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  • 57 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
Cake day: September 14th, 2025
  • tal@olio.cafetoWorld News@lemmy.world•What Is Going on with All This Radioactive Shrimp?English
    22·
    2 months ago

    Scrap metal was commonly used as a raw material by PMT, according to the Indonesian outlet Antara News. It’s unclear how it may have become contaminated with cesium-137. Biegalski, whose area of expertise includes nuclear forensics, told CR that the “easiest explanation” is that a medical or industrial device containing cesium-137 was inadvertently reprocessed as scrap metal

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident

    The Goiânia accident [ɡoˈjɐ̃njə] was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on September 13, 1987, in Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil, after an unsecured radiotherapy source was stolen from an abandoned hospital site in the city. It was subsequently handled by many people, resulting in four deaths. About 112,000 people were examined for radioactive contamination and 249 of them were found to have been contaminated.[1][2]

    The radiation source in the Goiânia accident was a small capsule containing about 93 grams (3.3 oz) of highly radioactive caesium chloride (a caesium salt) made with the radioactive isotope caesium-137, and encased in a shielding canister made of lead and steel.

    On September 13, 1987, the guard tasked with protecting the site did not show up for work. Roberto dos Santos Alves and Wagner Mota Pereira illegally entered the partially demolished IGR site.[7] They partially disassembled the teletherapy unit and placed the source assembly in a wheelbarrow to later take to Roberto’s home. They thought they might get some scrap value for the unit.[1]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Juárez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident

    A radioactive contamination incident occurred in 1984 in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, originating from a radiation therapy unit purchased by a private medical company and subsequently dismantled for lack of personnel to operate it. The radioactive material, cobalt-60, ended up in a junkyard, where it was sold to foundries that inadvertently melted it with other metals and produced about 6,000 tons of contaminated rebar.[1] These were distributed in 17 Mexican states and several cities in the United States. It is estimated that 4,000 people were exposed to radiation as a result of this incident.[1]

    Detection of radioactive material

    On January 16, 1984, a radiation detector at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the U.S. state of New Mexico detected the presence of radioactivity in the vicinity. The detector went on because a truck carrying rebar produced by Achisa had taken an accidental detour and passed through the entrance and exit gate of the laboratory’s LAMPF technical area.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samut_Prakan_radiation_accident

    A radiation accident occurred in Samut Prakan Province, Thailand in January–February 2000. The accident happened when an insecurely stored unlicensed cobalt-60 radiation source was recovered by scrap metal collectors who, together with a scrapyard worker, subsequently dismantled the container, unknowingly exposing themselves and others nearby to ionizing radiation. Over the following weeks, those exposed developed symptoms of radiation sickness and eventually sought medical attention. The Office of Atomic Energy for Peace (OAEP), Thailand’s nuclear regulatory agency, was notified when doctors came to suspect radiation injury, some 17 days after the initial exposure. The OAEP sent an emergency response team to locate and contain the radiation source, which was estimated to have an activity of 15.7 terabecquerels (420 Ci), and was eventually traced to its owner. Investigations found failure to ensure secure storage of the radiation source to be the root cause of the accident, which resulted in ten people being hospitalized for radiation injury, three of whom died, as well as the potentially significant exposure of 1,872 people.[1]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_radioactive_material_in_Tammiku

    The theft of radioactive material in Tammiku, often called the Tammiku nuclear accident, took place in 1994. Three brothers in Tammiku, Männiku, Saku Parish (Harju County), Estonia, who were scrap metal scavengers, entered a fenced area in the woods and broke into a small shed that was seemingly abandoned (after having had no success with entering a larger building inside the area), with stairs leading to an underground hall. The brothers did not know that the buildings were nuclear waste storage facilities (although there were signs at the gate, they did not see them because they had climbed over the fence elsewhere). One of the brothers, Ivan, suffered a crush injury when a drum fell onto him. The brothers placed some pieces of metal into their pockets and went home, planning to return later. Ivan placed a metal cylinder in his pocket, not knowing that it was a strong caesium-137 radioactive source that was released from a container broken by the falling drum.[1] He received a 4,000 rad whole-body dose and died 12 days later.[2] Only after Ivan’s family’s dog died, and Ivan’s stepson showed radiation burn of his hands (as a result of briefly touching the cylinder), was the cause of Ivan’s death identified. The delay in information was due to the brothers’ reluctance to admitting to the break-in.[3]

    While we’ve often — not always — managed to label radiation sources, in general, people scrapping metal stuff, often stealing it, haven’t done the best job of understanding or following related rules.

  • tal@olio.cafetoWorld News@lemmy.world•Repeated deadly cough syrup scandals pose hard questions for India’s drug regulatorsEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    The pharmaceutical variant has a strictly controlled presence of DEG, if any, unlike the cheaper commercial kind, which has far higher levels of the compound, making it unfit for human consumption. Manufacturers, knowingly or unknowingly, use commercial-grade PG when making cough syrups to cut costs.

