Japanese medical personnel check a woman evacuated from her home near the Fukushima 1 nuclear plant for radiation exposure in Japan. (Photo: Asahi Shimbun/epa/Corbis)

This Week: We meet a Japanese paleontologist who had long warned his country that a massive tsunami was overdue. The pharmaceutical industry and much of the scientific community selectively publishes only positive results of medical research. Now, the British Medical Journal and many scientists are criticizing this practice and encouraging scientists to publish all results. A decade ago, Gabon produced big and positive headlines by setting aside more than ten percent of the country in a network of new national parks. The idea was to conserve the country’s rainforests and wildlife and profit from it through eco-tourism. But those efforts weren’t as successful as expected.

Scientist Warned of Japan’s Tsunami: Long before the tsunami hit Japan last year, paleontologist Koji Minoura had been warning of the danger. Minoura found evidence that a huge tsunami hit Sendai in the year 869, and he cautioned that a similar disaster was overdue.
Read more here.

Watch Nuclear Aftershocks Preview on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Click here to watch the Frontline documentary ‘Nuclear Aftershocks.’

Should All Medical Research be Published? The British Medical Journal (BMJ) recently printed an editorial attacking the pharmaceutical and science community for the long-existing habit of only selectively publishing the results of clinical trials. BMJ editor-in-chief Fiona Godlee and neuroscientist Colin Blakemore discuss whether a false picture is being put forward by medical science.

Gabon’s Eco-tourism Efforts Stumble: A decade ago Gabon established more than a dozen new national parks. The country aimed to bring in revenue through eco-tourism. But the story of one big tourism investor shows the difficulty of actually getting tourism dollars flowing.

This week: We meet an Indian scientist who spent nearly three decades developing improved varieties of pigeon pea. A Dutch company is trying to make urban agriculture a possibility. And faced with the shortage of electricity, residents of Tokyo find creative ways of dealing with a hot summer.

Developing Hybrid Pigeon Pea: It’s not your most glamorous of crops. But pigeon pea is popular among thousands of subsistence farmers in India and other parts of the world. There are reasons for it’s popularity, especially in arid, drought-stricken areas. It’s deep roots impart drought tolerance to the plant. It also replenishes levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in the soil, so farmers don’t have to rely as much on fertilizers. Crop scientist K.B. Saxena, of the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) has spent nearly three decades developing high-yielding hybrid varieties of pigeon pea. Now, Indian farmers are benefiting from his years of work, by using his newly developed varieties.
Learn more about pigeon pea from ICRISAT’s website.
See pictures of Saxena’s pigeon pea hybrids, and take a tour of ICRISAT in this slide show:

Japanese Get Creative Without AC: This summer is especially hot for residents of Tokyo. Not because temperatures are higher than usual, but because of the ongoing electricity shortage since the shut down of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. So companies are getting creative: shuffling the work week, getting wild with its dress code, and covering buildings in vines. Reporter Liz Ruskin has the story.

Indoor Farming in the Netherlands: A Dutch experiment is attempting to make urban growing a viable possibility. Clark Boyd has the story.

This is Luxembourg’s very own begging robot. It’s part of an exhibit called “Poor Luxembourg?” at the Luxembourg City history museum. Begging isn’t allowed anywhere in the Grand Duchy, so they asked a Dutch artist named Kaspar Koenig to build this robot. The idea is to get people to think about people living in poverty. Koenig has also put the robot out on the streets, because there are no laws preventing a robot from begging. You can read more and see some videos of the beggar ‘bot over on The World’s homepage. That’s how we kick off WTP 331, along with some new music from podcast favorite, Spunkshine. Check out Huge Humans!

We’ve got an item on North Korea’s supposed cyber-army, and another on Japan’s virtual pop star. Also be sure to check out our stories on Playmancer, the game designed to assist with physical rehab, and on a British project looking to add some noise to electric cars.

And we end this episode with a segment featuring WTP listener Thomas Witherspoon, who runs a non-profit called Ears to Our World. The group seeks to put radios in the hands of students and teachers across the globe.

Speaking of endings…it is with heavy heart that I announce that WTP 331 will be the last podcast for a while. I’m taking a break from the podcast, but will still be appearing regularly on The World radio program (available as a podcast, of course) and on my colleague Rhitu Chatterjee’s World Science Podcast. If you like the yarns I spin, technology or otherwise, I urge you to subscribe.

It’s been a pleasure and a privilege bringing you the podcast for the past six and a half years. Thanks for listening, thanks for your story ideas, and thanks for telling your friends (and enemies) about the ‘cast. Here’s hoping I’ll be back in your earbuds soon.

