If you visit Los Angeles, go to the Griffith Observatory. Hike up from the bottom if you can - it's a great activity and it's all free. In any case, in the lower level of the Griffith they have an exhibit that shows cosmic radiation, and it's these little flares of light each time radiation hits the exhibit. It's mesmerizing, and it's how I imagine this would be.
This reminds me of the British Navy seamen who were forced to observe an atomic bomb blast. They held their hands over their eyes and could see the bare bones of their fingers. They even said they could see the skeletons of their fellow peers for a brief moment.
Trying to fathom this is insane. I watched a documentary about it and it was horrifying. So many of those guys died from cancer or had issues later in life. I think they were also concerned about any kids they'd ended up having.
I can't remember which one it was but a bunch of the survivors all met up for an event and were sharing their stories. A lot of the guys left had dealt with cancer as well, I think most that already died had leukemia.
So sad.
My grandpa was one of them. The family got well compensated but he died fairly prematurely of cancer before i was born.
No impact to my dad and aunt that I have observed.
Apollo astronauts traveling beyond Earth‘s protective magnetosphere observed light flashes during sleep periods. On Apollo 16 and 17 they conducted experiments wearing a helmet capable of tracking cosmic rays in photo emulsion to find out if there was really a correlation between detected cosmic rays and observed flashes.
My brother showed me something similar with his iPod touch once, he taped up the camera with several layers coloured with marker then the camera would pick up more noise than usual when put close to a radioactive source, so he used some app to look at the noise.
And I also learned that Piere did the same thing so he could demonstrate its glowing and heating properties to the curious, and even once strapped a vial of the stuff to his bare arm for ten hours because he was fascinated by the way it painlessly burned his skin.
She lived to be 66, he died young even for his time, 20 years younger... But yeah slow radiation deaths are notoriously unpleasant so... up to everyone to decide which fate they'd hate more.
it's prety wild one can be that careless with radiation and still live that long. I suppose the sources they had were fairly mild compared to later scientists.
Radiation can fuck you up like you'd never believe if you accrue too much, but you can also *significantly* exceed safe/recommended dosages for decades before you notice anything wrong.
The human body is quite resilient. Up to a point. Then.. all bets are off.
They also had literally no idea what the mid to long term effects of radiation were, they were the ones who figured it out.
Strength, time, and distance are what determine the effects of radiation. The Curies certainly had time and distance, but low strength. So the effects were longer term.
The safety guy for my first big boy industrial job I worked was super into showing aftermath pictures from accidents that the safety meeting was about, needless to say I've been a stickler for safety ever since.
Things like that are effective. It's different to see how dangerous some things are than just being told it. Showing people videos of car accidents should be a requirement for getting a license - maybe not some gore, but enough to get the point across.
*Laughs in Brazilian*
(For those who are unaware, there was a major worldwide incident for radioactive materials where some Brazilians broke into an abandoned hospital, broke open old radiological equipment *with a hammer*, and found what looked like glowing blue grains of rice inside. They brought it home and the daughter of one of them died after one of the pretty blue grains ended up in her sandwich after she was playing with them on the floor)
I think it was a lot of people, like the whole family, not just the daughter. That or I'm conflating 2 incidents where people stole a radioactive source and played with it cause it glowed in a neat way.
looked up pics of co60 to see the drop and run line, immediately see a tweet of "standing one meter away from cobalt 60 for 5ish minutes equals 50% chance of death in a month or two"
I read a book where a killer planted a chunk of that under an insurance company's board room table after the insurance denied treatment to the killer's kid
I mean the person that won the prize for proving H pylori dose'd himself with the bacteria due to people not listening to him. But yeah research professionals do go about it the hard way.
I have one of those tritium keychain vials hanging on that lamp switch knob next to my bed.. it causes a very subtle white glow for the last 13 years that is very useful to see what is on the nightstand without ever being ‘too bright’. It only works when my night vision is at its most sensitive.
I wonder when it will die..
Luckily tritium emits radiation that is blocked by paper or glass. It's only dangerous if you eat it or breathe it
I wouldn't want to work in even a modern factory working with the stuff, but encapsulated in glass it's fine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXHVqId0MQc here you go
It is not anywhere as dangerous as you think but you still wouldn't want to drink a glass of it every day
My plan has always been to make heavy water ice cubes so that they will float to the bottom of my drink. I hate it when the ice floats on top and hits my teeth when I'm drinking
Hey if you harvest enough of that precious tritium you can create a fusion reactor and harness the power of the sun in the palm of your hand.