    Known as the “pharmacy of the world”, India accounted for 3 per cent of the world’s total pharmaceutical exports in 2023. It is particularly known for exporting affordable drugs, especially to Africa and other developing regions.

    In May 2023, following the scandals abroad, the CDSCO mandated a testing protocol for cough syrups in designated Indian laboratories before export.

    But no such testing was mandated for the domestic market, which has many small manufacturers producing low-cost medicines. It has now asked all state governments to submit a list of cough syrup manufacturers, while initiating a joint audit of these companies.

    The failure to prevent repeated cough syrup scandals has also brought up a whiff of alleged corruption. Mr Sukesh Khajuria, a public health activist who has been helping families of the 2019-20 victims in and around Jammu seek justice, alleged that the Indian government had failed to rein in corruption within the country’s drug regulatory set-up.

    “Pharma companies have hidden partnerships with the party in power,” he claimed.

    A 2024 report published on Scroll, an Indian online news website, said that 35 pharmaceutical companies in India had contributed nearly 10 billion rupees (S$146.4 million) to political parties. Of these, at least seven companies were being investigated for poor-quality drugs when they made their contributions.

    Well. If the state doesn’t fix it from a licensing side, I guess it’d be possible for a company to fill the gap. Like, certify drug manufacturers.

    The difference between certification and licensing is that a certifier can’t prohibit a company from doing business if it isn’t certified. But…it does mean that a purchaser, at least as long as they know what certification to look for, can look for a given certification.

    You can make a certification company that places any restrictions it wants to certify a product or company, so that eliminates roadblocks to getting that side of things moving. 'course, the certifier has to build reputation for the certification to mean much.

  • tal@olio.cafetoTechnology@lemmy.world•The Web is Going to DieEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    That depends on how you define the web

    Wikipedia:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

    The Gopher protocol (/ˈɡoʊfər/ ⓘ) is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.[1]

    gopher.floodgap.com is one of the last running Gopher servers, was the one that I usually used as a starting point when firing up a gopher client. It has a Web gateway up:

    https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/

    Gopher is a well-known information access protocol that predates the World Wide Web, developed at the University of Minnesota during the early 1990s. What is Gopher? (Gopher-hosted, via the Public Proxy)

    This proxy is for Gopher resources only – using it to access websites won’t work and is logged!

  • tal@olio.cafetoTechnology@lemmy.world•The Web is Going to DieEnglish
    9·
    2 months ago

    How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer?

    Gopher predated the Web.

    I do agree that there have been pretty major changes in the way websites worked, though. I’m not hand-coding pages using a very light, Markdown-like syntax with <em></em>, <a href=""></a>, and <h1></h1> anymore, for example.

  • tal@olio.cafetoTechnology@lemmy.world•Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer RegistrationEnglish
    342·
    2 months ago

    I don’t see why it would need to be affected.

    The constraint to require a valid signing isn’t something imposed by the license on the Android code. If you want to distribute a version of Android that doesn’t check for a registered signature, that should work fine.

    I mean, the Graphene guys could impose that constraint. But they don’t have to do so.

    I think that there’s a larger issue of practicality, though. Stuff like F-Droid works in part because you don’t need to install an alternative firmware on your phone — it’s not hard to install an alternate app store with the stock firmware. If suddenly using a package from a developer that isn’t registered with Google requires installing an alternate firmware, that’s going to severely limit the potential userbase for that package.

    Even if you can handle installing the alternate firmware, a lot of developers probably just aren’t going to bother trying to develop software without being registered.

  • tal@olio.cafetoWorld News@lemmy.world•Right-wing Sanae Takaichi set to be Japan's first female premierEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    Could be. Liz Truss said something similar, and she’s also very much on the “loose” side of things

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/liz-truss-margaret-thatcher-similarities-b2159085.html

    When Liz Truss was asked at the very first Conservative leadership hustings in Leeds which of the party’s past prime ministers she most admired, she had a very definite answer: Margaret Thatcher.

    As Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out just last week, her plans to increase the national debt in order to lower taxes “could not be further from Thatcher who…took the very unpopular decision to raise taxes in 1981 to manage deficit and inflation”.

    Rather, the economics expert said, such a policy had “clear echoes of Ted Heath in 1973”.

    Conservative MP Robert Jenrick expressed a similar concern. “It is antithesis of Thatcherism,” he said, “to be going around making unfunded tax pledges merely to win a leadership contest.”

  • tal@olio.cafetoWorld News@lemmy.world•Right-wing Sanae Takaichi set to be Japan's first female premierEnglish
    111·
    2 months ago

    Takaichi, who says her hero is Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister, offers a starker vision for change than Koizumi and is potentially more disruptive.

    An advocate of late premier Shinzo Abe’s “Abenomics” strategy to boost the economy with aggressive spending and easy monetary policy, she has previously criticised the Bank of Japan’s interest rate increases.

    I mean, I guess there’s nothing necessarily wrong with both having Thatcher as your hero and adopting said policy, but Thatcher was a deficit hawk and advocated for tight fiscal policy, which is kind of the opposite of this.