Looming Quake Risk in Japan: A series of studies in Science, as reported by Nature, suggests another big quake could be in the offing south of where the Great Tohoku Earthquake struck.

Congress Restricts Sino-American Science Collaboration: Here’s one I missed a couple of weeks ago. A little-known clause in the latest federal budget bans certain forms of scientific collaboration between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China. Here’s one take on the issue from the Council on Foreign Relations.

Skin Disease in the Mind: A Mayo Clinic study suggests that Morgellons disease — which sufferers say is caused by parasites crawling under the skin — is actually caused by delusions, says a story in the L.A. Times. (The disease sounds reminiscent of Guinea worm disease, which is all too real. Check out my story on a former U.S. president’s battle against Guinea worm.)

Mummies with Heart Disease: We’ve heard this before: scientists put mummies in CT scanners to diagnose diseases of ancient Egypt. But this latest study is especially large and finds a surprisingly high rate of atherosclerosis. Report by Discovery News.

DDT vs. Malaria: The New York Times provides an update on a controversy in Northern Uganda. Are the benefits of combating malaria with DDT worth the risks? It’s a subject we investigated in 2009 with a lengthy news report and a World Science Forum discussion.

David Baron is the health & science editor at The World.

(Photo: flickr image by Ian Turton.)

This week: Two new studies outline characteristics that help alien species become invasive. India rethinks its ambitious nuclear energy plans. A new study shows what we might have known all along — human language originated in Africa. Yet another study suggests that rules of grammar are far from universal. Also, our ongoing Science Forum discussion about how our physical environments influence human behavior goes until Thursday, April 21st. So, stop by and add your thoughts and questions to the conversation here. (Photo: The Burmese python has invaded parts of the U.S. Credit: U.S. National Park Service.)

India Rethinks its Nuclear Energy Plans: The disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear complex has led India to rethink its increasing reliance on nuclear power. New York Times correspondent Vikas Bajaj tells anchor Marco Werman the demands for power in India are huge and growing. Forty percent of India’s population currently has no access to electricity.
Read the transcript of the interview.
Listen to my story on India’s nuclear energy plans in Podcast no. 91.
Asia’s Push for Nuclear Power — a Wise Bet? An online Science Forum discussion.

Fukushima vs. Chernobyl — Comparison Less Useful Than Ever: Fukushima is nothing like Chernobyl — except, it’s sort of the same. Of course, it’s no nearly as bad — unless it’s worse! If your head’s hurting right now trying to keep track of official evaluations of the scale of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, well, get in line for the aspirin — if not yet the iodine pills. Read more in this blog post by guest blogger Peter Thomson, The World’s environment editor.

The Original Language: The world’s 7,000 languages appear to share a common ancestral tongue, which was spoken in Africa at least 50 thousand years ago. Linguists hadn’t been able to trace the roots of language that far back in time before. But by stripping speech down to its most basic components, such as vowels and consonants, a researcher was able to show how languages changed as humans migrated across the globe.
The study.
The author’s website.
ScienceNOW coverage.
Links to more news stories.

No Universal Grammar: Although all modern languages have common roots, they share few grammatical rules. Linguists had expected that certain rules of syntax would always occur together so that changing one rule would mean changing others in concert, perhaps because of the way the brain works. But a new study suggests that languages evolve in varied ways, governed more by culture than biology. Does this challenge linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar ? My fellow podcaster, Patrick Cox (host of The World in Words podcast) helps us answer that question.
The study.
The authors’ user-friendly summary.
Wired Science coverage.

Invasive Species: As humans travel around the globe, we bring other animals and plants along. Biologists wish they could better predict which of these species will become invasive in their new habitats–as Burmese pythons have done in Florida. Two recent studies suggest that extra chromosomes (for plants) and big brains (for reptiles and amphibians) help species invade new habitats.
The studies: Plants and reptiles.
More on invasive plants in the U.S..
More on big brains.
Regulating trade could keep out alien invaders.

If your head’s hurting right now trying to keep track of official evaluations of the scale of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, well, get in line for the aspirin. If not yet the iodine pills.

For weeks we’ve been told that the still out-of-control nuclear mess at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant would ultimately come nowhere near the scale of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. (I wrote about this comparison—and its shortcomings—last week.)
(Fukushima nuclear power plant following the March 11 earthquake & tsunami. Photo: daveeza/Flickr)

The Japanese government, for instance, had rated the accident at level 5 on the IAES’s International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale—an “accident with wider consequences,” roughly on par with the scary but ultimately fairly limited Three Mile Island event in 1979.

