Ben Shoemate's Notebook

• How Radiation Threatens Health – Why and how does exposure to radiation make you ill? What levels of exposure are dangerous and what levels are lethal?
• Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power – Quake + tsunami = 1 minor radiation dose so far, says El Reg. Tragic as recent events in Japan have been. We should be building more nuclear reactors not fewer. Global warming caused by burning more and more fossil fuel in coming decades will have a far more detrimental effect on many more people than minor nuclear leaks.
• Dog walking ‘is good exercise’ – Owning a dog but not walking it is bad for the dog’s owner as well as the dog. NHS Choices unravels the spin on recent headlines proclaiming dog ownership good for health.
• Top banana – Atomic absorption spectroscopy is being used to assess how well banana peel can filter heavy metals, such as copper, from waste water. Preliminary results look promising and could lead to an ecologically sound method of industrial cleanup that uses a renewable but otherwise wasted source material.
• spectroscopynow.com/coi/cda/detail.cda?id=25080&type=Feature&chId=9&page=1″>Toxic robot – A new high-speed robotic screening system for chemical toxicity testing was recently unveiled by collaborating US federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health. The system will screen some 10,000 different chemicals for putative toxicity in what represents the first phase of the "Tox21" program aimed at protecting human health and improving chemical testing.
• Crystal unknowns – Frank Leusen and his co-workers at the University of Bradford, England, have turned to a quantum mechanical approach to help them predict the three known possible polymorphic structures of a sulfonimide. The work could assist crystallographers in structure determination of unknowns

My latest selection of six science stories, picked up by David Bradley Science Writer @sciencebase.

Six science selections is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog