This report describes the activities discussed at the 10th meeting of Section II of the Consultative Committee on Standards for the Measurement of Ionizing Radiations (Comité Consultatif pour les Etalons de Mesure des Rayonnements Ionisants, CCEMRI) held in May 1989 at Sèvres (France). Topics included present and future international comparisons of activity measurements, the status and possible...

Numerous organisms have shown an ability to survive and reproduce under low-dose ionizing radiation arising from natural background radiation or from nuclear accidents. In a literature review, we found a total of 17 supposed cases of adaptation, mostly based on common garden experiments with organisms only deriving from typically two or three sampling locations. We only found one experimental s...

The objective of the present study was to estimate cancer risk associated with the low-level radiation exposure of an average annual effective dose of 6.4 mSv (including internal exposure) in the high background-radiation areas (HBRA) in Yangjiang, China. The mortality survey consisted of two steps, i.e., the follow-up of cohort members and the ascertainment of causes of death. The cohort membe...

The epidemiological study on the residents of the high background radiation areas in Yangjiang, China was started by Chinese scientists in 1972 and continued until 1986. In 1991, Japanese scientists recognized the importance of the work and a joint feasibility study was conducted with revised protocols. The feasibility study matured to a cooperative project involving both Chinese and Japanese s...

BACKGROUND Radiation has negative effects on survival of animals including humans, although the generality of this claim is poorly documented under low-dose field conditions. Because females may suffer disproportionately from the effects of radiation on survival due to differences in sex roles during reproduction, radiation-induced mortality may result in male-skewed adult sex ratios. METHODO...

Background: Human is exposed to radiation in their environment with or without their consent and the exposure to natural background radiation is an unpreventable event on earth. Materials and Methods: An in situ assessment of the indoor and outdoor background radiation in Akwanga and Keffi towns of Nasarawa state Nigeria was carried out using a halogen-quenched Geiger Muller (GM) detector (Insp...

The ionizing spectral energy distribution of quasars exhibits a steepening of the distribution short-ward of 1200 Å. The change of the power-law index from approximately −1 to −2 so far has been interpreted as being intrinsic to quasars. We study an alternative interpretation, in which a tenuous absorption screen is responsible for the change of index. We find that the most successful function ...

We propose a variant of hybrid inflation which is applicable in a wide class of supersymmetric grand unified models. The observed temperature perturbations of cosmic background radiation can be reproduced with natural values of the parameters of the theory and a grand unification scale which is consistent with the unification of the minimal supersymmetric standard model gauge couplings as measu...

In order to draw out the essential behavior of the universe, investigations of early universe cosmology often reduce the complex system to a simple integrable system. Inflationary models are of this kind as they focus on simple scalar field scenarios with correspondingly simple dynamics. However, we can be assured that the universe is crowded with many interacting fields of which the inflaton i...

As a part of the China-Japan cooperative research on natural radiation epidemiology, we have carried out a dose-assessment study to evaluate the external exposure to natural radiation in the high background radiation areas (HBRA) of Yangjiang in Guangdong province and in the control areas (CA) of Enping prefecture since 1991. Because of the difficulties in measuring the individual doses of all ...