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Japanese Use Wild Monkeys To Track Radiation
PolygamousRanchKid writes "Scientists in Japan are taking a novel approach to measuring the impact of radiation in a forest affected by the Fukushima nuclear crisis: enlisting the help of local wild monkeys. Takayuki Takahashi, a professor of robotic technology at Fukushima University, told CNN Wednesday his team was working on a collar fitted with a dosimeter to measure radiation levels that could be fitted to the monkeys before they are released back into the wild. Takahashi said the experiment would help researchers understand how radiation in the forest can affect human beings, as well as wild animals. While human scientists have been monitoring radiation levels from the air, the use of monkey 'assistants' will give them a clearer idea of conditions on the ground."
Isn't this kind of where King Kong comes from?
Where have I heard this story before? Monkeys, nuclear radiation...
Oh yeah, every Japanese monster movie ever made!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
How long will it take before PETA starts crying murder with this?
I'm guessing if they gave them a room full of a million typewriters they'd actually just scream and hurl feces.
That's probably what I'd do too.
air and light and time and space
Anyone else want to gather about 100 irradiated monkeys and send them to PETA for some tlc?
Japan has everything cool!
Can people ACTUALLY be this stupid?
so depressing
Just use a scale based on how much they glow.
Not in the original, which took place on a remote island in the 1930s. There weren't many nuclera power plants around then.
Finally those decades of research are paying off.
Welcome our irradiated primate overlords. So this is how Planet of the Apes happened.
Or maybe we should send author of this idea together with some monkey. If monkey can go there, then human should be able to follow it.
It's not like they transported monkeys from other areas and threw them into the radiation.
and do you realize that almost EVERY animal hunts and eats each other? do you REALLY think most animals live bucolic lives just frolicking in the jungle? no, they are savagely slaughtering each other for food. you would not want to be an animal in the wild, it literally IS a jungle out there for them.
I think we now know how the Planet of the Apes ACTUALLY started...
C'mon, don't the Japanese have some sort of fancy robots to do this kind of work instead of using living creatures that can be harmed? They can make all sorts of dolls that men can use to have lifelike sexual experiences, but they cant use robots to patrol around the area to detect radiation levels?
Our wild monkeys track money. And rule us too.
Excuse me, but how is this tagged 'Idle'? And what's with the Planet Of The Ape jokes which is derivative of complete fiction?
This is a real country with a real populace.
Seems like a significant research technique for an original scenario, mutation jokes be damned.
She blinded me with science, she tricked me with technology. ~ Thomas Dolby
why not use the radiation to track wild monkeys?
Bah. I live in Japan, was born here, and will probably die here; hopefully from old age, perhaps from radiation or from earthquakes, who knows?
But hey, monkeys are funny. They are also fascinating.
And I love stupid Planet of the Apes jokes. Even stupid Godzilla and radiation jokes don't bother me. They probably don't bother the researchers either, and they sure as hell don't bother the monkeys. After all, they're monkeys! And get your stinking paws off me you damned dirty apes!
I wouldn't say the monkeys are really 'helpers', nor are they 'assistants' - we're exploiting them, to learn about the results of our disaster. Yet another example of other creatures having to suffer needlessly due to our choices..
Couldn't the data be collected in other ways? Set up stations in the forests? (Which would probably be cheaper given they could retrieve and reuse them, and be subject to less abuse.)
It might be more useful too, because the sensors are where we want them, not where any of these monkeys happen to wander.
I'm thrilled some consideration is being given to how Fukushima is affecting the habitat and other animals in the area, but let's make it a bit more meaningful by not stressing the animals there any further.. At least it's only three monkeys, according to the article. I'd hate to see a precedent set for more 'monitoring'.
Alright, back to the Planet of the Apes, King Kong and radiation-enhanced monkey overlord jokes. ;)
I was just thinking that myself. Peta's argument would be round them up and give them chemo, then release them somewhere else! Jokes aside, this is an environmental tragedy but if they can get some kind of useful info from the monkeys, then fair enough.
Peta's argument would be round them up and give them chemo, then release them somewhere else! Jokes aside, this is an environmental tragedy but if they can get some kind of useful info from the monkeys, then fair enough.
