First nuclear material is out of Fukushima

Earlier this week the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) released photos of the first nuclear material that they’ve managed to get out of one of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. Geoffrey Brumfiel elaborates in the News Blog:

All summer long, Tepco’s been busy demolishing the top of the unit 4 reactor to try and get at the fuel (the reactor was damaged in a fire that may have started as a result of the meltdown at unit 3). In July, they successfully extracted a single fuel assembly, and this week, they unveiled photos of the assembly under inspection.

An assembly is basically a lot of long little straws filled with pellets of uranium fuel. This particular one is filled with fresh fuel, so it’s not particularly radioactive (which is why everyone is standing around it). This one also does not appeared to be damaged at all, which is pretty remarkable considering what it’s been through. There is a little corrosion on the rods, but that could be precipitated iron from the water used to cool the pool, according to Margaret Harding, a nuclear engineer based in Wilmington, North Carolina. There is some debris from the fires and explosions in the bottom of the pool as well.

Continue to Geoffrey’s post to find out more.

New drug protects memory against stress in mouse study

A drug previously tested against muscular dystrophy might offer protection against memory problems induced by stressful conditions, explains Kathleen Raven in the Spoonful of Medicine blog:

In the new experiment, mice were placed each night in a plastic tube without space to move around, creating chronic stress and providing a proxy for  post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Andrew Marks, a physiologist at Columbia University in New York, and his team gave half of the animals a daily dose of the drug S107 beginning two days before the stress regime and continuing for the remaining three weeks of research. In their study appearing today in the journal Cell, they report that those mice that received S107 remembered where to find a hidden platform in a water maze a little more than twice as fast as their control counterparts. The treated mice also explored new objects placed in their cages while their stressed-out, untreated counterparts showed less interest.

More details about this study can be found in Kathleen’s post. 

California hantavirus outbreak surprises experts

Helen Thompson reveals in the News Blog, a hantavirus outbreak in California’s Yosemite National Park is raising concerns among public health officials:

{credit}CDC/CYNTHIA GOLDSMITH{/credit}

Hantavirus is characterized by flu-like symptoms which can appear as late as five to six weeks after exposure.  It’s caused by an RNA virus that’s only transmissible through airborne particles of rodent saliva, droppings, or urine.

Just 587 cases of hantavirus have been confirmed in the US from its first identification in 1993 to 2011.  ‘Sin nombre’, the most common strain (pictured), can result in a severe respiratory condition; roughly 38% of cases are fatal. Deer mice are the primary hosts for the virus, and high elevation sites, where the mice are more prevalent, can be hot spots.

“Most cases can be traced to the same house – usually we see groups of two where people were cleaning a cabin together, for example,” says Brian Hjelle, a pathologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. “But, it is unusual to have four cases coming from the same geographic location.”

That’s what has experts puzzled. Hantavirus has only infected humans twice before in Yosemite, each time at higher elevation cabins and only as isolated cases.

Find out more in Helen’s report.

Bird of the week

This week’s bird, featured by Eric Sawyer over at Scitable, is the  Double Crested Cormorant:

Follow through to his post to learn more about this bird.

Cannabis  and IQ

In her latest post, SciLogs blogger Suzi Gage is discussing a paper published a couple of days ago in PNAS, investigating cannabis dependence and it’s relation to change in IQ. She considers the media’s interpretation of this paper:

Media articles have interpreted these findings as ‘cannabis use is harmful to adolescent brains, but not afterwards’. Now, before I go on, I should say that I’m not disputing that this may be the case, but I don’t think this paper provides as strong evidence as is being reported, for a number of reasons, which I’ll go through here.

1. Sample size. OK, 1000 people sounds like a lot, but in terms of observational epidemiology, it’s not massive. This study had 5 levels of cannabis use, 3 of which had at least some form of dependence. Although cannabis use is quite common, cannabis dependence is not, and so the number of people in the highest cannabis use categories are very small, 35 and 38 in the top two. So although 1000 sounds like a lot, it can mean very small numbers in each category. Indeed, later in the paper, when the authors compare those dependent by age 18 with those dependent after age 18, they are looking at groups of less than 15 people in some cases.

Join in the debate by commenting in the thread.

The tale of the tail: measuring dinosaurs is tough when bones are missing

Ed Yong reveals in the News Blog that some dinosaur skeletons that may have been deemed ‘complete’, are missing parts of their tails:

{credit}PHOTO COURTESY OF DEBAIRD™ VIA FLICKR UNDER CREATIVE COMMONS{/credit}

Travel down the body of a dinosaur, and our knowledge of its anatomy tails away past its hips. As Dave Hone from University College Dublin has discovered, the vast majority of dinosaur skeletons, even many that have been deemed ‘complete’, are missing parts of their tails.

These lost bones are important because tails are included in estimates of dinosaur length, which are often quoted, and sometimes used to estimate mass. “A fairly simple question of ‘How long in total was this dinosaur?’ could be really quite tricky to answer for a very good number of species,” says Hone, writing in his Guardian blog. If tails are telling tall tales, other important measures could be inaccurate.

Learn more about this in Ed’s post. 

Curiosity beams back high-resolution zooms of Mars

NASA’s Curiosity rover is using its spyglass to scope out some as-yet unexplored environs:

The image above comes from Curiosity’s 100-millimeter telephoto camera, which, according to NASA, has about three times the resolving power of any previous landscape camera deployed on the Red Planet.

Continue to the post on the News blog, also cross-posted on Scientific American, to find out more.

Memories 

Finally, enjoy Viktor Poór‘s latest cartoon:

They say “only your memories can not be taken away from you”. Let’s see what the truth is: