monitoring

What made people sick? Dust and aerosols at Ground Zero

User Image egrossman | September 28, 2011
by Elizabeth Grossman Why some people who inhaled the airborne contaminants unleashed by the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 became sick for only a short time, why some have become chronically ill, and others terminally ill, may never be known. What is known, however, is that the dust and aerosols released in that disaster contained a potentially treacherous mix of everything that was in those enormous buildings and in those aircraft. What is also known is that, as Paul J. Lioy, professor and vice chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine…

Fuk-D: radiation monitoring

catdynamics | March 16, 2011
The Japanese Atomic Energy Authority has online environmental radiation monitors. The list of stations is here. View Larger Map The monitoring station at O-arai is the one between Fukushima and Tokyo. Ambient radiation levels there are 30-40 nGy per hour. Current levels are around 300 nGy/h - ten times normal. Acute radiation effects are seen around a dosage of a Gy, so long way to go - currently getting close to μGy/h. Things get serious around milliGy/h. 7 day graph is here Watch that curve.

Because unlike hurricanes, volcanoes are fuzzy, pink, and cute?

User Image bioephemera | February 25, 2009
As a native of Washington State, where we could literally scoop white ash off the ground in handfuls after Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980, I have one thing to say about Bobby Jindal's totally disingenuous dig at "volcano monitoring": if geoscience is such a big waste of money, sure, let's stop monitoring volcanoes - and hurricanes, too. That okay with y'all? I wonder what Jindal's fellow Republican governor Sarah Palin thinks of his advice, given that Alaska's Mt. Redoubt may erupt any day. . .

Proactive Preparation, Monitoring, and Time: Children Don't Prepare for the Future

developingintelligence | June 13, 2008
Children can be notoriously constrained to the present, but a fascinating article in JEP:HPP by Vallesi & Shallice shows exactly how strong that constraint can be: in a study with 4-11 year-olds, they show that only children older than about 5 years will take advantage of additional time provided for them to prepare for a simple task. Among adults, this finding is part of the literature on "foreperiod phenomena." Classically, this refers to the finding that reaction times are disproportionately faster with longer intervals between a warning stimulus and an "imperative" stimulus (e.g…