Japan has one of the highest installed renewable energy capacities in the world. The country is also one of the world’s largest consumers of energy. Lacking its own fossil fuel resources, it relies on imports for nearly all of its supply. This dependence on imports makes the country vulnerable to …
JAPAN has yet again managed to, controversially speaking, outstrip the sun. It kicked off a worldwide furore in December 1992 when it received its first radioactive nuclear waste shipment in the form of reclaimed plutonium from the French company, Cogema. Now, another shipload of the stuff of nightmares is ready …
BY THE time this editorial is out, the Akatsuki Maru, the Japanese ship due to elbow through 11 tonnes of reprocessed plutonium waste from the French port of Cherbourg to Japan, will probably be honking its horn. Already, its path home is a solid wall of protest; the Caribbean, the …
THE January 17 earthquake near Kobe in western Japan exacted a grim toll: over 5,000 dead -- and climbing -- and more than 23,600 injured, about 280,000 homeless; heavy infrastructural damage like collapsed highways, railroads and buildings. Epicentred 20 km below the tiny island of Awajishima in the Seto inland …
AT THE End of Tears and Anger is a Japanese film on a doctor diagnosing a pollution-related disease. Investigating further, he comes upon its linkages with the social structure. The film bagged the Grand Prize in the 3rd Festival of Earth Vision, held in Tokyo in December last year. The …
The resumption of commercial whaling is a longstanding Japanese demand. Even so, environmentalists were aghast when Japan's official Fisheries Agency announced its intention to sell whale meat at half its normal price. "The number of children who have never eaten whale meat is growing," blandly explained an agency official. To …
Japan has finally broken its long silence on its plutonium stockpile. A white paper on atomic energy by its Science and Technology Agency says that by 1993-end Japan had 4,684 kg of domestic plutonium reserves; 6,197 kg lay in Britain and France to be shipped to Japan after reprocessing. Agency …
A Japanese company, Hitachi, has developed the technology for making pocket-sized camcorders -- video cameras which are becoming essential family items (New Scientist, Vol 143, No 1945). The technology is based on a secret technique to compress data some 100 times, thereby enabling it to be recorded on "flash memory", …
With Russia's approval, the much-awaited Antarctic whale sanctuary will come into effect on December 6. Russia's agreement is a defeat for Japan's campaign to resume commercial whaling using Russian whalers. Now, Japan is also expected to give up its opposition to whale-saving campaigns. Russia's decision followed a fierce struggle between …
Zooms may soon be out of the picture. At least 5 Japanese companies are close to developing a filrsmart enough to do a zoom's job (New SciennVol 143, No 1941). The Dew film, detaile cc which are a closely guardc secret, will be coated magnetic material that ca store information …
SOCCER heroes may soon be displaced from their pedestals by a team of robots. In the first week of September, 22 teams of mechanical engineers paraded their star players before a spellbound audience in Osaka, Japan. The event in progress was the Techno-soccer Challenge, held for the second year in …
Most water starved nations cannot afford the extravagance of purifying water for agriculture through conventional desalination techniques. The London-based Light Works may have just the answer: a cost-effective system for producing pure water in hot coastal regions, which is then used to irrigate crops. Its prototype greenhouse, built on the …
The Japanese must learn to consume less water or they might soon have to do without it altogether. This is the warning has been issued by the National Land Agency in Japan. Following an unusually dry monsoon the Land of the Rising Sun is reeling under what is being described …
INDIAN exporters had pinned their hopes on gaining entry into the Japanese rice market in the wake of the compulsory opening up under GATT. But the Japanese Food Agency has recently communicated that they would consider placing India in their shopping list only if its rice were free from harmful …
ABOUT 3 million people worldwide were infected with HIV in the past 12 months, bringing the total to 17 million. Against this background, the 10th Annual International AIDS Conference in Yokohama, Japan, which concluded on August 11, turned out to be money and energy badly spent. There were no reports …
With no major breakthroughs in the fight against aids, the just-concluded 10th Annual International Conference on the disease, held at Yokohama, Japan, turned out to be a routine affair. The only new approach was using the tools of genetic engineering to alter the immune systems of newborns to enable them …
Nissan Motor Co, Japan, seems in for rattling-bad times. A study by Japan's transport ministry has found that more people have died from carbon monoxide poisoning in Nissan cars since 1985 than in other Japanese makers' vehicles. Nissan has responded by offering free safety checks on its Skyline, Laurel and …
HOSPITAL bathrooms need no longer be breeding grounds for harmful bacteria. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed bathroom tiles and sanitary ware that can convert water into hydrogen peroxide, which has anti-bacterial properties. The researchers coated the tiles and sanitary ware with a thin film of titanium oxide, …
The Japanese quail is at the epicentre of a row between the agriculture ministry and the ministry of environment and forests (MEF). The quails were introduced in India during the '70s and were being utilised as a rural development pursuit. But MEF has now thrown a spanner in the works: …
THE Japanese have come up with a process that makes wood resistant to fire, decay and warping. Earlier attempts at improving one of the 3 attributes invariably worsened at least 1 of the other 2. In the new process developed at the Miyagi Prefectural Institute of Technology, the wood tissue …
A GROUP of adivasis in Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, are confident that they will no longer be cheated by the patwari. Shedding centuries of mathematical ignorance, the tribals have grasped the concepts of the weights and measures, with the help of origami -- traditionally associated with creating beautiful figures by folding …
