WHO, UNDP, UNEP and UNICEF have partnered to create a new compendium of 500 actions aimed at reducing death and diseases driven by environmental risk factors, the first such resource to unite this expertise from across the UN system. Environmental pollution and other environmental risks cause 24 per cent of …
A REVIEW of previously classified documents has revealed that the US had used babies and unsuspecting patients for experiments on radioactivity for many years. It had also released large amounts of radiation into the environment in the 1940s and early 1950s. At least 19 mentally retarded teenagers were fed radioactive …
The administrators of India's nuclear establishments have always maintained that safety standards in their plants are stringent and strictly observed and do not require evaluations by external agencies. Participants at a symposium on Advances in Structural Dynamics, organised in December by the department of civil engineering, were thus pleasantly surprised …
CLAIMING that the Chernobyl nuclear power plant had become one of the safest in the world because of the safety measures that have been introduced since the 1986 explosion, Ukraine energy minister Vilen Semenyuk has urged the parliament to reverse its decision to shut down the reactor, which has been …
SCIENTISTS have confirmed environmentalists' fears about the depletion of the ozone layer, by measuring a 50 per cent increase in the ultraviolet radiation striking Ushuaia in south Argentina. According to a report recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, the increase occurred in December 1990 when a piece of …
The Meghalaya government is taking no chances even though uranium mining in the state has been given a clean chit by a high-level team led by Atomic Energy Commission chairperson R Chidambaram. Chief minister S C Marak says he will send a multi-party delegation to the uranium mines in Jaduguda, …
TWO RUSSIAN scientists propose to get rid of radioactive waste by throwing it out of the solar system. The waste will be blasted out of the earth's atmosphere on conventional rockets and then fired out of the solar system using energy from the waste itself, according to Konversia, a Moscow-based …
USE OF additives, irradiation and the threat of pesticide residues and food-borne infections have led to the quality of diet being questioned these days as never before. Factory Farming comes as a comprehensive review of modern livestock farming and its implications, mainly in the context of Europe and North America. …
RUSSIA -- and the Soviet Union before it -- has dumped twice as much radioactive waste in the sea as 12 other nuclear countries put together, a special commission set up by President Boris Yeltsin reports. The dumping, first reported in a British weekly is said to be still continuing …
TIBETAN emigres accuse China of seeking to build a nuclear reactor near Lhasa, the Tibetan capital; of dumping nuclear waste on the Tibetan plateau, and of setting up sites there for missiles aimed at India. The US-based International Campaign for Tibet adds forced prison labour is being used to build …
ALASKAN Eskimos and American Indians were fed radioactive iodine at the height of the Cold War, but the project leader denies it was to learn how well American soldiers could survive in the Arctic. US Senator Frank H Murkowski has called for a federal investigation, stating, "There was no evidence …
AUSTRALIAN astronomers have chanced upon a rare type of pulsar (a word coined from pulsating star) -- a cosmic source of regular and rapid pulses of radiation, usually at radio frequencies. The pulsar is lurking at the edge of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Named PSR J0437-4715, the pulsar is …
AN AMERICAN satellite has provided firm evidence that cosmic rays -- showers of energised particles from space that bombard the earth from all directions -- are produced within earth's own galaxy -- the Milky Way. Speculation was rife on whether these radiations emanated from within the Milky Way or outside …
MEASURING the radioactivity of snake venom, scientists say, can fairly accurately determine overall con7 tamination in an area. This would be particularly useful in such places as the former Soviet Union, which is contaminated by different kinds of radioactive isotopes as a result of waste released from nuclear fuel plants, …
ONE OF the most remarkable and exciting developments in physics has been the interaction between particle physics and cosmology. Remarkable, because it combines the study of the very small, namely, particle physics, with the study of the very large, namely, cosmology. Exciting, because each is contributing immensely towards answering fundamental …
THOUGH reports linking brain, cancer to the use of mobile phones pushed down shares of US Cellular telephone companies, Japanese firms remain mostly unaffected. Tokyo stock market analysts explain this is because the Japanese have been inoculated by earlier reports of radioactive cellular phones. Says Edward Staiano of Motorola, the …
DISPOSING low-level radioactive waste from hospitals, pharmaceutical manufacturers and electric utilities will become more difficult and expensive in the US, with the collapse of a waste-disposal system functioning under a 12-year-old law. Now, the three states that have been operating radioactive waste dumps can refuse to accept waste generated outside …
When 35-year-old Jayamma was brought to the Kidwai Memorial Institute of Oncology ((KMIO) in Bangalore for advanced cervical cancer treatment, little did she anticipate the nightmare that lay in store for her. Jayamma was selected for Brachy therapy, in which sources of radiation are kept inside the affected part of …
THE HIGH incidence of bone cancer and leukaemia in western Rajasthan has led doctors to advocate studies be carried out to ascertain whether the 1974 Pokharan nuclear test is responsible in any way. A retrospective study of malignancy frequency in the region, conducted by R G Sharma and his associates …
Environment minister David Maclean has delayed British Nuclear Fuel's (BNF) commissioning of the L1.8 billion Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (Thorp) at Sellafield until a L50 million treatment plant is set up to neutralise emissions of Krypton 85, a radioactive gas. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have warned local residents …
THYROID cancer has started appearing sooner and spreading faster than expected among children exposed to radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April, 1986, according to two studies. A World Health Organisation team of pathologists and epidemiologists detected 102 cases of malignant thyroid cancer, usually not found among the children …
