48465763
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AmiMoJo writes:
The operator of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant says radioactive cesium levels at one of the plant's observation wells have soared over the past 3 days. On Monday, TEPCO recorded 9,000 becquerels of cesium 134 and 18,000 becquerels of cesium 137 per liter of water at a well between the No. 2 reactor building and the sea.
Both radioactive substances were up about 90 times from the level logged 3 days ago. The same well also showed high levels of beta rays on Friday. The rays would have been emitted from strontium and other radioactive materials. Seawater in the port next to the Fukushima Daiichi plant has been showing increasing levels of radioactive tritium since May.
47372121
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AmiMoJo writes:
Japanese researchers have found that fish close to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant absorbed a large amount of radioactive material immediately after the March 2011 accident, rather than gradually accumulating it. The plant operator detected in a rock trout last August 380 times the government safety standard of radioactive cesium. The fish was caught about 1 kilometer off the coast of Minamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture.
[Experts expect] radioactivity levels in local fish to decrease gradually.
46964167
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AmiMoJo writes:
Japan's nuclear regulator has ordered the operator of the Monju fast-breeder reactor to suspend preparation for its restart until measures are put in place for its proper maintenance and management. The regulators acted after finding the operator had missed checkups on about 10,000 pieces of equipment. They ordered that sufficient manpower and funds be allocated for maintenance and management.
The reactor in Tsuruga City, central Japan, is at the center of the nation's nuclear-fuel recycling policy. But its operator has been hampered by a series of problems.
46673541
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AmiMoJo writes:
Over on Slashdot Japan (between discussions of the price of beef bowl and Linux kernel vulnerabilities) there has been some discussion over which key is least used on a PC keyboard. According to a small survey conducted by Yahoo Japan it is unsurprisingly the Pause/Break key. More interesting are the next three keys in descending order of unpopularity: F3, F6 and F12. No mention of the "multimedia" keys found on many keyboards these days, or Num Lock.
Which key do you use the least? What, if anything, would you replace it with?
46040781
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AmiMoJo writes:
An anonymous coward over at Slashdot Japan asked How do I encourage the transition from Windows XP?. With support due to finish in April 2014 there are still a lot of companies and individuals running XP. How do you convince corporate IT to update hundreds of PCs, or your grandmother to upgrade her 2003 vintage machine? My bank still uses XP, so perhaps it's time to switch.
45996315
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AmiMoJo writes:
The billion-euro Herschel observatory has run out of the liquid helium needed to keep its instruments and detectors at their ultra-low functioning temperature. This equipment has now warmed, meaning the telescope cannot see the sky. Its 3.5m mirror and three state-of-the-art instruments made it the most powerful observatory of its kind ever put in space, but astronomers always knew the helium store onboard would be a time-limiting factor.
45477543
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AmiMoJo writes:
Over on Slashdot Japan there is a discussion about What Magazines Do You Read? (translation). Japanese people still tend to read a lot of periodicals, while in the west readership seems to be in decline. Do you read magazines regularly, or at all? Are web sites a good substitute or do print publications still offer something worth spending your cash on?
45172199
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AmiMoJo writes:
It looks like Mozilla are finally going to remove the much hated tag from the Gecko rendering engine that powers Firefox. Work to remove support for the tag, which was always non-standard and is not supported by the most popular HTML layout engines WebKit and Blink (Chrome, Safari, Opera, Android), is progressing and should show up in a future version of the browser.
