Eideard

Japanese mobile phone giant NTT DoCoMo is developing a smartphone that will measure radiation levels. The design was inspired by worries over the health implications of the radiation leak at the Fukushima nuclear plant.

The phone will come with changeable “jackets” which will also be able to measure bad breath and body fat…

At the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technology, hosted near Tokyo next month, DoCoMo will show off three smartphone ‘jackets” that are fitted with sensors, to monitor body mass as well as level of skin-damaging ultraviolet light.

But the shell that measures radiation levels is likely to prove the most popular.

“Many customers have been nervous about radiation since the Great East Japan Earthquake,” said DoCoMo’s spokesman Daisuke Sakuma.

“We had been thinking what services we can provide to address these needs as a telecom carrier,” he added.

Just think of the possibilities:

Record a speech from a political candidate and it will tell you the percentage of lies.

Fears of radiation from Japan have driven some customers at health food stores on the West Coast to stock up on kelp out of a belief its iodine content can protect against thyroid cancer…

Health officials have repeatedly said United States residents face no risk from radiation drifting across the Pacific Ocean from Japan’s stricken nuclear plants.

But that has not stopped some Americans from buying potassium iodide, considered a defense against radiation poisoning. Authorities have warned against taking potassium iodide unnecessarily because of a potential for side-effects.

Meanwhile, consumers are turning to more health-friendly sources of iodine, with kelp tablets high on the list and suppliers running out, health store owners and managers along the West Coast told Reuters.

Seaweed snacks and blue-green algae liquid are also popular items, and one Washington State homeopath is even recommending miso soup and brown rice, because of an anecdote that it helped a Japanese doctor protect against radiation decades ago…

Willow Follett said consumers are “just grasping at straws” in an effort to do anything they can to protect themselves, even though they face no risk…

That did not stop the phone from ringing off the hook at Justin Brotman’s Seattle supplements and health food store Heleo, from people worried about nuclear radiation.

Callers asked about potassium iodide, which Brotman said he would not sell them because of its potential side effects. Instead, he sold them the more healthy alternative of blue-green algae, which also has some iodine.

“I even stopped answering the phone to be honest with you”, said Brotman, 29.

A required reaction to natural disaster is watching out for criminal profiteering. In a case like this, Left-coasters stampeding like two-footed lemmings on the basis of unreasonable fear – I hope these people pay through the nose for their supply of homeopathic humbug.

The sun unleashed its strongest solar flare in four years Monday night, hurling a massive wave of charged particles from electrified gas into space and toward Earth.

The solar storm sent a flash of radiation that hit Earth in a matter of minutes. Now a huge cloud of charged particles is headed our way. These coronal mass ejections, as they are called, typically take about 24 hours or more to arrive. They can spark spectacular displays of the aurora borealis, or northern lights, at high latitudes and sometimes even into the northern United States…

Class X flares are the strongest types of solar flares that can erupt from the sun…

Last night’s X2.2 flare is the most powerful solar eruption of the sun’s current weather cycle, called Solar Cycle 24…

The Monday flare came on the heels of another, only slightly less powerful, class M6.6 flare on Sunday, Feb. 13. Both events erupted from the same area on the sun, called active region 1158…

Such a flare can bathe the Earth in high doses of ultraviolet radiation and X-rays hurl a huge burst of solar wind in our direction. When this burst arrives at Earth, the electrons and protons from the solar wind come into contact with our planet’s magnetic field, and stream toward the magnetic poles.

The disturbance can create a geomagnetic storm in Earth’s magnetic field.

Get out your tinfoil hats!

White phosphorus being used in Falluja

A study examining the causes of a dramatic spike in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja has for the first time concluded that genetic damage could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults that took place six years ago.

The research, which will be published next week, confirms earlier estimates revealed by the Guardian of a major, unexplained rise in cancers and chronic neural-tube, cardiac and skeletal defects in newborns. The authors found that malformations are close to 11 times higher than normal rates, and rose to unprecedented levels in the first half of this year – a period that had not been surveyed in earlier reports…

“We suspect that the population is chronically exposed to an environmental agent,” said one of the report’s authors, environmental toxicologist Mozhgan Savabieasfahani. “We don’t know what that environmental factor is, but we are doing more tests to find out.”

The report identifies metals as potential contaminating agents afflicting the city – especially among pregnant mothers. “Metals are involved in regulating genome stability,” it says. “As environmental effectors, metals are potentially good candidates to cause birth defects.

The findings are likely to prompt further speculation that the defects were caused by depleted uranium rounds, which were heavily used in two large battles in the city in April and November 2004. The rounds, which contain ionising radiation, are a core component of the armouries of numerous militaries and militias…

The report acknowledges that other battlefield residues may also be responsible for the defects. “Many known war contaminants have the potential to interfere with normal embryonic and foetal development,” the report says. “The devastating effect of dioxins on the reproductive health of the Vietnamese people is well-known….”

