Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Disaster Expected to Release 800 Terabecquerels' Worth of Cesium-137 Reaching North America by Next Year 2016

""By 2016, nearly as much radiation from the Fukushima disaster will have reached the North American West Coast as was initially scattered over Japan during the nuclear explosions, according to professor Michio Aoyama of Japan's Fukushima University Institute of Environmental Radioactivity.

In March 2011, a massive earthquake and tsunami triggered multiple nuclear meltdowns at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. A massive cloud of radiation was ejected into the atmosphere, settling all across Japan and into the Pacific Ocean.

Approximately 800 terabecquerels' worth of cesium-137 (Cs-137) alone is expected to reach North America by next year, accounting for just 5 percent of the Cs-137 spilled into the ocean as a result of the disaster.

Radioactivity already arriving

Radioactive cesium does not naturally occur on planet Earth and is found only as a result of human nuclear activities. Cs-137 is widely considered one of the most dangerous byproducts of nuclear activity, because it mimics the activity of potassium and therefore accumulates in soil and plants, and is actively taken up by the human body.

Aoyama says that approximately 3,500 terabecquerels' worth of Cs-137 have been released into the sea from the Fukushima plant since March 2011, plus an additional 1.2 to 1.5 terabecquerels that was first released into the air but later fell into the sea. Based on measurements of the pace at which the Cs-137 has been moving eastward, Aoyama recently calculated that 800 terabecquerels would reach the West Coast of North America by next year.

Notably, 800 terabecquerels is nearly as much as (80 percent of) the 1,000 terabequerels that Fukushima operator Tokyo Electric Power Company says fell over Japan following the disaster.

In April, researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution announced that they had detected traces of Cs-134 in waters collected at the shores of Vancouver Island. Because this isotope has a half-life of only two years, the only likely source of this contamination is from the Fukushima disaster.

Based on this and other studies, Aoyama said that the 800 terabecquerels he has predicted might already have arrived at North American shores.""

http://www.naturalnews.com/050098_Fukushima_radiation_plume_West_Coast.html

Japan has Level 5 Alert Volcanic Eruption on Remote Island and Sudden Evacuation to the Astonishment of Residents

""A volcano exploded into life Friday morning on lightly populated Kuchinoerabu Island in Kagoshima Prefecture, sending smoke and ash soaring into the sky. Authorities ordered residents and visitors to evacuate.

The 9:59 a.m. “explosive” eruption of the 650-meter Mt. Shindake, the main peak on the island, resulted in a plume over 9 km high and a pyroclastic flow which reached the coast, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties, according to the local town office on the adjacent island of Yakushima, a popular tourist destination.

A weather agency official told a news conference that there is a risk of a second eruption and associated new pyroclastic flows. So far, he said, the pyroclastic flows had not struck the populated Maeda district.

Located about 100 km south of the southern tip of Kyushu, Kuchinoerabu has only about 100 full-time residents.

Some of those believed to have been present at the time were short-term visitors. The prefectural government said 141 people in all, from 78 families, were required to evacuate.

The evacuation warning came after the weather agency upgraded its alert for the island to the highest level of 5, up from the previous level of 3, which imposed limits on climbing the volcano.

The prime minister’s office in Tokyo set up a response team at its crisis management center, and the Japan Coast Guard dispatched a large patrol ship to the area.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe instructed officials involved to do all they can to ensure the safety of islanders, according to Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga.""

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/05/29/national/volcano-erupts-isle-kagoshima-prompting-evacuation-order/#.VWf2X89Viko

Customer Service Humanoid Droid on Duty in Tokyo Japan Almost Human

""The latest robot sensation in Japan is so lifelike that when she was on the floor of a Tokyo department store recently, she was confused for a human being. The new humanoid's name is Aiko Chihira, and she was working in customer service, clad in a traditional silk kimono.

"She's 165 centimeters [5 feet 5 inches] tall ... and she's supposed to be 32 years old," Hitoshi Tokuda says. He's Toshiba Corp.'s head of new business development, who led the making of Chihira with a team of programmers.

