Some go to school to become journalists. Others hit the road with a notebook, camera and insatiable curiosity, while others have a shocking moment of awareness of the complexity of the human condition and want to document it. I decided to enter the field when a war journalist showed me a roll of images from [...]

There’s been a lot of confusion and concern about radiation in the past few weeks. As part of the Building a Better Explainer project at N.Y.U.’s Studio 20, we decided to create a visual explainer of radiation levels, inspired by some recent presentations over at XKCD and Information is Beautiful. Both compare radiation doses from [...]

On Friday, March 11, Japan was rocked by an earthquake. People were displaced, a nuclear reactor was in trouble, and the world watched as a tsunami flooded Japan, threatened the islands of the Pacific, and ultimately hit the western coasts of North and South America. Chris Rowan pointed out that “Very little of the devastation [...]

The radiation crisis in Japan worsens for two reasons: one that we’ve heard about, one that we haven’t but which may in the end do far more harm. The Japanese government, and the company in charge of the crippled nuclear complex, are struggling with their risk and crisis communications, and their missteps are fueling mistrust [...]

For the second time in under a year, a large-scale energy disaster is unfolding before our eyes. Two different industries. Two different crises. Can we apply any lessons from the Gulf oil spill, and what can we expect for the nuclear industry moving forward? It was just over a year ago that the Macondo well [...]

Last year, on March 11, a deadly earthquake and tsunami rocked Japan, killing more than 15,000 people. To make matters worse, the natural disaster triggered a major crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. The subsequent meltdown and radioactive release is the only event in history other than Chernobyl to rate as a “major [...]

In June I wrote about a claim that babies in the U.S. were dying as a direct result of Fukushima radiation. A close look at the accusation revealed that the data used by the authors to make the argument showed no such thing. “That data is publicly available,” I wrote, “and a check reveals that [...]

Autonomous mini-sailboat drones ply the ocean and mop up oil spills, gather information on marine life in crisis and clean up floating plastic trash. That’s the vision of Protei, a collective of technology students from around the globe who have been designing a fleet of these craft as “open” hardware—or electronic gadgets assembled from scratch [...]

Plutonium has a half-life of about 24,000 years. And scientists have known for decades that even in small doses, it is highly toxic, leading to radiation illness, cancer and often to death. After the March nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, people the world over worried that plutonium poisoning might [...]

A recent article on the Al Jazeera English web site cites a disturbing statistic: infant mortality in certain U.S. Northwest cities spiked by 35 percent in the weeks following the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The author writes that "physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light [...]

After weeks on standby, robots have been called from the sidelines to help inspect reactor buildings at Japan’s damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Tokyo Electric Power Company sent a remote-control robot into the No. 1 and No. 3 nuclear reactor buildings on Sunday and then into the No. 2 reactor the following day. The [...]

A year ago today, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake rocked Northern Japan. In the wake of this earthquake, a massive tsunami would flatten the Northern Tohoku region, killing nearly 20,000 people and knocking out power to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. And, as the country rode through a large series of aftershocks, news of an [...]