Elevated levels of radiation have been found 125 miles from the power plant, which was destroyed by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. That is well beyond the 18-mile exclusion zone that has been imposed.

Officials in the city of Tokamachi, in northwest Niigata Prefecture, detected 27,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogramme (2.2lbs) of waste in a school compost heap. By law, any waste containing just 8,000 becquerels per kg must be treated as radioactive waste.

Experts and residents say the government should have begun monitoring further afield immediately after the plant began leaking radioactivity.

‘Since the first week of the disaster, authorities have slowly been announcing that they would start checking fish, seaweed, vegetables for radiation,’ said Tom Gill, a British professor of anthropology at Meiji Gakuin University who is studying communities in the disaster zone.

‘And the response in each case has – quite reasonably – to ask why it wasn’t done previously,’ he said. ‘And this is no different.’

As well as being slow to broaden the monitoring, Mr Gill says the figures being provided by the authorities are ‘extremely inconsistent.’

The education ministry, charged with compiling data, says on its web site that the maximum level of radiation in Fukushima Prefecture […]

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Brazilian scientists report finding a possible 3,700-mile-long river flowing 13,000 feet beneath the Amazon River, the Associated Press says.

Based on temperature variations at 241 inactive oil wells, researchers identified water movement more than two miles deep and running nearly the length of the world’s second longest river, said Valiya Hamza of Brazil’s National Observatory, for whom the presumed subterranean river was named.

If the find is confirmed, which is expected by late 2014, the underground flow indicates the Amazon rain forest has two drainage system running west to east.

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In high school, Katherine Foronda trained herself not to feel hungry until after the school day had ended. She wasn’t watching her weight or worrying about boys seeing her eat.

She just didn’t have any food to eat or any money to buy it.

‘I thought, if I wasn’t hungry during class I’d be able to actually focus on what we were learning,” said Foronda, now 19.

Every day, children in every county in the United States wake up hungry. They go to school hungry. They turn out the lights at night hungry.

That is one of the stunning key findings of a new study to be released Thursday by Feeding America, a network of 200 food banks and the largest hunger charity in the country.

As many as 17 million children nationwide are struggling with what is known as food insecurity. To put it another way, one in four children in the country is living without consistent access to enough nutritious food to live a healthy life, according to the study, ‘Map the Meal Child Food Insecurity 2011.’

Those hungry children are everywhere, and with the uncertain economy, the numbers are only growing, experts say.

The consequences of malnutrition can be severe. Several studies have shown […]

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The universe contains many wonders, but scientists have discovered something that defies the imagination: a planet made of diamonds.

The carbon-based planet is denser than any previously discovered. A diamond forms when carbon is put under immense pressure, so scientists speculate that the conditions are right for much of the planet to be crystalline — in other words, a giant celestial diamond.

‘The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon — i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star,’ Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne told Reuters.

Located about 4,000 light years away in the constellation Serpens, the planet is in a tight orbit around a type of tiny dead neutron star known as a pulsar, completing its revolution around the pulsar every two hours and 10 minutes. Pulsars regularly emit bursts of radiation , which allowed scientists to detect this one, called PSR J1719-1438. They realized that the radiation beams were being modulated by a small planet, which then led them to the ‘diamond planet.’

The scientists’ measurements indicate that the planet has slightly more mass than Jupiter, but is 20 times as dense. It is also lacking in lighter elements like […]

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What causes riots? That’s not a question you would expect to have a simple answer.

But today, Marco Lagi and buddies at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, say they’ve found a single factor that seems to trigger riots around the world.

This single factor is the price of food. Lagi and co say that when it rises above a certain threshold, social unrest sweeps the planet.

The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause. Both these sources are plotted on the same graph above.

This clearly seems to show that when the food price index rises above a certain threshold, the result is trouble around the world.

This isn’t rocket science. It stands to reason that people become desperate when food is unobtainable. It’s often said that any society is three square meals from anarchy.

But what’s interesting about this analysis is that Lagi and co say that high food prices don’t necessarily trigger riots themselves, they simply create the conditions […]

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