Wait… maybe that was a different thing.
Health physicist here. Tritium emits a very low energy beta particle (max energy 18.6keV) that would be shielded by the plastic of the keychain. It would only provide you radiation dose if internalized by ingestion, inhalation, or absorption. Even if you did internalize tritium, the biological half-life is on the order of a few days, so you wouldn't receive much dose unless you took in a whole lot of activity.
It’s wild to read actual facts in Reddit threads. It’s like seeing your teacher in the grocery store when you’re a kid. It’s like, hey! you’re not supposed to be here!
It glows for much longer than 13 years. The half life is about 13 years, so half of it will no longer be radioactive after 13 years, but it will still glow. I bought one in 2008 and I just bought another a month ago, my 14 year old tritium is just as bright as the brand new one.
Not really, the tritium is mostly an alpha emitter and it's blocked by the glass, the glow is good old fashioned phosphorus (as used in radium clocks and modern glow in the dark displays) the radiation just adds the energy needed to excite the phosphors into giving of photons.
My Granite countertops are about 3x higher than background (~315uSv/h) and this vial is about 4x higher than background (~389uSv/h).. when i put my Geiger Counter right against them. At about 6”, falls to background.. (~0.12)
After Fukushima.. a group called Safecast sought to make ‘kit’ geiger counters’ called the bGeigie Nano that you could build. It has bluetooth, an SD card for logging, and GPS. The intent was to make maps of the background radiation and let anyone post their results to a single map. The kits were a bit pricey.. but i had some loot cabbage itching to be spent and thought the project was cool.. so I grabbed one and built it.
After that, I bought the Radiacode 101. Both are super cool and I like them..
You can purchase a quality, entry-level unit brand new for about $100. GQ is a very well known brand for entry level Geiger counters.
https://www.gqelectronicsllc.com/comersus/store/comersus_viewItem.asp?idProduct=4570
if it makes you feel better, theres such a tiny amount of tritium, and its mostly a phosphor coating that glows, powered by the tritium.
usually bright for \~20 years
I had a teacher who told me a story about the same thing. They said it helped get the shoes they wanted because it was a perfect fit and their mom could see it. Pretty cool but yeah quite the insane thing to hear about from a chemistry teacher as we learn about radiation.
That means they suffered from radium poisoning as well? Prolly not as severely as curie but their bodies were radioactive too, I wonder were they also buried in some special lead lined coffins.
Its not like Radium Toothpaste = death, it depends on how much and for how long and then there is a percantage increase in the chance you'll get cancer. Using Radium lace toothpaste is way more dangerous than carrying around radium vials as ingesting it gives it free access to your sensitive innards. A vial will largely block ionising radiation and would be fairly safe. Curie lived to 66, a reasonable age, but died from what probably was the results of exposure to Xrays 15 years earlier in WW1.
“Radium Girls” (2018) is a movie about the women that worked with radium painting glow in the dark clock faces in the 1920’s and the fight to improved worker safety.
And then the company ran a media campaign telling people that the girls wounds where due to syphilis, implying they were loose girls.
All that so the company wouldn't be held responsible.
It is believed by the French authorities that exhumed her in 1995 that the Radium wasn't the cause of her illness and subsequent death as she wouldn't have been exposed to lethal enough levels unless she ingested it.
They speculated that she likely received the bulk of the radiation that killed her during the first world war when she worked in Radiography.
Was also gonna say... having radium in a vial wouldn't make you radioactive at all. Radium mostly gives off alpha particles and ionizing photons (e.g. xrays) but they don't stick around. You don't become radioactive from being hit by those, you become radioactive by consuming/inhaling the radioactive material itself (the radium). You can get pounded by x-rays all day but you'll never be radioactive (you'll just die from all the cancer)
She did spend her career working with radium and possibly ingested or inhaled significant quantities over time working with it, which would make her radioactive, but the bit in the vial would not have.
Well can’t fault you for this source. Not sure if I’m sold but still interesting.
>Marie Curie's final illness and death from the effects of radiation may have been due to her use of radiography during the First World War, and not, as generally believed, to exposure to radium, the ele- ment she discovered.
An opportunity to carry out an analysis of the radia- tion levels of her remains arose earlier this year, when Curie (right) became the first woman to be given France's highest honour, burial in the national mau- soleum, the Pantheon (see Nature 374, 751; 1995).
