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A recent article on the Al Jazeera English web site cites a disturbing statistic: infant mortality in certain U.S. Northwest cities spiked by 35 percent in the weeks following the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant . The author writes that "physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and [ sic ] may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.” The implication is clear: Radioactive fallout from the plant is spreading across the Pacific in sufficient quantities to imperil the lives of children (and presumably the rest of us as well)

By Marian Turner of Nature magazine Munich Confronted with what has become one of the world's most severe outbreaks of Escherichia coli, physicians and scientists in Germany say that the country's fractured health-management system has failed to handle the crisis properly.

Foggy Bottom has a plan to jump-start a venture-capital approach to the field of humanitarian tech. When the earthquake decimated Haiti last year, technologists around the world converged online to develop tools to help rescuers find victims and raise funds .

The Fast Company reader's essential source for breaking news and innovation from around the web--updated all day. Geek Crisis, Day 6: Playstation Network Still Down After a devastating hack took down the Sony Playstation Network, the company has shut down the network for an indefinite amount of time--but already, this is the longest shutdown on memory. It is still unknown whether credit card and other private data of the 75 million gamers who use the service was hoisted in the attack

Each day, Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs. Here's what we found today. Entrepreneurship exposed.

By Gwyneth Dickey Zakaib One thing is certain about the human costs of the radiation leaking from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan: they will pale in comparison to the catastrophic consequences of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that triggered the crisis. [More]

By Risa Maeda and Kazunori Takada TOKYO, March 22 (Reuters) - Rising temperatures around the core of one of the reactors at Japan's quake-crippled nuclear plant sparked new concern on Tuesday and more water was needed to cool it down, the plant's operator said. Despite hopes of progress in the world's worst nuclear crisis in a quarter of a century, triggered by an earthquake and tsunami that left at least 21,000 people dead or missing, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said it needed more time before it could say the reactors were stabilised. Technicians working inside an evacuation zone around the stricken plant on Japan's northeast Pacific coast, 250 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, have attached power cables to all six reactors and started a pump at one to cool overheating nuclear fuel rods.

As Japanese military struggles to cool overheating fuel rods at the country’s damaged nuclear plant, some suggest a full meltdown might actually be happening somewhere else--in the corporate suites of Tokyo Electric Power Co. Tepco, as it’s known, is a for-profit utility that owns the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and other plants and provides almost 35% of Japan’s electricity ( pdf ). And in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami that brought the country to nuclear crisis, the organization is turning into a lighting rod of political criticism.

Some of the undersea cables off the coast of Japan shared by the world's telecomm companies have suffered significant damage from the 8.9 earthquake and subsequent aftershocks. So far, there has been little disruption to communications thanks to rerouting data through alternate pathways.

Tokyo Electric Co.

First came the earthquake , centered just off the east coast of Japan, near Honshu. The horror of the tsunami quickly followed

This past December, a leaked EPA document revealed that the agency allowed the widespread use of pesticide known to be toxic to honeybees, despite warnings from EPA scientists.

The United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has teamed up with a coalition of Google Maps-savvy computer security, journalism, NGO and humanitarian experts to find out exactly what's happening in Libya. The challenge: stopping the map from being used for military intelligence purposes.