Butterflies and balloons at Fukushima
Nuclear meltdowns make everything depressing, and this week, even butterflies and balloons have seen their normally cheery image marred by radioactivity.
First butterflies. A paper in the open-access journal Scientific Reports, shows mutations in butterfly populations around the Fukushima plant, which melted down in March of last year following a major earthquake and tsunami. The paper is impressively thorough: it examined 144 butterflies collected a month after the accident. While their behaviour was normal, they did suffer from small morphological defects, such as dented eyes and slightly deformed wings (see above). A second examination of butterflies caught six months later showed about twice the rate of mutation.http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/08/butterflies-and-balloons-at-fukushima.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+news%2Frss%2Fnewsblog+%28News+Blog+-+Blog+Posts%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
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