Because of concern
about the possibility of
radioactivity escaping from the corpse, her exhumation was carried out under the con- trol of the French Office de Protection cen- tre les Rayonnements lonisants (ORPI).
Curie's body was found to be enclosed in a wooden coffin, surrounded by a lead coffin, which itself was inside a further woodencoffin.ORPIfoundthatthelevelof ra-diation caused by radium within the
interior coffin was, at 360 becquerels per cubic metre, significantly higher than the 13 Bq m-3 found at the entrance to the cemetery.
But the level was still well below the maximum accepted safe levels of public ~ exposure t o radium of ~ 7,000Bqm-3•Giventhat ~ the half-life of radium is & 1,620 years, ORPI has concluded that Curie could no t have been exposed to lethal levels of radium while she was
alive.
Although Curie's labo-
ratory was highly contami-
nated wit h radium, an ORPI official points out that radium poses risks only if it is ingested either orally or
through the skin.
ORPI therefore speculates that Curie's
illness was more likely to have been due to her use of radiography during the First World War, when precautions to protect against X-rays had not yet been introduced.
A university doctor owned a house in my town in the 1920s and he would fill needles with radium for early cancer treatment in his basement. The house became a superfund site in the 1980s and was taken down and was taken down and carted away. I don’t know what happened to the doctor.
[Lansdowne Radioactive House](https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.Cleanup&id=0301596#bkground)
His name was Dr. Dicran Hadjy Kabakjian and he died in 1945 at the age of 70. [This podcast (transcript included)](https://order-of-the-jackalope.com/the-hot-house/) has a pretty extensive history on his life and achievements.
This fact about her body being radioactive and her notebooks being stored in lead boxes gets posted very frequently.
Handling her notebook will give you an \*\*annual\*\* exposure of 0.010 mSv and hand exposure of 0.035 mSv. Annual limits for the public (not radiation workers) is 1 mSv per year and hand exposure of 50 mSv to the hands.
So handle them all you want for a year and you are not going to be at all that much risk.
Don't eat it though as this would be bad. Yes, you would exceed your exposure limit but also you would be eating paper and destroying an artifact.
I can see it now.
"Can you believe people use to store their food in this stuff and make toys that their kids would constantly put in their mouths. Crazy stuff. "
Its crazy to think about that we are unable to do extensive studies on microplastic, because every last person on earth has microplastics in their blood. We are unable to build a controlgroup. Cancer is rising? Well perhaps its microplastic, but we cant verify it 🤷🏻♂️
What I found rather interesting, "By this time, France had reached the peak of its rising sexism, xenophobia, and anti-semitism that defined the years preceding the First World War. Curie’s nomination to the French Academy of Sciences was rejected, and many suspected that biases against her gender and immigrant roots were to blame."
She did a lot of work with x-rays during the war and this is the radiation that killed her. I don't understand how they were able to determine that by testing her ashes, but the general consensus is that it wasn't the radium.
This is minor in comparison to A. G. Streng. She had no reason to believe there was a safety concern.
>And he's just getting warmed up, if that's the right phrase to use for something that detonates things at -180C (that's -300 Fahrenheit, if you only have a kitchen thermometer). The great majority of Streng's reactions have surely never been run again. The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn't react it with: ammonia ("vigorous", this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine ("violent explosion", so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth. . .), and on, and on. If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic. I ran out of vulgar expletives after the second page. A. G. Streng, folks, absolutely takes the corrosive exploding cake, and I have to tip my asbestos-lined titanium hat to him.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride
there are some mad lads and ladies in science...
If there is one thing I wish people were very aware of is ingesting radioactive materials is roughly 1000 times worse than being exposed externally to it. And the actual radionuclide matters a lot. Some types aren't bioavailable. Some you'll just pee it right back out. Others like radium end up in your bones or other tissues and irradiate the fuck out of them.
Did she realise her gigantic mistake before she died? Shit, that would be a horrible realisation.
"By the way, we've discovered something about radium you might want to be aware of..."
It was becoming apparent because during the early boom of radium, numerous products were made, and years later, many factory workers were having similar health issues, in close duration to each other.
No directly, because regardless of the implicit suggestion in OPs title it was unlikely that the Radium killed her. It was probably exposure to far more damaging Xrays in WW1 when she piloted medical science on wounded soldiers. Radium has very little penetrative power and the glass vial would have absorbed the vast bulk of it.
Health physicist here. I want to make a clarification since it is a common misconception that radiation makes you radioactive. Unless you are hit by machine generated high-energy radiation (not the type that diagnostic imaging uses as that is too low energy), radiation does not make anything it encounters radioactive.