Then on Tuesday, we here in the US awoke to news that Japan has re-evaluated the amount of radiation released so far, and has recalibrated the disaster as a 7—top of the IAEA’s scale, a “major accident,” and a level previously reached only by… Chernobyl.

The announcement was widely reported in leads and top graphs in ways that strongly suggested Fukushima is, in fact, comparable to Chernobyl. (See NYTimes, NPR, Kyodo News, NHK.)

Yikes.

But hold on, they told those of us who weren’t too stunned to listen or read further, Fukushima still has released only about a tenth of the total radiation released at Chernobyl. So even if it’s on the same level as Chernobyl it’s still “totally different from Chernobyl,” according to an official of Japan’s nuclear agency.

OK, so it’s the same, but actually not at all the same.

Turns out the confusion partly results from an imprecise measurement system that doesn’t distinguish between events on the top end of the scale. And there IS a very important distinction here—between a Chernobyl reactor without a containment vessel that exploded and burned for two days, spewing high levels of radiation over thousands of square miles, and the four reactors at Fukushima that have so far suffered much less damage and the impact of which has been much more localized.

Except… on the heels of the government’s announcement that Fukushima is not on par with Chernobyl came this, from an executive of the Plant’s owner, Tokyo Electric Power:

“Our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl.”

Huh?

Aside from that single quote from TEPCO’s Junichi Matsumoto, I haven’t been able to unearth any more details about this statement, certainly nothing about the level of probability behind it. And the same Japanese nuclear official who said Fukushima is totally different from Chernobyl, despite the top-level crisis rating, told the New York Times, “I cannot understand their position.”

So for the time being we’re again left in the dark. Which has been one of the biggest problems of this whole crisis—a dearth of detailed and reliable information, or context for the information we do have.

Some of this may be impossible to get for years, if ever—many instruments are broken or unreliable after the quake and tsunami, and the reactor cores are still too hot to for anyone to be able to assess them directly. It’s also impossible to measure radiation in every possible place it could have ended up. But some information may also have been withheld or massaged by TEPCO or the Japanese government, which has been wrestling with the challenge of how to manage the situation without causing panic among its people.

As I said, we do know that the dynamics of the Chernobyl incident were very different from those at Fukushima. We also know that Fukushima has been managed far better than the Soviets handled Chernobyl (not well, perhaps, but still far better). That means many fewer people have so far received acute doses of radiation this time, and that the fallout from the airborne releases seem to be much less and far more localized. And the Japanese government says that a month now into the crisis, the chances of another large burst of radiation are “significantly smaller.”

But we also know that along with the airborne releases, large amounts of radioactivity have seeped into the ground and been released into the sea, much of which, it seems, is as yet uncounted. And of course the disaster is still far from over. Radiation may continue to escape for weeks or months to come.

And amid the mixed signals, here’s one more: even as the risk of significant new releases seems to be diminishing, the Japanese government this week expanded the evacuation zone around the plant to include new areas where residents are likely to receive long-term elevated radiation exposure. It’s also becoming increasingly clear that some of these areas will be uninhabitable for at least several decades to come.

So—Fukushima like Chernobyl? Fukushima NOT like Chernobyl? I still believe the comparison is inappropriate no matter how the numbers do or don’t stack up (Are we comparing the nature of the accident? Total radiation released? Area affected? Total impact on human health?) But it’s clearer than ever this week that that’s a losing rhetorical battle, even as it’s also clear that the comparisons are more meaningless than ever.

But I sure do hope that at the very least, the IAEA will change its scale before the next nuclear disaster—this is becoming harder than ever to characterize for a general audience.

If they don’t, we’ll know that they really are in cahoots—not with the nuclear industry, as many allege, but with the aspirin manufacturers.

Peter Thomson is the environment editor at The World.

Also in this episode, we’ll explore the legacy of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who 50 years ago became the first human being in space. We’ll hear from the Soviet side, and the American side, and we’ll give you some points to ponder in the manned vs. unmanned space exploration debate. Oh, and we’ll give you the world’s first space/earth flute duet. Awesome.

And we’ll end with the BBC’s Chris Vallance offering you an audio glimpse, if that makes sense, of Daphne Oram’s prototype electronic music production device, the Oramics Machine. It will go on display this summer in London’s Science Museum, but Chris gives us a preview.

Remember, you can follow us on Twitter, or join our Facebook fan group.

