by any means, including fire hoses and airplane drops.
Antimatter of Fact: Collider Generates Most Massive Antinucleus Yet
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider has produced several nuclei of the antimatter counterpart to helium 4
Antimatter of Fact: Collider Generates Most Massive Antinucleus Yet
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider has produced several nuclei of the antimatter counterpart to helium 4
By John Matson
The realm of antimatter is a sort of shadow world in which the particles of our matter-dominated world have mutually annihilating counterparts—the electron has an antimatter partner in the positron, the proton has the antiproton, the neutron has the antineutron, and so forth. The big bang should have produced copious amounts of both matter and antimatter, but the latter is mysteriously rare in our experience, and physicists and cosmologists would like to know why. To investigate this seeming asymmetry of nature, scientists have manufactured subatomic antiparticles in high-energy collisions for decades and have even managed to produce short-lived nuclei and atoms of antimatter.
But those antinuclei and anti-atoms are difficult to corral—they annihilate in a burst of energy on contact with ubiquitous ordinary matter—and have only been created in the most rudimentary form, as tiny groupings of antiprotons, antineutrons and sometimes positrons. Now a research group using a particle collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., has produced the most massive antimatter assemblies yet: two antiprotons and two antineutrons, which together constitute the antimatter twin to the helium 4 nucleus, also known as the alpha particle. (Helium 4 is normal helium; an antimatter counterpart had already been observed for the rarer, lighter helium 3 isotope, which has two protons and one neutron.)
By sifting through the particulate wreckage of a billion smashups between gold ions, each traveling at 99.995 percent the speed of light in Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider before crashing together inside the STAR detector, the researchers identified 18 separate nuclei of antihelium 4. (The collider is known as RHIC for short, and STAR is an acronym for Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC.) The antinuclei, once created in the collisions, quickly annihilated against ordinary matter in the detector and vanished. The researchers announced their finding March 16 in a paper posted to the physics preprint Web site arXiv.org
The study's authors have submitted the paper to Nature, which has a strict policy of media silence prior to publication. So, they did not want to discuss their work. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)
But independent physicists call the result an impressive, if not entirely surprising, experimental coup. "It is an enormous technical achievement that they can extract these rarely produced objects," says Tom Cohen, a nuclear physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park. "But everybody believed—I should almost say knew—that anti-alpha particles could exist." Cohen compares the feat with climbing the world's tallest mountain: "It's really impressive that you can do it, but the fact that there's a summit to Mount Everest is not a big surprise."
Another physicist, who wished to remain anonymous because he had been asked to refrain from commenting publicly on the results, echoed Cohen's reaction. "It's really, really very impressive that they're able to do that, to see these rare events and convincingly isolate them," he says. "What they've found is that there is no shock; it's where it's predicted to be."
What would be a shock would be some deviation in the way antimatter behaves as compared with matter, which might help explain why our cosmic surroundings are dominated by matter and almost bereft of antimatter. Particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva are now pushing closer every year to big bang–like energy levels to look for such hints of new physics. And complementary experiments at lower energies have managed to produce and then trap—however briefly—atoms of antihydrogen with an eye toward making precision measurements of the anti-atoms' properties. But so far the cause of the matter–antimatter asymmetry remains an open question.
As for the STAR collaboration's newfound antihelium 4 nuclei, they are likely to hold the crown of most massive antimatter tidbits for some time. The next stable nucleus on the periodic table is lithium 6, with three protons and three neutrons; it, too, will have an antimatter counterpart. But the STAR researchers note that as rare as antihelium 4 nuclei are, revealing themselves only 18 times in one billion collisions, antilithium 6 is much rarer still. Its expected rate of production is roughly one millionth that of antihelium 4, leaving it beyond the reach of today's accelerators.
Chernobyl-Style Yellow Rain
Authorities assure alarmed citizens yellow powder is pollen, but victims of Chernobyl radiation were told the same thing
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Radioactive yellow rain that fell in Tokyo and surrounding areas last night caused panic amongst Japanese citizens and prompted a flood of phone calls to Japan’s Meteorological Agency this morning, with people concerned that they were being fed the same lies as victims of Chernobyl, who were told that yellow rain which fell over Russia and surrounding countries after the 1986 disaster was merely pollen, the same explanation now being offered by Japanese authorities.
“The (Japan Meteorological) agency received more than 200 inquiries Thursday morning about yellowish residue left on roofs and elsewhere by the rain, stirring concerns that radioactive substances had fallen after accidents caused by the March 11 quake and tsunami at a nuclear power plant around 220 kilometers northeast of Tokyo,” reports Japan Today.
Officials later suggested the discoloration was caused by air-borne pollen falling with the rain. “The JMA believes the yellow patches are pollen, but has yet to confirm this,” reports the Wall Street Journal, adding that the JMA received over 280 calls after residents in the Kanto region discovered yellow powder on the ground.
“A health official at the Tokyo metropolitan government also said there is a possibility that the rain contained radioactivity but not at a level to have had adverse effects on people’s health,” adds the Japan Today report.
Given the fact that Japanese authorities have been habitually deceptive about the Fukushima crisis from start to finish, assurances that the yellow powder was merely a result of air-borne pollen particles are dubious at best. With people living in Tokyo already being told that tap water is unsafe to drink, along with contaminated vegetables and milk from certain areas near Fukushima, the fact that they were panicked by yellow rain is unsurprising.
Although pollen can turn rain a yellow color, the fact that the phenomenon occurred a couple of hundred kilometers south of the radiation-spewing Fukushima nuclear plant has stoked alarm, and understandably so given the fact that victims of Chernobyl nuclear fallout in 1986 were also told by authorities that yellow rain was harmless pollen, when in fact it was deadly radioactive contamination.
A University of California Daily Bruin article entitled “Remembering Chernobyl,” documents how children in Belarus happily splashed around in puddles of yellow rain having been assured by Russian authorities that it was merely pollen, when in fact it was a toxic mixture of radioactivity that had been blasted from the Chernobyl plant 80 miles away.
Thinking back to 20 years ago, it’s the splashing in yellow rainwater that Antonina Sergieff vividly recalls.
“We all jumped in the puddles with the yellow stuff. … You don’t see (it in) the air, it doesn’t materialize. But when you see the yellow dust, you see radiation,” Sergieff said.
When these elements first reached Sergieff 20 years ago, they came in the form of yellow rain.
It was not long after that residents in her hometown knew it wasn’t simply “pollen” – which is what government officials assured them, she said.
The effects of this “pollen” soon confirmed that those puddles of yellow rain contained something far more sinister, namely iodine-131, caesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239.
“Soon, people started losing their hair, pictures of deformed animals sprouted up in independent newspapers, and incidences of cancer in Belarus skyrocketed, Sergieff said. According to the U.N. brief, cases of breast cancer in Belarus doubled between 1988 and 1999, among other increases.”
With levels of radiation emitted by Fukushima now approaching those spewed out by the blast at Chernobyl, as the establishment media bizarrely pretends that the crisis is all but over, seawater samples taken around 330 meters south of the plant confirm that levels of radioactive iodine released are the highest yet recorded.
As we have highlighted, despite UN and World Health Organization studies that claim Chernobyl led to a maximum of 9,000 deaths and 200,000 cases of radiation sickness, more contemporary studies have shown that nearly a million people have been killed from cancers caused by the disaster over the course of the last 25 years.
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.
Radioactive Iodine In Fukushima Seawater Highest Ever, Reactors 5 And 6 Now Leaking Too
Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Thursday, March 24, 2011
And while futures rise as the market anticipates the latest central bank intervention to paper over the global financial insolvency, the radioactive fallout from Fukushima continues to worsen as Iodine 131 levels in the seawater hits the highest since the start of the crisis. “According to Tokyo Electric Power Co., radioactive iodine-131 146.9 times higher than the legal concentration limit was detected Wednesday morning in a seawater sample taken around 330 meters south of the plant, near the drain outlets of its troubled four reactors. The level briefly fell to 29.8 times the limit on Tuesday morning from 126.7 times on Monday, but rose to its highest so far in the survey begun this week apparently due to rain and water sprayed at spent fuel pools from outside that caused radioactive materials to seep into the sea, it said.” What’s far worse, reactors 5 and 6 which have been supposed to be ok, are also leaking: “The firm also said it found both iodine-131 and cesium-137 in a sample taken from near the drain outlets of the plant’s No. 5 and No. 6 reactors that stabilized Sunday in so-called ”cold shutdown.” The bad news is not only in immediate proximity to Fukushima: “Iodine-131 19.1 times higher than the limit was also detected Wednesday afternoon in a sample taken some 16 kilometers south of the nuclear power station, up from 16.7 times on Tuesday.”
