by eec

Radiation is harmful to living things, yet the long-term effects of persistently high levels of background radiation on ecosystems are poorly understood. With this in mind, a team led by Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina and Anders Moller of the University of Paris-Sud set out to compare bird species dwelling near the Fukushima plant with those living at the site of another nuclear incident that scored a seven on the INES: the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl, where disaster struck in 1986. Remarkably, they found that some species seem to develop a tolerance for radioactivity over time.