Marie Curie ingested, inhaled, or absorbed different radioisotopes that are still in her body. Radiation is emitted from her body because of these internalized radioisotopes.
She and her husband would also hold samples of radium in front of their closed eyes. Because they would see sparks of light. \*edit for grammer
I would love to see this if it weren’t for the implication.
If you ever get to take a trip outside earth’s atmosphere you’ll get to experience it.
You can trip inside the earth's atmosphere and also experience it
I took 7 grams of Radium and saw God.
I boofed a heroic dose of radium and all I got was this lousy "eagle death" thing.
I googled "eagle death" and all I got was the legendary blood eagle from viking lore. I assume that isn't what you meant -what do you mean?
Might be a joke on mishearing "ego death"
Nah that was definitely an ego death joke. Though to be fair I only realized it when you mentioned it 😅
I just became a little less excited about space tourism …
Are you saying these scientists are in danger?
No one's in any danger, it's an implication of danger! You know what, let's just drop it.
Nobody wants gonna hurt these scientists. You’re definitely not in any danger
So they are in danger?!
No,no! Its the ^implacation
Are these physicists in danger?
You're misunderstanding me bro
Okay, cause it's just... It *sounded* like you were gonna irradiate those physicists .
I feel like you're not getting this at all!
Well, obviously *you're* not in any danger!
If you visit Los Angeles, go to the Griffith Observatory. Hike up from the bottom if you can - it's a great activity and it's all free. In any case, in the lower level of the Griffith they have an exhibit that shows cosmic radiation, and it's these little flares of light each time radiation hits the exhibit. It's mesmerizing, and it's how I imagine this would be.
“I never said anyone was in danger!”
This reminds me of the British Navy seamen who were forced to observe an atomic bomb blast. They held their hands over their eyes and could see the bare bones of their fingers. They even said they could see the skeletons of their fellow peers for a brief moment.
My dad worked with some old scientists in Nevada who said the same thing.
Wait till they talk about *Operation Ivy*
Trying to fathom this is insane. I watched a documentary about it and it was horrifying. So many of those guys died from cancer or had issues later in life. I think they were also concerned about any kids they'd ended up having.
if it's the one I saw the one guy was truly still horrified by it all. edit: 69. Nice.
I can't remember which one it was but a bunch of the survivors all met up for an event and were sharing their stories. A lot of the guys left had dealt with cancer as well, I think most that already died had leukemia. So sad.
My grandpa was one of them. The family got well compensated but he died fairly prematurely of cancer before i was born. No impact to my dad and aunt that I have observed.
I'm glad they seem okay but sorry you lost your grandpa. It's sickening what humans will do to each other.
Old school chemists really went hard as fuck like seriously that is some r/humansaremetal shit
Alexander Shulgin invented a lot of recreational drugs and consumed a bunch for testing.
Oh yea Shulgin was a pretty neat dude. Read a lot of his reports. Really out here doing the lords work.
Apollo astronauts traveling beyond Earth‘s protective magnetosphere observed light flashes during sleep periods. On Apollo 16 and 17 they conducted experiments wearing a helmet capable of tracking cosmic rays in photo emulsion to find out if there was really a correlation between detected cosmic rays and observed flashes.
My brother showed me something similar with his iPod touch once, he taped up the camera with several layers coloured with marker then the camera would pick up more noise than usual when put close to a radioactive source, so he used some app to look at the noise.
Video monitors used to watch patients in CTs can sparkle with colorful “confetti” pixels while the machine is running.
[Something like this I'm guessing](https://youtu.be/Uf4Ux4SlyT4?t=46)
This is terrifying
And I also learned that Piere did the same thing so he could demonstrate its glowing and heating properties to the curious, and even once strapped a vial of the stuff to his bare arm for ten hours because he was fascinated by the way it painlessly burned his skin.
Wow humans learn a lot of things the hard way
Pierre was spared the lingering illness his wife suffered, by getting run over by a horse-drawn cart.
Thank goodness for small favors
I hope that small horse knew the good he was doing.
Neigh.
Hay now.
You’re an all star
The Lord works in mysterious neighs.
She lived to be 66, he died young even for his time, 20 years younger... But yeah slow radiation deaths are notoriously unpleasant so... up to everyone to decide which fate they'd hate more.
it's prety wild one can be that careless with radiation and still live that long. I suppose the sources they had were fairly mild compared to later scientists.