The United States has owned up to nothing to help the victims of that environmental poisoning.

The researchers believe that the figures understate what they describe as an epidemic of abnormalities, because a large number of babies in Falluja are born at home with parents reluctant to seek help from authorities…

“An epidemic of birth defects is unfolding in Fallujah, Iraq,” said Savabieasfahani. “This is a serious public health crisis that needs global attention. We need independent and unbiased research into the possible causes of this epidemic.

RTFA. Having worked at thwarting the testing and development of DU weapons in New Mexico, I don’t need to be convinced of the dangers of depleted uranium ammo. It’s a pyrophoric metal that burns to dusty completion after ignition leaving it’s deadly structure blowing in the wind.

Mobile phone tower disguised as a giant penis

Do mobile phone towers make people more likely to procreate? Could it be possible that mobile phone radiation somehow aids fertilisation, or maybe there’s just something romantic about a mobile phone transmitter mast protruding from the landscape?

These questions are our natural response to learning that variation in the number of mobile phone masts across the country exactly matches variation in the number of live births. For every extra mobile phone mast in an area, there are 17.6 more babies born above the national average.

This was discovered by taking the publicly available data on the number of mobile phone masts in each county across the United Kingdom and then matching it against the live birth data for the same counties. When a regression line is calculated it has a “correlation coefficient” (a measure of how good the match is) of 98.1 out of 100. To be “statistically significant” a pattern in a dataset needs to be less than 5% likely to be found in random data (known as a “p-value”), and the masts-births correlation only has a 0.00003% probability of occurring by chance.

The match between mobile phone towers and birth rates is an extremely strong correlation and it is highly statistically significant. There is no doubting the mathematical finding that more mobile phone masts mean that there will also be more births. This is about as rigorous as statistics can get.

Mobile phone masts, however, have absolutely no bearing on the number of births. There is no causal link between the masts and the births despite the strong correlation. Both the number of mobile phone transmitters and the number of live births are linked to a third, independent factor: the local population size. As the population of an area goes up, so do both the number of mobile phone users and the number people giving birth…

But would the media turn a correlation-only finding into a causation-based health scare? To find out, I have released my mobile masts and births results as a press release. We’ll see if anyone jumps to the conclusion that mobile phone radiation really can give conception a helping hand.

I love it. My kind of computational analysis – taking the time to examine factors beyond the few chosen as possible cause-and-effect determinants.

I don’t recall posting any of Matt Parker‘s ruminations in the past – but, he’s my kind of smartass.

They risked their lives to capture on film hundreds of blinding flashes, rising fireballs and mushroom clouds.

The blast from one detonation hurled a man and his camera into a ditch. When he got up, a second wave knocked him down again.

Then there was radiation.

While many of the scientists who made atom bombs during the cold war became famous, the men who filmed what happened when those bombs were detonated made up a secret corps.

Their existence and the nature of their work has emerged from the shadows only since the federal government began a concerted effort to declassify their films about a dozen years ago. In all, the atomic moviemakers fashioned 6,500 secret films, according to federal officials.

Today, the result is a surge in fiery images on television and movie screens, as well as growing public knowledge about the atomic filmmakers…

Two new atomic documentaries, “Countdown to Zero” and “Nuclear Tipping Point,” feature archival images of the blasts. Both argue that the threat of atomic terrorism is on the rise and call for the strengthening of nuclear safeguards and, ultimately, the elimination of global arsenals.

As for the atomic cameramen, there aren’t that many left. “Quite a few have died from cancer,” George Yoshitake, 82, one of the survivors, said of his peers in an interview. “No doubt it was related to the testing.”

Long, reflective and cautionary tale. The sort of history the Pentagon, Congress and the corporations they pimp for would rather remain hidden.

I was around nuclear manufacturing early enough to remember annual updates to advisories which announced that “last year’s” safety levels had been found to be unsafe. Again and again.

When Alain Reyes’s hair suddenly fell out in a freakish band circling his head, he was not the only one worried about his health. His co-workers at a shipping company avoided him, and his boss sent him home, fearing he had a contagious disease.

Only later would Mr. Reyes learn what had caused him so much physical and emotional grief: he had received a radiation overdose during a test for a stroke at a hospital in Glendale, Calif.

Other patients getting the procedure, called a CT brain perfusion scan, were being overdosed, too — 37 of them just up the freeway at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, 269 more at the renowned Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and dozens more at a hospital in Huntsville, Ala.

The overdoses, which began to emerge late last summer, set off an investigation by the Food and Drug Administration into why patients tested with this complex yet lightly regulated technology were bombarded with excessive radiation. After 10 months, the agency has yet to provide a final report on what it found.