"Her movement is done by 30-times-per-second data [transfers]," he says, and she's powered by 43 motors. So Chihira's movements — like bowing or blinking — look subtle and her silicone body looks more wax figure than R2-D2.

Even in Japan, where new releases of robots are common, she was a surprise for customers like Masayuki Yamamoto.

"It's stunning, seriously I never expected this would be real," Yamamoto says. "I thought, why on earth are all these people taking a picture of a receptionist? I looked at her carefully and I realized it was a robot."

When NPR visited Chihira, she fooled more than a few folks into thinking she's real.

That trick of getting a robot to look human, without winding up in the uncanny valley that scares children, is a difficult balance for designers. Toshiba's Tokuda says it was his team's biggest challenge.

"Eighty percent humanlike is very scary. So it has to be 90 percent or close, or very close to perfect," Tokuda says.""

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/05/14/403498509/shes-almost-real-the-new-humanoid-on-customer-service-duty-in-tokyo

Multitudes of Deep Sea Melon-head Dolphin Families Beach Themselves Along the Waters of Hokota Japan

""We see one or two whales washing ashore a year, but this may be the first time to find over 100 of them on a beach," a coastguard official told AFP.

The pod was stretched out along a roughly six-mile-long stretch of beach in Hokota, Ibaraki, where they had been found by locals early Friday morning.

"They are alive. I feel sorry for them," a man told public broadcaster NHK, as others were seen ferrying buckets of seawater to the stranded animals and pouring it over them.

Several animals could be seen writhing in a futile effort to move themselves on the sand, although as the morning progressed they were clearly becoming weaker

Melon-headed whales, also known as electra dolphins, are relatively common in Japanese waters and can grow to be six- to nine-feet long.

In 2011, about 50 melon-headed whales beached themselves in a similar area.

Despite international opprobrium, Japan hunts minke and pilot whales off its own coast, and has for many years also pursued the mammals in the Antarctic Ocean using a scientific exemption to the international moratorium on whaling.

It has never made any secret of the fact that meat from the animals is also consumed.

However, a UN court ruled last year that its hunt was a commercial activity masquerading as research, and ordered it be halted.

Tokyo, which insists whaling is a tradition and labels environmental campaigners as "cultural imperialists", has vowed to restart a redesigned southern ocean whaling programme, possibly later this year.""

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/11526850/Race-to-save-more-than-130-beached-dolphins-in-Japan.html

Himalayan Yeti a Distant Relative of the Polar Bear?

""A Venezuelan evolutionary biologist and a US zoologist state that they have refuted, through mitochondrial DNA sequencing, a recent claim, also based on such sequencing, that unknown type of bear must exist. in the Himalayas and that it may be, at least in part, the source of yeti legends. Their study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Last year, B. Sykes and co-authors, in the course of mitochondrial DNA sequencing identification of hair samples that had been attributed to "anomalous primates" (yetis, bigfoots, and others), claimed to have found that two samples said to have come from the Himalayas had a 100% match with DNA recovered from a fossil Polar Bear from over 40,000 years ago. On this basis, they concluded that a currently unknown type of bear must inhabit that portion of Asia.""

""The results were partly in agreement with past studies but were also showing some new insights. The data set resulting from studying this part of the bears' genomes seems to be insufficient to make any definitive decisions as to what are the existing relationships on the basis of it alone. In combination with the results of other studies, however, it may very well prove quite useful in making such decisions.

Interestingly, it was found that one sequence from an Asian Black Bear from Japan indicated that it was not closely related to the mainland members of that species. This unexpected large evolutionary distance between these two geographic groups of the Asian Black Bear probably deserves further study.

"In fact, a study looking at the genetic and morphological variability of Asian Black Bear populations throughout the geographic distribution of the species is yet to be conducted, and it would surely yield exciting results," Gutiérrez said.""

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-03/pp-ylp031215.php