Yeah, I'm a real nuke-u-lar fanboi, but I love the tasty animals too. Perhaps we'll advance veterinary science a bit because of this. When the chips are down, you take your victories where you can.
This is done in the US as well. . . at nuclear weapon storage facilities monkeys are released and allowed to live in the areas around the site, yet within the perimeter. They are monitored for radiation levels as a last ditch failsafe test of radiation leakage. My friend was in the national guard and was stationed on such a facility, and the running joke was that they were just protecting the monkeys, not the weapons.
I think we've all created a random sentence maker in our programming careers.
:P
But what we haven't done is let it go loose on the web, and allow people to vote them up/down
I think with some creativity, you could even go,"Do these two sentences fit next to each other?" And that could create the next version of the website: Assembled Phrases voted up/down. Which as you understand could lead to the next voted thing: Do you like this paragraph +/-?
The real problem with this website is you're taking something silly and trying to be serious/professional with it. The work you'd need to put in the site is non trivial. Yet, it could be so worth it
God spoke to me
I guess the question I have is why monkeys?(other than monkeys are awesome of course :P) Is there any advantage to using monkeys over other types of animals, particularly since monkeys are quite social and thus tend to clump together in groups.... Unfortunately TFA doesn't explain why monkeys were chosen.
Monstar L
"The creatures are expected to wear the collar for about a month. "
This isn't going to tell them anything they couldn't get by putting dosimeters around the various locations where people would normally be as opposed to the local forests.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
...you know we're all fucked when the first one says "NO!"
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
ya learn somethin' new everyday....
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Did they pay peanuts?
We simply send the monkeys out into the wild, and the ones that encounter large doses of radiation come back and tell us all about it.
The amusing thing is that this means that God (or the gods) got worse at it the more practice He/They got....
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
Most posters don't seem to grasp the fact these are local wild monkeys. Not captured monkeys from elswhere released in the irradiated area. And now I bet the next suggestion will be deporting all wildlife from the irradiated area or forcing an anti-radiation suit on them...
Was anyone else reminded of the Movie Project X?
And the monkey unemployment problem is solved!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
..'cos that's what happens when you pay peanuts.
I'll get my coat.
The U.S. Use Wild Monkeys To Track Radiation Too.... They're called Stripclubs.
They had a monkey escape a lab, and are saying now that they let hi out on purpose to do experiments about what introduction of an animal that is radioactive into the wild would do to the rest of the animals, and maybe even humans.....I don't know but I smell something..... not quite sure what it is.....
Pfft, my mod points expire, right before I get a chance to mark spam.
king knog vs godzilla?
It was 2013 when they were all finally captured, transported in white trucks, loaded onto wooden fishing boats and banished to the evacuated island of Me-shima. The sullen, glowing creatures, some with open sores and missing hair, were unloaded from their crates by the workers in their hazard isolation suits. The workers were helicoptered onto a waiting ship back to Nagasaki, leaving the radmonkeys miserably exiled to the tiny island, presumably forever.
It has been 17 years, now, but the scientists stopped remotely monitoring the radmonkeys long ago. Budget cuts happened almost immediately, but moreso, everyone wanted to forget about the entire disaster. The "humane" thing had been done for the radmonkeys, after the sickening had been done to them. The novel anti-radiation gene therapy experimentation had not yielded any results, and the radmonkeys became less and less interesting, and more a reminder of so many things gone wrong.
When the initial survey team was dispatched to Me-shima this summer, they expected to find the island a little smaller (owing to the ocean rise from global warming), but perfectly safe. What they were not expecting, were living radmonkeys.
.. welcome our new glow-in-the-dark monkey overlords.
Cesium snowball fight! 13:00 sharp at the hot springs!
Am I the only one who is waiting for an xkcd comic to come from this?
I thought that the cost of reprocessing outweighed the cost of new rods. So we get new rods and a pile of yuck that nobody Luddites or nuke fanboys really want to touch.
It's good that the Japanese have learned to always mount scratch monkeys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_monkey
PETAphiles are going to have a field day with this, they don't even like the Japanese dressing up virtual Italian plumbers in a fur suit.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
It is much easier to read a glowing monkey than listen to a Geiger counter. In Japan, I believe wild monkeys are quite often seen as pests so it makes it ok. Now if they could only militarize the cicadia population.