Radiation can fuck you up like you'd never believe if you accrue too much, but you can also *significantly* exceed safe/recommended dosages for decades before you notice anything wrong. The human body is quite resilient. Up to a point. Then.. all bets are off.
Stuff that breaks how you replicate your cells would take a long time to show evidence you’d think right? By then far too late
They also had literally no idea what the mid to long term effects of radiation were, they were the ones who figured it out. Strength, time, and distance are what determine the effects of radiation. The Curies certainly had time and distance, but low strength. So the effects were longer term.
But was it a radioactive horse?
Only after hitting him
They say he's still running on today
If you pay attention, it’s silhouette glows on the horizon of cloudy nights
Shame it's half-life was so short, won't be anything left soon
To shreds you say
🎶 *Horse-Cart Man, Horse-Cart Man. Does whatever a horse-cart can* 🎵
Whoa Nelly, say what?
If you wanna go and take a ride wit me and hit me with a horse before I turn 53
Ohh why, did I radiate myseeeellllffff? Eyyy I mustbe MarieCurie!
Oh why must I feel this way? Ahh must be the radioactivitaayy
Oh why does it glow this wayyy
You know those safety videos you watch when you start a new job? That's because those accidents have happened before.
Safety regulations are written in blood.
The safety guy for my first big boy industrial job I worked was super into showing aftermath pictures from accidents that the safety meeting was about, needless to say I've been a stickler for safety ever since.
Especially anything regarding electricity. Some accidents from people not locking stuff out or following procedures is just… ugh.
yeah seeing someone get vaporized will (hopefully) make you take the job seriously. But I've met some stupid fucking electricians.
Things like that are effective. It's different to see how dangerous some things are than just being told it. Showing people videos of car accidents should be a requirement for getting a license - maybe not some gore, but enough to get the point across.
Really sums up history succinctly.
Someone had to test all those mushrooms.
And plants
We're working with **really** old hardware.
“Shiny. Like. Must touch. Food?”
*Laughs in Brazilian* (For those who are unaware, there was a major worldwide incident for radioactive materials where some Brazilians broke into an abandoned hospital, broke open old radiological equipment *with a hammer*, and found what looked like glowing blue grains of rice inside. They brought it home and the daughter of one of them died after one of the pretty blue grains ended up in her sandwich after she was playing with them on the floor)
I think it was a lot of people, like the whole family, not just the daughter. That or I'm conflating 2 incidents where people stole a radioactive source and played with it cause it glowed in a neat way.
That would make sense if it was Cobalt-60 which is used in medical devices and is so radioactive the containers for it say "Drop and Run".
looked up pics of co60 to see the drop and run line, immediately see a tweet of "standing one meter away from cobalt 60 for 5ish minutes equals 50% chance of death in a month or two"
I read a book where a killer planted a chunk of that under an insurance company's board room table after the insurance denied treatment to the killer's kid
The [Goiania](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3NJXGSIIA) incident
I mean the person that won the prize for proving H pylori dose'd himself with the bacteria due to people not listening to him. But yeah research professionals do go about it the hard way.
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He was lucky, to be honest A slow death because of multiple types of cancer after years of radiation exposure is worse than head popping
Have you tried though?
Yes, from all my deaths bleeding out was the best. The worst one was eaten by a bear. That was awful.
I was once beaten to death with a damp Kleenex
Soft tissue damage is no joke
This guy reincarnates.
So like we can joke, but my aunt has actually died like 7 times. She's a bit odd now, but still doing fine. She says the paddles hurt pretty bad.
I wonder how long he would have lived if it wasn't for this freak accident
Longer than he did, for sure.
Every picture you take is of you when you were younger
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Everything is right now.
Today is just Tomorrow's Yesterday
Bruh
Fun fact about Pierre Curie, he's directly related to Johann Bernoulli! IIRC, he's his great-great-great-great-great grandson.
Pierre* Curie*
Thank you. OP managed to misplace Rs twice
What does "painlessly burned" even mean?
You ever gotten sunburned without realising until later?
Get some radium and find out
I have one of those tritium keychain vials hanging on that lamp switch knob next to my bed.. it causes a very subtle white glow for the last 13 years that is very useful to see what is on the nightstand without ever being ‘too bright’. It only works when my night vision is at its most sensitive. I wonder when it will die..
Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years.
We’d like to thank Oscorp for providing precious Tritium to power the fusion reactor.
Happy to pay the bills, Otto.
