Lifeboat Foundation

The operator of Japan’s ruined Fukushima nuclear power plant began removing radioactive fuel rods on Monday at one of three reactors that melted down after an earthquake and a tsunami in 2011, a major milestone in the long-delayed cleanup effort.

Thousands of former residents have been barred from the area around the plant for years as crews carried out a large-scale radioactive waste cleanup in the aftermath of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. The process of removing the fuel rods from a storage pool had been delayed since 2014 amid technical mishaps and high radiation levels.

The plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power, said in a statement that workers on Monday morning began removing the first of 566 spent and unspent fuel rods stored in a pool at the plant’s third reactor. A radiation-hardened robot had first located the melted uranium fuel inside the reactor in 2017.

Continue reading “Removing Fuel Rods, Japan Hits Milestone in Fukushima Nuclear Cleanup” »

In a major ethical leap for the tech world, Chinese start-ups have built algorithms that the government uses to track members of a largely Muslim minority group.

Watch for Andromeda in the early evening night sky this fall.

Researchers have invented a new type of cancer immunotherapy by injecting tumours with a series of stimulants. The experimental therapy attracts the body’s own immune system’s attention, so it can come and destroy the cancerous masses.

The radical new approach has already shown promise in patients with an advanced form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that resists conventional treatments, and is currently being tested on a variety of stubborn cancers.

The result can be described as turning the tumours into “cancer vaccine factories”, because attracting the body’s immune cells to the cancer site is a method known as in situ vaccination.

Continue reading “New Kind of Cancer ‘Vaccine’ Teaches The Immune System to Destroy Tumours” »

Scientists in China implant human genes into brains of the rhesus macaque monkey, in a move described by some as an “ethical nightmare.”

US journalist Alice Robb on her new book about the science of dreams.

Try it out for yourself.

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Every generation has a legend. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker — in cinemas January. #StarWarsPH