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Radioactive Particles Are Spreading Across Europe and No One Knows Why
‘Iodine-131 is a dangerous radioactive isotope. It can clog up your thyroid gland and contaminate food. It’s been a big problem in Japan (for obvious reasons), but now it’s been scarily detected throughout Europe. And nobody knows the source.’
Before everyone puts on their lead suits, it’s important to understand that the current iodine-131 levels are incredibly low and unlikely to cause harm to anyone (the estimated dose level was 1/40,000 of the radiation that a person receives during a Transatlantic flight). However, what is causing this is a complete mystery which remains to be solved.
Some compounds found in grapes help to protect skin cells from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. The study supports the use of grapes or grape derivatives in sun protection products.
SOMA, Japan - A third explosion in four days rocked the earthquake-damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in northeast Japan early Tuesday, the country’s nuclear safety agency said.
The blast at Dai-ichi Unit 2 followed two hydrogen explosions at the plant — the latest on Monday — as authorities struggle to prevent the catastrophic release of radiation in the area devastated by a tsunami.
Breaking
Radiation from a mobile phone call can make brain regions near the device burn more energy, according to a new study.
Cellphones emit ultra-high-frequency radio waves during calls and data transfers, and some researchers have suspected this radiation — albeit inconclusively — of being linked to long-term health risks like brain cancer. The new brain-scan-based work, to be published Feb. 23 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, shows radiation emitted from a cellphone’s antenna during a call makes nearby brain tissue use 7 percent more energy.
“We have no idea what this means yet or how it works,” said neuroscientist Nora Volkow of the National Institutes of Health. “But this is the first reliable study showing the brain is activated by exposure to cellphone radio frequencies.”
I posted something like this yesterday via NYTimes, but might as well post it again for anyone who missed it.
Rings in Sky Leave Alternate Visions of Universes
Last month a pair of physicists startled the world by claiming that they had managed to see through the Big Bang and glimpse evidence of previous incarnations of the universe in an analysis of radio signals from the sky.
The evidence, said Roger Penrose of Oxford University and Vahe Gurzadyan of Yerevan State University in Armenia, takes the form of concentric rings caused by the collisions of supermassive black holes in earlier versions of our universe and imprinted, like ripples on a pond, on a haze of microwave radiation widely thought to be left over from the Big Bang that started our own cycle of time about 13.7 billion years ago.
Our Universe or Earlier?
Groups of astronomers have differing explanations for the timing of these rings.
The current cosmological consensus is that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang. But a legendary physicist says he’s found the first evidence of an eternal, cyclic cosmos.
The Big Bang model holds that everything that now comprises the universe was once concentrated in a single point of near-infinite density. Before this singularity exploded and the universe began, there was absolutely nothing - indeed, it’s not clear whether one can even use the term “before” in reference to a pre-Big-Bang cosmos, as time itself may not have existed yet. In the current model, the universe began with the Big Bang, underwent cosmic inflation for a fraction of a second, then settled into the much more gradual expansion that is still going on, and likely will end with the universe as an infinitely expanded, featureless cosmos.
Sir Roger Penrose, one of the most renowned physicists of the last fifty years, takes issue with this view. He points out that the universe was apparently born in a very low state of entropy, meaning a very high degree of order initially existed, and this is what made the complex matter we see all around us (and are composed of) possible in the first place. His objection is that the Big Bang model can’t explain why such a low entropy state existed, and he believes he has a solution - that the universe is just one of many in a cyclical chain, with each Big Bang starting up a new universe in place of the one before.
