This week: A new analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists provides new, higher numbers for radiation caused cancer deaths around Chernobyl. Brazil lures back Brazilian scientists working in the U.S. Court rulings may be influenced by whether or not judges are hungry, according to a new study.

Chernobyl Cancer Study Surpasses U.N. Estimates: Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with physicist Lisbeth Gronlund of the Union of Concerned Scientists about her new study on the likely number of cancer deaths caused by Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident.
Dr. Gronlund’s study.
The Chernobyl body count controversy.
Remembering Chernobyl after 25 years.
Click here to read a discussion about Gronlund’s analysis. (go to the bottom of the page in the comments section)

Brazil’s Investment in Science & Tech: Brazil wants to compete with the US in the fields of science and technology. The country has dramatically boosted investment in research and has begun to lure home Brazilian-born scientists who have been working abroad. Solana Pyne reports from Rio de Janeiro.
Reporter: Solana Pyne.
Read the story here.

Hunger Affects Court Rulings: Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Columbia Business School professor Jonathan Levav about his new study, “Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions,” which suggests that factors such as whether or not a judge is hungry affect court rulings.
Read the interview transcript here.

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.

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.

This week: Swine flu continues to spread. In today’s podcast you’ll hear from two parts of the world that are dealing with the pandemic. We also have a story about the lessons two American brothers learned while bringing renewable energy to the rural poor in Nicaragua. We follow up by talking to environmental engineer Anu Ramaswami about why technological fixes often fail. We have an update on negotiations over a new international climate change treaty. And a new twist on an old tale about a duo of man-eating lions in Kenya.

Ukraine Overreacts to Swine Flu: Ukrainians are panicking about the spreading swine flu virus. But is the hysteria justified? You’ll hear how culture and politics rather than science and good information may be causing Ukraine to react so dramatically.
Report: By Brigid McCarthy in Kiev.
Links:
Information on H1N1 flu from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
More on the upcoming Ukrainian elections from the BBC

Swine Flu in the Amazon: A thousand members of the Yanomami tribe deep in the Amazon have fallen ill with swine flu. Seven have died. Venezuela has shut off a part of the forest to help protect the tribe.
Guest: Fiona Watson, Survival International.
Links:
BBC story
More about the Yanomami people from Survival International

Fighting Poverty in Nicaragua: Two American brothers, Mathias and Guillaume Craig, have dedicated themselves to bringing renewable energy to the rural poor in Nicaragua. They returned home with some important lessons about the limits of technology in eradicating poverty.
Report: By Eliza Barclay in Nicaragua.
Links:
Website of blueEnergy, the Craigs’ organization

Re-thinking Engineering: The Craig Brothers are not alone in discovering that technological fixes often fail to produce the intended results. Some educators say engineers need more training in the social sciences, so those who work with technology can fashion their efforts to serve people better. We talk to one educator on the forefront of this movement.
Guest: Anu Ramaswami, University of Colorado.

Do you have an example of a failed technological fix? Or thoughts on how to design solutions that really work? Bring them to our online discussion with Anu Ramaswami in The World Science Forum here. Anu will be taking your questions and sharing her thoughts through November 13th.

Elsa’s Favorite Science Stories:

• Man-eaters of Tsavo: In 1898, two male lions terrorized and killed workers building a railroad over the river Tsavo, in Kenya. Legend has it that the lions killed and ate more than 140 people. Researchers have now analyzed tissues from the lions – on display at the Field Museum in Chicago – and conclude that the lions did not eat as many people as previously thought.
  The study
  Information about the Tsavo lions, then and now, from the Field Museum of Natural History
  World Wildlife Fund page on human-wildlife conflict
• Language Learning in the Womb: Babies may start their language lessons earlier than previously thought. German researchers have found evidence that fetuses  pick up elements of their mother tongue in the womb.
  The study
• Gene Therapy Shows New Promise: Two new gene therapy studies have reported promising results. One treated ADL, a neurodegenerative disease that causes nerves to lose their protective sheath. The other cured hereditary blindness.
  The ADL study
  The blindness study
  Notes on bioethics and gene therapy from Georgetown University

Climate Negotiations: This week negotiators met in Spain to discuss the possibilities of a new international climate treaty, but chances remain slim that countries will settle on a new treaty at the climate summit in Copenhagen next month.
Report: By The World’s Marina Giovannelli.
(This story is a podcast exclusive! It is a longer version of a story that aired on The World earlier this week.)
Collection of BBC stories on the Copenhagen summit

Mysterious Bear Disease: An unknown disease is striking bears in zoos in Germany and elsewhere. It is turning spectacled bears bald.
BBC story