From Kyodo:
Abnormally high levels of radioactive materials were again detected in the sea near the crisis-hit nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture, its operator said Thursday, warning the radiation levels in seawater may keep rising.
According to Tokyo Electric Power Co., radioactive iodine-131 146.9 times higher than the legal concentration limit was detected Wednesday morning in a seawater sample taken around 330 meters south of the plant, near the drain outlets of its troubled four reactors.
The level briefly fell to 29.8 times the limit on Tuesday morning from 126.7 times on Monday, but rose to its highest so far in the survey begun this week apparently due to rain and water sprayed at spent fuel pools from outside that caused radioactive materials to seep into the sea, it said.
The firm also said it found both iodine-131 and cesium-137 in a sample taken from near the drain outlets of the plant’s No. 5 and No. 6 reactors that stabilized Sunday in so-called ”cold shutdown.”
Iodine-131 19.1 times higher than the limit was also detected Wednesday afternoon in a sample taken some 16 kilometers south of the nuclear power station, up from 16.7 times on Tuesday.
The current radiation levels in seawater do not pose an immediate risk to human health, an official of TEPCO told reporters, but added, ”We have to continue to monitor whether (radioactive materials in seawater) will keep rising.”
Reuters
Thursday, March 24, 2011
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Two strong quakes of magnitude 7.0 struck northeast Myanmar, close to the Thai and Laotian borders, the U.S. Geological Survey reported on Thursday.
It said the quakes struck seconds apart at 8:25 p.m. on Thursday (1355 GMT) and were centered 69 miles north of Chiang Rai in neighboring Thailand. The first one was very shallow, at a depth of 6.2 miles, while the second one was deeper at 142.5 miles.
Read more at www.prisonplanet.com
Sen. Brown: Obama Has to Explain Libya
By Hiram Reisner
“I think it’s up to the president to define it. It’s troubling: We’re now, in some sense in four Arab countries, if you count the drones going into Pakistan,” said Brown, who has called for U.S. Libyan involvement to be short term and limited.
“I think this begs the question about what we need to do in Afghanistan, do we need to stay on the July timetable and begin the withdrawal of troops there,” he said. “Because we are overextended as a nation, and I don’t know if that sends a very good message to the Arab world.”
Brown commended the president for moving cautiously, and said it was important that he brought other countries together in the Libyan effort, but added: “I think he needs to face the nation and tell the nation, and tell Congress, what the end game is and how this going to play out.”
The Ohio Democrat was asked whether he had spoken to Obama, or whether anyone from the White House had approached him on the intervention. Brown said no one had spoken with him.
“No, they didn’t to me. I think sometimes you have to move quickly . . . but I think that is why he needs to explain to the country what the goals [are] here, why he did this,” he said. “Congress is important in this, but the country particularly, addressing the nation about this.”
When asked how much longer the U.S. military can sustain all its worldwide activities, Brown said it was not just a question of the armed forces’ ability.
“It’s the fact that we’re, you know, in four Arab countries now,” he said. “I hope the president has thought this through better than previous presidents on dealing with the Middle East and the Arab world, and that’s why it is important that he address the nation.”
Brown noted that questions posed by House Speaker John Boehner about the Libyan mission in a letter to Obama where legitimate – and should be answered.
“I think it’s what the people are asking,” he said.
A New Oxford couple accused of taking pornographic pictures of an infant and then distributing those images over the Internet.
New Oxford couple charged with producing child pornography
A New Oxford couple accused of taking pornographic pictures of an infant and then distributing those images over the Internet was federally charged Thursday.
Michael Strausbaugh and his wife, Rebecca Strausbaugh, ages 30 and 31 respectively, were both charged with production of child pornography. Michael Strausbaugh was also charged with distribution and possession of child pornography.
A Canadian individual, whom authorities have not named, was arrested for allegedly trading images containing child pornography with Michael Strausbaugh, according to a U.S. Department of Justice news release. Michael Strausbaugh allegedly took pornographic photographs of an infant, who at the time was less than 1 year old, and distributed the images over the Internet, according to the release.
The Strausbaughs were arrested Friday. U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge J. Andrew Smyser ordered the couple to be detained at a hearing Wednesday.
If convicted, Michael Strausbaugh faces a mandatory minimum of 25 years in prison. Rebecca Strausbaugh faces a 15-year mandatory minimum prison sentence.
Anyone with information related to this case should call the U.S. Postal Inspector Michael Corricelli at 257-5581.