I spend the bulk of my time for the radio program, The Big Show, chasing my tail trying to bring you “all the latest news.” What’s great about the podcast is that it affords me, and therefore you, the chance to step back and get some historical context and perspective on the news. That’s what I’m doing this week with the ongoing nuclear crisis at Fukushima in Japan. Here you see a picture of the reactor at Chernobyl, encased in its concrete “sarcophagus.” That’s one of the places we will revisit, along with Three Mile Island in the United States, and the Tokaimura plant in Japan.

Yes, I’ll admit that WTP 324 will not be the most uplifting episode we’ve done. But it’s a fascinating glimpse into the past, and will hopefully arm you with some much-needed perspective amidst the daily deluge of breaking news.

To make up for the darkness, we will also feature a Tokyo blogger who is helping translate tweets from Japan during these difficult times.

Remember, you can follow WTP on Twitter, and on Facebook.

(Photo: Elena Filatova)

This is Malte Spitz, German Green Party politician and cell phone user. Super user, actually. Recently, he started wondering just how much data his cell phone company had on him. So, he asked for it. And under German Constitutional Law, the company had to fork it over. Spitz then took the data, all six months of it, and it available to the German newspaper “Die Zeit,” which took it and made an intriguing, some might say frightening, visualization of it. Not hard, considering Spitz cell phone was registered and logged by a local cell phone tower no fewer than 35,000 times in that six month period. In this episode of The World’s Technology Podcast, we’ll feature an interview with Spitz, and find out why he asked for his information, and what he intends to do now. You can read, and hear, a longer interview with Malte Spitz over at Deutsche Welle‘s Spectrum program.

Also on this program, we’ll do a survey of how countries that currently use nuclear power, and those that had plans to, are feeling in the wake of the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima plant in Japan. It all raises the question of risk assessment, not just with nuclear power, but with all the things that we might have cause to fear in our lives. To give us some perspective, we’ve got an interview with Dan Gardner, author of Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear.

Haven’t you always wanted to take a peak inside Virgin Galactic’s commercial spacecraft? I know I do. Luckily, the BBC was granted access to get inside the craft, and we’ll have the report. If you’ve got $200,000 to spare, it just might be a sweet, if short, ride.

And here’s a question: how would you like to help the FBI solve a cold case? Well, you might have to know a bit about cryptography, or not. No one’s really sure if the scraps of paper left behind at a 1999 crime scene are encrypted clues, or just gibberish. So, they’ve made the notes available online, and are asking for the public’s help.

Finally, we pay tribute to a giant of stickiness, Harry Coover. Coover worked with cyanoacrylates, and that work eventually gave rise to the product we all know and love (and hate), Super Glue. Coover passed away this week at the age of 94. He had more than 400 patents, and was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2010.

Remember, you can always join the fun on our Facebook fan page, or follow us on Twitter.

(Photo: German Green Party)

This week: Scientists are debating the legacy of a doomed expedition to the South Pole, which took place a century ago. Today, the Antarctic is a laboratory for all sorts of science. In fact, a small group of researchers is spending the entire winter at the South Pole. We hear from one of those researchers, an astrophysicist from Belgium. She’s also taking your questions in our latest Science Forum. Click here to join the discussion.  Also, looking back at the Chernobyl nuclear disaster after 25 years. (Photo: Credit Freija Descamps)

Debating the Legacy of a Doomed Antarctic Expedition: Reporter Eric Niiler examines the doomed South Pole expedition of British explorer Robert Scott, which took place nearly one hundred years ago.
Read more here.
‘One man won the battle, the other won hearts,’ by The New York Times.
‘Race to the End of the Earth,’ an excellent exhibition about the Norwegian and British expeditions to the South Pole by the American Museum of Natural History. The exhibition is currently traveling and will be at the National Geographic Museum starting in May 2011..
See pictures of McMurdo research station and relics from Scott’s expedition.

Life and Science at the South Pole Today: Working conditions in the Antarctic have changed a lot since Robert Scott’s expedition nearly one hundred years ago. Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks to Freija Descamps, a Belgian astrophysicist who is spending the winter at the South Pole. Descamps is working at a new observatory called IceCube, which detects ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos. She is also our guest in the latest Science Forum discussion, so you can send your questions all the way to the bottom of the planet. Click here to join the conversation.
Read about life at the South Pole in Descamps’s blog.
See Freija Descamps’s pictures of the South Pole in this slide show.

Remembering Chernobyl After 25 Years: The nuclear crisis unfolding in Japan is taking place exactly 25 years after the world’s worst nuclear accident in Chernobyl. Brigid McCarthy reminds us of the scale of that disaster.
Read Brigid McCarthy’s story here.
More on Japan’s nuclear crisis on The World.
See pictures of Chernobyl in this slide show.