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 …
"RESFARCH whaling" is malignantly alive in Japan. In mid-April, a Japanese factory ship, the Nisshin Maru, returned to Tokyo with 330 minke whales harpooned in the Antarctic during this year's "research mission". Japan has earned worldwide notoriety for sickeningly indiscriminate whale slaughter. It has killed since 1987 about 300 minke …
Researchers at the National Cancer Centre Research Institute, Tokyo, and the Chiba University School of Medicine in Japan, have made a significant discovery which may help correct genetic disorders in the womb. Scientists implanted an easily detectable gene into mouse embryos by injecting it into the tail veins of pregnant …
JAPANESE researchers claim to have developed a high-strength, fatigueresistant spring designed for motor vehicles, which could be used in clutch torsional dampers of pickup trucks. To make the spring, scientists from Nippon Steel, Japan, used a high-strength steel which is formed by adding special elements to a material based on …
In the aftermath of January's devastating earthquake in Kobe, the Japanese have begun to scrutinise and review disaster management plans that they thought were more than adequate. The major lacuna in post-quake reconstruction, believe Japanese researchers, was the absence of geographical information systems (GIS). As Shigeru Kakumoto, a visiting associate …
The brutal face of modern day terrorism bared its fangs recently on a busy subway system in Tokyo. On March 20, a vicious nerve gas spewed through subway cars and stations during the morning rush hour in the city leaving 6 dead and thousands of passengers reeling under its noxious …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
