Japan
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Tsunami disaster site rehabilitated as robot farm
The Japanese government is reclaiming land flooded by the March 2011 tsunami and turning it into what Wired calls a "robot-run super farm." The Ministry of Agriculture has claimed a 600-acre site, part of thousands of acres of farmland destroyed by the tsunami and its aftereffects, for its "Dream Project" — a farm tilled by […]
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Video: Here’s what being in a tsunami looks like
We saw some pretty insane videos of the Japanese tsunami back in March, when it happened, but this one (which is going newly viral for whatever reason, and which I hadn't seen before) is by far the insanest. This delivery driver caught the earthquake on his in-dash video, and it looks like no big deal […]
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Radioactive monkeys will patrol Fukushima
Scientists have a new approach to monitoring radiation levels around Fukushima: They're outfitting local monkeys with radiation-measuring collars, then releasing them back into the wild. The monkeys will spend a month frolicking around the (potentially) nuclear forest, collecting data about radiation levels on the ground. The experimental device, which will also include GPS tracking and […]
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Prius is the only survivor of $3 million car crash
A car crash in Japan that's being hailed as the most expensive ever, even though it totally wasn't, totaled eight Ferraris, a Lamborghini, and three Mercedes…es. (Ugh, I just looked it up and Mercedes looks like a fifth-declension noun with the nominative plural "Mercedes," so I can't even make up a cutesy Latinate plural, WHATEVER […]
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Cloning a mammoth: Totally gonna happen
Back in August, a team of scientists uncovered a woolly mammoth's thigh bone, which had been so well preserved in Siberian permafrost that it offered the possibility of creating a mammoth clone. And this weekend, a team of Japanese and Russian scientist announced that, yes, they are going to do this thing. Mammoth clones. They're […]
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Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown more terrifying than we thought
In a new report, Tokyo Electric Power company has revealed that the Fukushima meltdown probably did more damage and was more dangerous than anyone realized at the time. The report's based on a simulation, but that simulation indicated that the entire ration of fuel inside one reactor could have turned into a pile of molten […]
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Critical List: Emissions jumped in 2010; Japan has created the world’s most efficient solar cell
In 2010, greenhouse-gas emissions increased more than they ever had before in one year. Blame the tepid economic recovery. The EPA's going to release initial results from its fracking investigation next year, but the final report won't come out until 2014. Dig into the dysfunction of the Keystone XL approval process and the fighting between […]
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Japanese companies turn bras into fuel
The whole "feminists burn their bras" thing is kind of a canard, but now you can do it for real and for an equally good cause. Japanese lingerie manufacturers are collecting bras and recycling them into solid fuel.
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Talking motorbike runs on poop. That is all.
Here's a bike that runs on biogas from human poo, writes messages in the air, plays music, and features a talking toilet. Is it even worth making jokes about this? Is it even POSSIBLE?