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6 | NewScientist | 9 April 2011 FBI THE world’s most beleaguered electricity company drew more flak this week with a proposal to dump 11,500 tonnes of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), owner of the severely damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, says the operation, backed by the Japanese government, will speed up stabilisation of the plant. It says the plan would not pose any serious danger to the public or the marine environment, because the radiation would rapidly be diluted. If people ate fish and seaweed every day from the area they would still only be exposed to radiation amounting to 0.6 millisieverts per year, a quarter of the average annual dose, it claims. TEPCO wants to use the space that this frees up to store more highly contaminated water which Radioactive fish is spilling out into the ocean through a leak from unit 2 at the plant (see page 10). South Korea has expressed concern over the plan but Japan’s foreign minister, Takeaki Matsumoto, says the dumping does not violate the 1986 Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident. Meanwhile, TEPCO has announced that it will make compensation payments to residents and farmers living near the plant. Some 80,000 residents were told to evacuate, and farmers are facing restrictions on the sale of their produce. Wiki cancer wipe A CHARITY has unleashed a legion of experts on Wikipedia, where – like a swarm of antibodies assailing a tumour – they will seek out and edit spurious entries on cancer. When you search for information about cancer online, Wikipedia entries usually come up in the first few results, ahead of Cancer Research UK. Rather than try to rise in the ranks, the charity has decided to tidy up Wikipedia, assigning its experts to vet the encyclopedia’s pages about cancer for accuracy and clarity. A 2009 study found that information on oral cancers from the top websites gathered by Google and Yahoo searches was “poor” (Oral Oncology, vol 45, p e95). Although Wikipedia has been shown to be mostly free of factual errors, some drug firms have been caught removing negative information from pages that describe their products. A study last year concluded that Wikipedia’s cancer information is quite accurate but does not read well. Perhaps Cancer Research UK should pair its learned scientists with veteran writers. Murder code THE FBI has asked the public to help it decipher coded messages that may hold clues to a decade- old murder. In 1999, the body of Ricky McCormick was found in a field near St Louis, Missouri. Police found two encrypted notes in his trouser pockets, thought to have been written by McCormick himself. These messages have withstood all attempts to decipher them using the FBI’s –Won’t be around for long– –The solution died with him– Coral reef countdown TIME is not on our side: we have just 10 years to save the Great Barrier Reef. That’s according to Ove Hoegh- Guldberg at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. If we continue to release CO 2 into the atmosphere at current rates, within a decade we will reach a tipping point beyond which ocean warming will occur no matter what we do, reducing the reef’s chances of survival, he told delegates at the Greenhouse 2011 conference in Cairns this week. Just six years ago the outlook was more optimistic. Biologists had found evidence that corals might cope with warmer oceans by swapping the symbiotic algae they rely on for their energy with versions that function efficiently at higher temperatures. But more recent studies have suggested that this is only an option for the 25 per cent of the world’s coral species that host multiple species of algae rather than just one. The remaining species must “migrate their way out of trouble” instead, says Hoegh-Guldberg. His calculations suggest that under current rates of warming, the corals must move southwards at a rate of 15 kilometres per year to stay cool. “Individual coral larvae can travel great distances, but the entire reef system can’t,” he says. “The uncomfortable conclusion is that we might lose the reef.” Lesley Hughes at Macquarie University in Sydney agrees. “There is virtually no evidence” that coral reefs can adapt fast enough to keep up with global warming, she says. “The space freed up will be used to store highly contaminated water now spilling out into the ocean” THEO ALLOFS/PHOTONICA/GETTY UPFRONT
