You have to hand it to the Japanese; Last March's Tohoku earthquake and associated tsunami wasn't the first natural (or unnatural, for that matter) disaster to befall the island nation, but as just as before the country isn't simply rebuilding. Instead, it's rethinking and improving upon what was there before. The latest example: Japan's agriculture ministry is building a fully robotic experimental farm on a swath of farmland inundated by the tsunami.
This spring's nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant released almost double the amount of radiation the Japanese government has claimed, according to a new analysis. The authors say the boiling pools holding spent fuel rods played a role in the release of some of the contaminants, primarily cesium-137 - and that this could have been mitigated by an earlier response.
It appears that phase 2 in what is quickly becoming something of a bona fide patent war has commenced, with Samsung seeking injunctions on the newly launched iPhone 4S, in Japan and right here in Australia, on the basis of a variety of patents held in Japan, and also right here in Australia.
Masayoshi Son, entrepreneurial founder of Softbank, Japan's third-largest mobile network, and according to Forbes, the nation's richest man, unveiled a vague but undeniably ambitious plan to completely change Japan's energy infrastructure. His plan, which relies heavily on wind and geothermal power and abandons nuclear, would, he says, shift the majority of Japan's energy sources to renewable energy by 2030.
Previous