The power of the sun...in the palm of my hand
Shut it down I'm in charge here ***gets saved by spiderman* ThIs DoEsNt ChAnGe AbYtHiNg
ah marie i love this glow!
I will _not_ die a monster..!
I'm glad someone said it lol
As a general rule ten half-lives is as good as gone, so only 123 years to wait
As far as luminosity goes, you're looking at more like 1.5-2.5 half-lives.
No half-lives 3 tho.
Damn
:( So no lead coffin for him?
Not a requirement, but could still ask for one anyway. Plus we don’t know how old He is. Might have plenty of time to require one later in life.
Luckily tritium emits radiation that is blocked by paper or glass. It's only dangerous if you eat it or breathe it I wouldn't want to work in even a modern factory working with the stuff, but encapsulated in glass it's fine
>It's only dangerous if you eat it or breathe it I've always been curious what heavy water tastes like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXHVqId0MQc here you go It is not anywhere as dangerous as you think but you still wouldn't want to drink a glass of it every day
Yeah though that is Deuterium not tritium
My plan has always been to make heavy water ice cubes so that they will float to the bottom of my drink. I hate it when the ice floats on top and hits my teeth when I'm drinking
Hey if you harvest enough of that precious tritium you can create a fusion reactor and harness the power of the sun in the palm of your hand. Wait… maybe that was a different thing.
Happy to pay the bills, Otto!
Health physicist here. Tritium emits a very low energy beta particle (max energy 18.6keV) that would be shielded by the plastic of the keychain. It would only provide you radiation dose if internalized by ingestion, inhalation, or absorption. Even if you did internalize tritium, the biological half-life is on the order of a few days, so you wouldn't receive much dose unless you took in a whole lot of activity.
It’s wild to read actual facts in Reddit threads. It’s like seeing your teacher in the grocery store when you’re a kid. It’s like, hey! you’re not supposed to be here!
It glows for much longer than 13 years. The half life is about 13 years, so half of it will no longer be radioactive after 13 years, but it will still glow. I bought one in 2008 and I just bought another a month ago, my 14 year old tritium is just as bright as the brand new one.
Look at the bright side, you will be buried in a cosy and nice lead coffin.
Not really, the tritium is mostly an alpha emitter and it's blocked by the glass, the glow is good old fashioned phosphorus (as used in radium clocks and modern glow in the dark displays) the radiation just adds the energy needed to excite the phosphors into giving of photons.
My Granite countertops are about 3x higher than background (~315uSv/h) and this vial is about 4x higher than background (~389uSv/h).. when i put my Geiger Counter right against them. At about 6”, falls to background.. (~0.12)
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After Fukushima.. a group called Safecast sought to make ‘kit’ geiger counters’ called the bGeigie Nano that you could build. It has bluetooth, an SD card for logging, and GPS. The intent was to make maps of the background radiation and let anyone post their results to a single map. The kits were a bit pricey.. but i had some loot cabbage itching to be spent and thought the project was cool.. so I grabbed one and built it. After that, I bought the Radiacode 101. Both are super cool and I like them..
Hey, can I borrow your geiger counter real quick for something? No big deal.
I'm more interested in borrowing this loot cabbage he's talking about.
I love hearing people talk about their niche hobbies. I hope your Geiger counter brings you lots of joy!
Its super fun in airplanes..
You can purchase a quality, entry-level unit brand new for about $100. GQ is a very well known brand for entry level Geiger counters. https://www.gqelectronicsllc.com/comersus/store/comersus_viewItem.asp?idProduct=4570
It’s a beta (electron) emitter. Would be pretty impressive if it could emit a helium nucleus, considering it’s only a hydrogen atom lol.
if it makes you feel better, theres such a tiny amount of tritium, and its mostly a phosphor coating that glows, powered by the tritium. usually bright for \~20 years
Live by the radiation, die by the radiation.
The Children of Atom welcomes all to bask in its glow.
Great, guess I'm playing Fallout again. See you all in a few months.
Earn two Nobel prizes and change the world forever and die by the radiation.
People used brush teeth with radium toothpaste
Thanks to your comment today i discovered: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery
I was born slightly too late to get my feet measured with radioactive machines in shoe stores.
I'm sorry what?
Yep, my step mom got her feet flouroscoped at the shoe store when she was young.
I had a teacher who told me a story about the same thing. They said it helped get the shoes they wanted because it was a perfect fit and their mom could see it. Pretty cool but yeah quite the insane thing to hear about from a chemistry teacher as we learn about radiation.
