Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
What you’re looking at is what some believe to be radioactive produce from Fukushima. Photos are making the rounds online and fear is likely spreading with each click of the “share” button. Probably not so great for the businesses trying to revive Fukushima’s manufacturing centers. Once a major producer for Japan’s agricultural and fisheries industry, Fukushima is a long way from recovery in those sectors. Even if clean-up and recovery efforts are successful, it will probably be several generations before the fear of contamination disappates. Volunteer-led efforts to inform and empower the public (like Safecast) continue, refusing to wait for the powers-that-be to call all the shots about the coast being clear. In more local news (for this particular Robot), radiation contamination scares persist in the Gobi Desert, where herders living near uranium mines have reported births of two-headed goats and baby camels born without eyes. It rallied a handful of nationalists fond of Nazi fashion to call for more monitoring of mining sites, and government action, but the eccentric dressers have gained more global attention than the environmental concerns they’ve tried to raise. Two headed peaches and mutant baby goats. They make great memes, but at some point – hopefully before we’re all sprouting extra appendages – they probably warrant a closer look beyond the Reddit hits.
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What you’re looking at is what some believe to be radioactive produce from Fukushima. Photos are making the rounds online and fear is likely spreading with each click of the “share” button. Probably not so great for the businesses trying to revive Fukushima’s manufacturing centers. Once a major producer for Japan’s agricultural and fisheries industry, Fukushima is a long way from recovery in those sectors. Even if clean-up and recovery efforts are successful, it will probably be several generations before the fear of contamination disappates. Volunteer-led efforts to inform and empower the public (like Safecast) continue, refusing to wait for the powers-that-be to call all the shots about the coast being clear. In more local news (for this particular Robot), radiation contamination scares persist in the Gobi Desert, where herders living near uranium mines have reported births of two-headed goats and baby camels born without eyes. It rallied a handful of nationalists fond of Nazi fashion to call for more monitoring of mining sites, and government action, but the eccentric dressers have gained more global attention than the environmental concerns they’ve tried to raise. Two headed peaches and mutant baby goats. They make great memes, but at some point – hopefully before we’re all sprouting extra appendages – they probably warrant a closer look beyond the Reddit hits.
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Nearly 15 months have passed since a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami resulted in the triple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and with the prospects of a resolution of radiation-spewing disaster yet decades away, Softbank announced today that its soon to released Pantone 5 107SH smartphone will be the first in the world with a built-in geiger counter. Since the Fukushima disaster, we’ve seen companies release mobile radiation detectors like Scosche’s iPhone-compatible RDTX, an accessory that plugs into an iPhone to give users a reading of nearby radiation levels. The Pantone 5, however, eliminates the need for dongles and attachments. The front of the phone features a button, just beneath the screen, that provides access to a radiation sensor. Once you press the button, the phone launches an app that reads the number of microsieverts, the unit in which radiation is measured, in the surrounding air. [WIRED ~ Gadget Lab]
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