It's fairly unusual for high-profile games set in the UK to be set outside London. While indie games - such as the Shropshire-set Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and last year's Barnsley-based laughfest Thank Goodness You're Here! - have ventured further north, bigger games haven't tended to stray beyond the M25. Jason says the US is about 40% of the video games market, so it's important to appeal to players there, and there's a "natural tendency" to follow the norms. Being an independent company, he feels, allows Rebellion to do things differently, and Britain offers lots of inspiration for new settings - if you're prepared to look for them. "The UK, I think, to understand certain aspects of our culture, you've got to dig into it a little bit because we tend to understate things quite a lot."

Before the 2011 tsunami inundated Ukedo elementary school's classrooms, the ocean was central to the school's identity. In the summer, pupils would run down the 300-metre path to the beach, splitting up into groups to see who could make the best animals out of sand. Every year, students also painted local fishermen's boats, a tradition that resonated strongly in Namie town, where many parents worked in the fishing industry. But when a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, a subsequent tsunami and a nuclear disaster brought devastation to Japan's northeastern Tohoku region, that all changed, Shinichi Sato, a teacher who taught at Ukedo elementary school, told Al Jazeera. "For years after the disaster, we weren't allowed to teach lessons outside, in fear that kids would touch radioactive soil," Sato said.

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up when all is said and done, but the environmental cost could be significantly higher, with nearby lakes contaminated for decades, according to a new study. A group of researchers, led by those at the University of Tsukuba, have found that Lake Onuma on Mount Akagi could be contaminated with radioactive cesium-137 (137CS) for roughly 30 years after the disaster. The researchers used the fractional diffusional method and determined that radioactivity concentration will happen for up to 10,000 days following the accident. Just after the nuclear accident, the radioactivity concentration declined sharply, but that decline slows greatly in the months and years that follow. Lake Onuma is a closed lake and has a limited amount of inflow and runoff water. Japan's Lake Onuma could be contaminated with radioactive cesium-137 (137CS) for roughly 30 years after the Fukushima disaster, a new study has found'Previous investigations have used the two-component decay function model, which is the sum of two exponential functions, to fit the measured 137Cs radioactivity concentration,' one of the study's co-authors, Professor Yuko Hatano, said in a statement.

Japan's catastrophic Fukushima disaster in 2011 has resulted in a unique species of boar-pig, a new study reveals. Researchers investigating the effects of the nuclear disaster on animals in the area report that radiation has had no adverse effects on their genetics. However, wild boars (Sus scrofa leucomystax) have proliferated in the area, after being left to roam freely from the lack of humans. The boars have bred with domestic pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus) that escaped from nearby properties after farmers had to flee, creating a new hybrid species. Rare spotted wild boar observed inside the evacuated area of Fukushima, Japan, indicative of the'introgression' - the transfer of genetic information from one species to another - with domestic pigs Images from remotely-operated cameras indicate wildlife is flourishing in Fukushima's exclusion zone. Wildlife ecologist James Beasley of the University of Georgia and colleagues used a network of 106 remote cameras to capture images of the wildlife in the area over a four-month period.

The owner of the wrecked Fukushima No. 1 power plant is trying this week to touch melted fuel at the bottom of the plant for the first time since the disaster almost eight years ago, a tiny but key step toward retrieving the radioactive material amid a ¥21.5 trillion ($195 billion) cleanup effort. Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings Inc. will on Wednesday insert a robot developed by Toshiba Corp. to make contact with material believed to contain melted fuel inside the containment vessel of the unit 2 reactor, one of three units that melted down after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. "We plan to confirm if we can move or lift the debris or if it crumbles," Joji Hara, a spokesman for Tepco said by phone Friday. Tepco doesn't plan to collect samples during the survey. The country is seeking to clean up the Fukushima disaster, the world's worst atomic accident since Chernobyl, which prompted a mass shutdown of its reactors.

A wildfire broke out over the weekend in an uninhabited portion of Japan's Fukushima prefecture, sparking concerns that the blaze might spread airborne radiation. The fire started on Mount Juman in Namie, where radiation has remained high enough since the 2011 disaster for officials to continue declaring it a "difficult-to-return zone." Eight helicopters from Fukushima, Miyagi and Gunma prefectures were dispatched to the site, Japanese newspaper the Mainichi reported Monday. When those helicopters couldn't stop the flames, local officials called in the Ground Self-Defense Force, a branch of the Japanese military, to help. The fire was likely started by lightning in the uninhabited region, the Mainichi reported.

It's been an uphill battle for the coastal prefecture of Fukushima, Japan, since an earthquake and tsunami devastated the region in 2011, causing a nuclear disaster at its power plant. Six years later, workers are still battling to decommission the plant, where radiation is deadly. Officials expect the cleaning won't be finished for decades. "This is an accident that does not exist in the past tense, but in the present progressive form," Fukushima Gov. Masao Uchibori said earlier in March, criticizing Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for not explicitly the disaster in his annual speech. "It's not possible to avoid using the important and significant terms of the nuclear plant accident of nuclear power disaster."

Barely a fifth of the way into their mission, the engineers monitoring the Scorpion's progress conceded defeat. With a remote-controlled snip of its cable, the latest robot sent into the bowels of one of Fukushima Daiichi's damaged reactors was cut loose, its progress stalled by lumps of fuel that overheated when the nuclear plant suffered a triple meltdown six years ago this week. As the 60cm-long Toshiba robot, equipped with a pair of cameras and sensors to gauge radiation levels was left to its fate last month, the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), attempted to play down the failure of yet another reconnaissance mission to determine the exact location and condition of the melted fuel. Even though its mission had been aborted, the utility said, "valuable information was obtained which will help us determine the methods to eventually remove fuel debris". The Scorpion mishap, two hours into an exploration that was supposed to last 10 hours, underlined the scale and difficulty of decommissioning Fukushima Daiichi – an unprecedented undertaking one expert has described as "almost beyond comprehension".

The coastal prefecture of Fukushima has faced a difficult road since a devastating earthquake and tsunami rocked the area in 2011, killing tens of thousands and causing its nuclear reactor to melt down, leaking radiation and rendering the surrounding provinces uninhabitable. Since then, the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), has been working to clean and decommission the facility. In January, the company bumped its estimate for a full cleaning to $188 billion, noting it would probably take decades. Radiation levels from the reactors should have faded over time, but TEPCO said Thursday levels inside the Fukushima Daiichi plant reached such astronomical levels, not even a cleaning robot could survive inside. The previous radiation high, measured one year after the disaster, was 73 Sieverts per hour.

Japan is spending more than 1 billion to resurrect the area around the wrecked Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant as the country's "Innovation Coast." The region is trying to capitalize on technology developed in the five years spent cleaning up the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, including Hitachi Ltd. and Toshiba Corp. robots that slither like snakes or cruise through radioactive water like speed boats to investigate the flooded reactors. Fukushima Prefecture -- like Beirut or post-bankruptcy Detroit -- is ripe to develop a strong tech community, according to Samhir Vasdev, an innovation consultant at the World Bank. "To lead the future from Fukushima, we must overcome our failures," Fukushima Gov. Masao Uchibori said at the Foreign Press Center in Tokyo last month. "Creating new industries will attract new people, which will be vital to revitalizing the region."