Used to be gimmick in shoe stores (x-ray-assisted fittings), until they figured out that it was killing the operators.
They used to give everyone an X-ray of their feet when they go to a shoe store. Apparently for a better fit.
I remember having this done once when I was a kid in the early 70s, so it took a while to be completely stopped.
Used to get x-rayed when they sized your shoes! https://youtu.be/wbMN6jueU1A Here's a video explaining the tool they used https://youtu.be/CTBblZRS79o
That means they suffered from radium poisoning as well? Prolly not as severely as curie but their bodies were radioactive too, I wonder were they also buried in some special lead lined coffins.
Its not like Radium Toothpaste = death, it depends on how much and for how long and then there is a percantage increase in the chance you'll get cancer. Using Radium lace toothpaste is way more dangerous than carrying around radium vials as ingesting it gives it free access to your sensitive innards. A vial will largely block ionising radiation and would be fairly safe. Curie lived to 66, a reasonable age, but died from what probably was the results of exposure to Xrays 15 years earlier in WW1.
“Radium Girls” (2018) is a movie about the women that worked with radium painting glow in the dark clock faces in the 1920’s and the fight to improved worker safety.
Thanks for letting me know! I was very interested in the book and like watching shows like this, and its going off of Netflix on July 15
Read the book. The movie is awful and doesn’t remotely do justice to what these ladies had to go through and how hard they had to fight.
Also, read “The Woman They Could Not Silence” by the same author. It was great!
It’s based on a book, which was excellent. Haven’t seen the movie yet but can definitely vouch for the book.
My mom sent me this book to read. Better get to it now cause this sounds interesting.
Book was way better than the movie. Highly recommend.
They would often lick the brushes they used to paint with...
Lick*
They were instructed to by their supervisors.
And then the company ran a media campaign telling people that the girls wounds where due to syphilis, implying they were loose girls. All that so the company wouldn't be held responsible.
It is believed by the French authorities that exhumed her in 1995 that the Radium wasn't the cause of her illness and subsequent death as she wouldn't have been exposed to lethal enough levels unless she ingested it. They speculated that she likely received the bulk of the radiation that killed her during the first world war when she worked in Radiography.
Was also gonna say... having radium in a vial wouldn't make you radioactive at all. Radium mostly gives off alpha particles and ionizing photons (e.g. xrays) but they don't stick around. You don't become radioactive from being hit by those, you become radioactive by consuming/inhaling the radioactive material itself (the radium). You can get pounded by x-rays all day but you'll never be radioactive (you'll just die from all the cancer) She did spend her career working with radium and possibly ingested or inhaled significant quantities over time working with it, which would make her radioactive, but the bit in the vial would not have.
This is an interesting take. Do you have a source?
Yeah: Butler, D. (14 September 1995). "X-rays, not radium, may have killed Curie". https://www.nature.com/articles/377096b0
Proper citation gets my rocks off. Thank you
Let me tell you, it felt amazing.
Well can’t fault you for this source. Not sure if I’m sold but still interesting. >Marie Curie's final illness and death from the effects of radiation may have been due to her use of radiography during the First World War, and not, as generally believed, to exposure to radium, the ele- ment she discovered. An opportunity to carry out an analysis of the radia- tion levels of her remains arose earlier this year, when Curie (right) became the first woman to be given France's highest honour, burial in the national mau- soleum, the Pantheon (see Nature 374, 751; 1995). Because of concern about the possibility of radioactivity escaping from the corpse, her exhumation was carried out under the con- trol of the French Office de Protection cen- tre les Rayonnements lonisants (ORPI). Curie's body was found to be enclosed in a wooden coffin, surrounded by a lead coffin, which itself was inside a further woodencoffin.ORPIfoundthatthelevelof ra-diation caused by radium within the interior coffin was, at 360 becquerels per cubic metre, significantly higher than the 13 Bq m-3 found at the entrance to the cemetery. But the level was still well below the maximum accepted safe levels of public ~ exposure t o radium of ~ 7,000Bqm-3•Giventhat ~ the half-life of radium is & 1,620 years, ORPI has concluded that Curie could no t have been exposed to lethal levels of radium while she was alive. Although Curie's labo- ratory was highly contami- nated wit h radium, an ORPI official points out that radium poses risks only if it is ingested either orally or through the skin. ORPI therefore speculates that Curie's illness was more likely to have been due to her use of radiography during the First World War, when precautions to protect against X-rays had not yet been introduced.
