Late last year we were approached by Julia Muggenburg, owner/director of the Belmacz Gallery in London, about presenting the Safecast project as part of their Bodikon exhibition, which opened on January 17, 2017 and runs through March 17, 2017. Many active Safecast volunteers are artists, musicians, or designers, and we often think about the implications…
No, radiation levels at Fukushima Daiichi are not rising
— Yes, TEPCO has measured very high radiation inside Daichi Unit 2. — No, it does’t mean radiation levels there are rising. In response to visual investigation results and high radiation measurements recently taken by TEPCO inside Fukushima Daiichi Unit 2, many news outlets have published stories with headlines like “Fukushima nuclear reactor radiation at…
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Safecasting abandoned uranium mines
[Note from the editors: Safecast volunteer BergiX has uploaded quite a few interesting logs from former uranium mining sites in Germany and elsewhere. In the process of checking with him about some of the surprisingly high readings he posted before approving his uploads, we learned that he is careful, well-informed, and researches sites well before…
Upcoming Tokyo Events
In addition to the SAFECAST x E2D3 visualisation hackathon on Nov. 3, 2016, we have a few more upcoming events in Tokyo. Mark your calendars! Nov 14th, 2016 – 7:30pm: SAFECAST x RSA JFN lecture – “Radiation & Science Journalism” In conjunction with the Japan Fellows’ Network of the UK Royal Society for the Encouragement of…
Improving the EPA Smart City Air Challenge
Safecast believes strongly in citizen-based environmental monitoring, and we constantly encourage official government bodies and others to support it. Recently, the US EPA announced a grant program called the EPA Smart City Air Challenge, which asks communities to propose their own plans for deploying air quality sensors and offers up to $40,000 for implementation. It…
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Safecast Web Map Update
Check out the new Safecast Tilemap! While quite a few people depend upon Safecast’s open-source iOS and OSX native apps for investigating radiation levels around the world, our web-based tilemap undoubtedly gets the most use. Because it’s accessible to anyone with an internet connection and from any web browser, it’s extremely convenient. It’s also automatically…
kGeigie and the future citizen scientists
On 24th July 2016, a Safecast volunteer crew participated in hosting a workshop at the “Mirai Summer Camp Kids Workshop” event at Roppongi Hills in Tokyo. About sixty kids from as young as eight to fifteen years old proved that anyone can be a citizen scientist. Safecast coordinated two three-hour workshops with three sessions each.…
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Pointcast Rollout, Part 2: Iitate Village
Above: The Pointcast installation in Iitate is at Iitate Farms, in Nodegami hamlet. (This is the second in a multipart series about the Pointcast realtime radiation sensor system. Part 1, which describes the technical aspects of the system, can be found here) As mentioned in Part 1, Safecasters Joe Moross, Pieter Franken, and Azby Brown…
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50 million data points!
This week Safecast hit a major milestone, reaching 50 million data points in our radiation measurement database. We hit the 40 million mark just last January, which means we’re logging close to two million data points a month now. Another way to look at it is that it took us 3 1/2 years to reach 25…
We just published our first scientific paper
Safecast marked another first recently with the publication of a peer-reviewed paper in the prestigious Journal of Radiological Protection (JRP). The paper, titled “Safecast: successful citizen-science for radiation measurement and communication after Fukushima,” tells the story of our project, attempting to place it within the spectrum of citizen science in general and to describe our…
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