Jul 10, 2018 2:46 AM

Tuesday briefing: Two million evacuated as western Japan floods

128 people are dead and millions have been evacuated in the wake of severe flooding in Japan's Hiroshima and Okayama prefectures, Nissan has admitted faking diesel emissions test results

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Western Japan has experienced the most devastating rainfall and flooding seen in 30 yearsMARTIN BUREAU/AFP/Getty Images

Your WIRED daily briefing. Today, 128 people are dead and millions have been evacuated in the wake of severe flooding in Japan's Hiroshima and Okayama prefectures, Nissan has admitted faking diesel emissions test results, an AMD licencing deal opens the door to a Chinese x86 CPU boom and more.

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1. Two million evacuated as western Japan floods

Two million people have been evacuated from the Hiroshima and Okayama prefectures in western Japan in the wake of flooding and landslides that have killed at least 128 (BBC News). It's the highest rainfall-related death toll the country has seen since 1982, and its aftermath is being exacerbated by extreme heat, which it's feared will affect the health of evacuees. Experts say multiple factors contributed to the record rainfall and its catastrophic impact, and Hiroyuki Ohno, head of the Sabo and Landslide Technical Center warned rJapan Times that: "The frequency of heavy rain-linked disasters is on the rise, and we are facing a world where the rules learned from your experiences no longer apply."

2. Nissan admits faking diesel emissions test results

Nissan has become the latest diesel vehicle maker to admit to falsifying nitrogen oxide emissions data, with an internal review finding "misconduct" at all but one of Nissan's Japanese production plants and affiliates (The Register). Specifically, the investigation found "exhaust emissions and fuel economy tests that deviated from the prescribed testing environment" and the "creation of inspection reports based on altered measurement values." The faked emissions data was first uncovered in March 2017 by Which?, which discovered that the Nissan X-Trail's 1.6 litre engine's measured emissions were “13 times as much NOx as the Euro 6 limit”.

3. AMD licencing deal opens the door to Chinese x86 CPU boom

Chinese chipmaker Hygon is now producing x86 architecture server processors thanks to a licensing deal with AMD that, it's hoped, will reduce the country's dependence on overseas tech firms (Ars Technica). China has been subject to CPU export restrictions from the USA since a 2015 ban on the sale of Intel Xeon processors for use in Chinese supercomputers, and the situation has only been exacerbated by the US government's ongoing trade war against its industrial rival. Thanks to some rather convoluted licencing and ownership agreements, China is now making integrated system-on-chip (SoC) processors locally, starting with the AMD Zen-based Dhyana family, which is so closely related to AMD's original architecture that less than 200 lines of new code were required to add support for it to the Linux operating system kernel.

4. The science behind why novichok isn't a huge public health risk

Forty-four-year-old Dawn Sturgess has become the first person to die after being exposed to a strand of the Russian-linked nerve agent novichok (WIRED). Novichok nerve agents disrupt nerve signals to the muscles by stopping the acetylcholinesterase enzyme from functioning in the body, which can cause breathing difficulties. Novichok strands five and seven are believed to be the most dangerous but their exact composition is a closely guarded secret. "We don't actually know which one it is and we know very little about them," says Andrea Sella, a synthetic inorganic chemist at University College London. He says it is likely novichok agents are more robust and less sensitive to moisture than other chemicals. This will be helped when they are in a protective container. He explains: "In the same way that putting a lid on a tin of paint means that you can come back to it six months later and you can still paint your house with it, the same applies to these things."

5. Watch icebergs calve off Greenland's warming Helheim glacier

Scientists from New York University have captured remarkable footage of an approximately seven kilometre section of the Helheim glacier in Greenland calving off into the ocean (The Verge). The event, which took around 30 minutes, has been compressed into a 90-second video showing first a vast, pancake-shaped iceberg splitting away in a churning mass of ice, followed by smaller pinnacle bergs. Prof David Holland, part of the team that witnessed the event while checking on observation equipment at the site, said: "Global sea-level rise is both undeniable and consequential. By capturing how it unfolds, we can see, first-hand, its breath-taking significance."

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