The Atomic Energy Council (AEC) yesterday announced the development of a compact device that would make it easier to detect radiation using 3G cellphones as a positioning device.
“Radiation is all around us. Aside from naturally occurring radiation, such as radium, thorium and uranium, there are numerous manmade radiation sources such as X-rays and medical cobalt 60,” said Tseng Hsun-hua (曾訓華), a researcher at the AEC’s Institute of Nuclear Energy Research (INER).
INER has been working for the past three years with the AEC’s Radiation Monitoring Station and National Tsing Hua University to design a device that local governments or communities can use to check the safety of their environments, Tseng said.
“The FNS-99 is the first comprehensive radiation detection device that is aided by cellphones,” Tseng said, adding that the equipment would be available for sale in six months at the earliest and would cost less than NT$150,000.
The FNS-99 measures 26cm x 20cm x 9cm, weighs less than 1.5kg and can be linked to cellphones equipped with Bluetooth and WiFi/GPRS/3G functions, Tseng said.
“The radiation spectrum analyzing core of the machine is an INER-patented 160MHz high-speed impulse analysis chip,” he said, adding that when fully charged, it can run for eight hours.
The prototype has been tested to work on a DOPOD 700 cellphone model, Tseng said, “because the DOPOD 700 was the most advanced domestically produced cellphone when we started the project three years ago.”
However, the system can be modified to work with any advanced cellphone, Tseng said.
Equipped with a high-density memory card, the FNS-99 can store thousands of real-time spectrums, analyses and geographical locations, Tseng said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater