Living Lab Radio: Nobel Prize Wrap-up and Fukushima Follow-up

Storage tanks for contaminated water are seen through a window of a building during a media tour to the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) in Okuma town, Fukushima prefecture, Japan, Thursday, Feb. 23, 2017.

Heather Goldstone is the science editor at WCAI, the Cape and Islands NPR Station. She holds a Ph.D. in ocean science from M.I.T. and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and spent a decade as an active researcher before leaving the lab to become a writer.

October 10, 2017

Updated July 03, 2023

The Nobel Prizes in science were awarded this past week, and Massachusetts was well-represented. Two of the three recipients of the physiology and medicine prize are from Brandeis University, and half the physics prize went to a scientist who has spent the vast majority of his career – from college onward – at MIT. Learning who these prize-winning scientists are can reveal a lot about the culture of science.
The Fukushima nuclear disaster has faded from American headlines, but researchers are still tracking the environmental impacts. Now, they've found leftover radiation in an unexpected place - trapped on and between sand grains on beaches up to sixty miles from the power plant.
We know there are synthetic chemicals in our furniture, our cosmetics, our cleaners, and even our drinking water. A crowd-sourced study has been finding these same chemicals in our bodies. In many cases, we know exactly where they’re coming from and how to avoid them. But some of them are a bit more mysterious.