Jesse Rogerson

We go to Japan where there was the awful Fukushima nuclear event because of the tsunami and the earthquake and all that.

Of course, areas in that region have high radiation.

It was a disaster.

What happens in those areas?

Does all life perish or do some forms of life like funguses and microbes and stuff, do they thrive or are they completely unaffected?

protective little environments for themselves and apparently maybe they i mean they this was their speculation may have been protecting against the radiation cool there's also some radio radiation tolerant bacterium and one of them is has an amazing name it's called methylobacterium radio tolerance i love that the latin names is basically like radiation tolerant

Interesting.

So whatever you use to encase the nuclear site, you've got to make sure bacteria doesn't erode it.

Well, Jesse Rogerson is a professor of astrophysics at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Jesse, thanks for joining us for Science News.

I appreciate you coming on the show.

Always happy to be here.

Thanks.

Welcome, Jesse.

David, let's talk about microplastics in water.

Yeah, you would have thought that the answer would be obviously no, but there's the misconception or maybe the good perception that bottled water would be safer, right?

You'd think, okay, this water is like pristine, you know, it's in the bottle, it's in a plant, it's not the stuff coming out of my taps.

You know, you open up your tap, you don't know what your pipes are like, you know, like

That can be different all over the country, but you get like a quality product from a bottle of water.

Maybe, you know, this is a perception even I had.