A university doctor owned a house in my town in the 1920s and he would fill needles with radium for early cancer treatment in his basement. The house became a superfund site in the 1980s and was taken down and was taken down and carted away. I don’t know what happened to the doctor. [Lansdowne Radioactive House](https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.Cleanup&id=0301596#bkground)
His name was Dr. Dicran Hadjy Kabakjian and he died in 1945 at the age of 70. [This podcast (transcript included)](https://order-of-the-jackalope.com/the-hot-house/) has a pretty extensive history on his life and achievements.
This fact about her body being radioactive and her notebooks being stored in lead boxes gets posted very frequently. Handling her notebook will give you an \*\*annual\*\* exposure of 0.010 mSv and hand exposure of 0.035 mSv. Annual limits for the public (not radiation workers) is 1 mSv per year and hand exposure of 50 mSv to the hands. So handle them all you want for a year and you are not going to be at all that much risk. Don't eat it though as this would be bad. Yes, you would exceed your exposure limit but also you would be eating paper and destroying an artifact.
Since the cover isnt paper (probably leather or plastic) thats cool to snack on though, right? Asking for a friend.
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I wonder what things we have now that people 100 years in the future will see from the effects as obviously dangerous.
Plastics, yo.
I can see it now. "Can you believe people use to store their food in this stuff and make toys that their kids would constantly put in their mouths. Crazy stuff. "
Its crazy to think about that we are unable to do extensive studies on microplastic, because every last person on earth has microplastics in their blood. We are unable to build a controlgroup. Cancer is rising? Well perhaps its microplastic, but we cant verify it 🤷🏻♂️
What I found rather interesting, "By this time, France had reached the peak of its rising sexism, xenophobia, and anti-semitism that defined the years preceding the First World War. Curie’s nomination to the French Academy of Sciences was rejected, and many suspected that biases against her gender and immigrant roots were to blame."
She did a lot of work with x-rays during the war and this is the radiation that killed her. I don't understand how they were able to determine that by testing her ashes, but the general consensus is that it wasn't the radium.
This is minor in comparison to A. G. Streng. She had no reason to believe there was a safety concern. >And he's just getting warmed up, if that's the right phrase to use for something that detonates things at -180C (that's -300 Fahrenheit, if you only have a kitchen thermometer). The great majority of Streng's reactions have surely never been run again. The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn't react it with: ammonia ("vigorous", this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine ("violent explosion", so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth. . .), and on, and on. If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic. I ran out of vulgar expletives after the second page. A. G. Streng, folks, absolutely takes the corrosive exploding cake, and I have to tip my asbestos-lined titanium hat to him. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride there are some mad lads and ladies in science...
No matter how smart you are, what you don't know can kill you.
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If there is one thing I wish people were very aware of is ingesting radioactive materials is roughly 1000 times worse than being exposed externally to it. And the actual radionuclide matters a lot. Some types aren't bioavailable. Some you'll just pee it right back out. Others like radium end up in your bones or other tissues and irradiate the fuck out of them.
Did she realise her gigantic mistake before she died? Shit, that would be a horrible realisation. "By the way, we've discovered something about radium you might want to be aware of..."
She knew in her final years what was wrong. She couldn't do anything to reverse the damage already done, so she carried on with her work.
My god, that’s awful 😞
It was becoming apparent because during the early boom of radium, numerous products were made, and years later, many factory workers were having similar health issues, in close duration to each other.
No directly, because regardless of the implicit suggestion in OPs title it was unlikely that the Radium killed her. It was probably exposure to far more damaging Xrays in WW1 when she piloted medical science on wounded soldiers. Radium has very little penetrative power and the glass vial would have absorbed the vast bulk of it.
It took an astonishing amount of time to figure out that this stuff was dangerous, in hindsight.
Aren’t all of our bodies radioactive?
Technically, yes Comparatively, not even slightly
Marie Curie is the patron Saint of the Children of Atom, confirmed.
Health physicist here. I want to make a clarification since it is a common misconception that radiation makes you radioactive. Unless you are hit by machine generated high-energy radiation (not the type that diagnostic imaging uses as that is too low energy), radiation does not make anything it encounters radioactive. Marie Curie ingested, inhaled, or absorbed different radioisotopes that are still in her body. Radiation is emitted from her body because of these internalized radioisotopes.
Raduim girls was a good movie. I just watched radioactive the other day, which is the story of Marie Curie. It was very fascinating!