But an examination by The New York Times has found that radiation overdoses were larger and more widespread than previously known, that patients have reported symptoms considerably more serious than losing their hair, and that experts say they may face long-term risks of cancer and brain damage.

The review also offers insight into the way many of the overdoses occurred. While in some cases technicians did not know how to properly administer the test, interviews with hospital officials and a review of public records raise new questions about the role of manufacturers, including how well they design their software and equipment and train those who use them…

Officials there said they intentionally used high levels of radiation to get clearer images, according to an inquiry by the company that supplied the scanners, GE Healthcare.

Experts say that is unjustified and potentially dangerous…

RTFA. The scary bits persist. The incompetence of hospital administrators and staff in charge of procedures is matched by the carelessness of technology firms who apparently figured that folks would RTFM. And that would be good enough.

It ain’t.

The amount of plutonium buried at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State is nearly three times what the federal government previously reported, a new analysis indicates, suggesting that a cleanup to protect future generations will be far more challenging than planners had assumed.

The active phrase being “previously reported”. You can assume the DOE has been lying for decades.

Plutonium waste is much more prevalent around nuclear weapons sites nationwide than the Energy Department’s official accounting indicates, said Robert Alvarez, a former department official who in recent months reanalyzed studies conducted by the department in the last 15 years for Hanford; the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory; the Savannah River Site, near Aiken, S.C.; and elsewhere.

But the problem is most severe at Hanford, a 560-square-mile tract in south-central Washington that was taken over by the federal government as part of the Manhattan Project. By the time production stopped in the 1980s, Hanford had made most of the nation’s plutonium…

The fear is that in a few hundred years, the plutonium could reach an underground area called the saturated zone, where water flows, and from there enter the Columbia River. Because the area is now arid, contaminants move extremely slowly, but over the millennia the climate is expected to change, experts say…

But more than 20 years after the Energy Department vowed to embark on a cleanup, it still has not “characterized,” or determined the exact nature of, the contaminated soil.

The department has been weighing whether to try to clean up 90 percent, 99 percent or 99.9 percent of the waste, but because the extent of contamination is unclear, so is the relative cost of the options.

In other words, the bureaucrats hope the problem will be dealt with – by someone else after they retire. Results were classified. Scientists were ordered for years to keep quiet or be arrested and charged with violating national security laws.

People wonder why I’m cynical about our politicians? I’m amazed we finally have an administration that let the truth out.

With evidence mounting that radiation exposure from medical scans is a growing public health issue, the Food and Drug Administration is taking action.

The agency says it’s got a “three-pronged approach” to reducing unnecessary exposure to X-rays during exams, such as CT scans and angiograms:

Encourage safe use of medical imaging devices, including stronger safeguards against dangerous doses;

Help doctors make better decisions by making patient doses easier to see and record in medical files;

Empower patients with better information and tools to track their doses, such as a personal dose card.

FDA’s goal “is to support the benefits associated with medical imaging while minimizing the risks,” said a statement quoting Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the agency’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health…

Last week, the National Institutes of Health said it would take steps to standardize recordkeeping of radiation doses at its own hospital, a move that could set a standard for others to follow.

Uh, why did this take so long?

If you care to read through the agency’s report, it’s over here.

More than 40 sites across Iraq are contaminated with high levels of radiation and dioxins, with three decades of war and neglect having left environmental ruin in large parts of the country, an official Iraqi study has found.

Areas in and near Iraq’s largest towns and cities, including Najaf, Basra and Falluja, account for around 25% of the contaminated sites, which appear to coincide with communities that have seen increased rates of cancer and birth defects over the past five years. The joint study by the environment, health and science ministries found that scrap metal yards in and around Baghdad and Basra contain high levels of ionising radiation, which is thought to be a legacy of depleted uranium used in munitions during the first Gulf war and since the 2003 invasion.

The environment minister, Narmin Othman, said high levels of dioxins on agricultural lands in southern Iraq, in particular, were increasingly thought to be a key factor in a general decline in the health of people living in the poorest parts of the country…

“We have been regulating and monitoring this and we have been urgently trying to assemble a database. We have had co-operation from the United Nations environment programme and have given our reports in Geneva. We have studied 500 sites for chemicals and depleted uranium. Until now we have found 42 places that have been declared as [high risk] both from uranium and toxins…”

Scrap sites remain a prime concern. Wastelands of rusting cars and war damage dot Baghdad and other cities between the capital and Basra, offering unchecked access to both children and scavengers.

The United States continues to leave an unmatched heritage through the lands we “liberate”. From Agent Orange and landmines in VietNam and Cambodia – depleted uranium rounds in the Middle East – we continue to kill and maim generations well beyond the context of battlefields.