So, cell phones emit radiation. But how much does yours emit? Compare over 1,000 different cell phones and smartphones.
posted by amro on Sep 10, 2009 - 202 comments

How Nuclear Radiation Can Change Our Race. The excellent Modern Mechanix brings us Mechanix Illustrated's uninformed 1953 article on the effects of nuclear fallout.
But why, then, don't we have our superintelligent bobblehead beagles?
posted by dunkadunc on Jun 6, 2009 - 32 comments

A Review of Criticality Accidents (3.7 MB pdf) Do you like reading comp.risks, or CVR transcripts from famous plane crashes? Then you may enjoy this technical analysis of 60 accidents where improper handling of fissile materials led to unexpected critical mass. [more inside]
posted by ikkyu2 on Dec 10, 2008 - 36 comments

Cornelia Hesse-Honegger paints watercolours of mutated insects from radioactively contaminated areas in Ukraine, Switzerland, the United States, and Europe. She has recently published a scientific article incorporating these paintings (5 MB PDF). site also available in German
posted by Rumple on Oct 1, 2008 - 26 comments

Silent spring : Deep in the radioactive bowels of the smashed Chernobyl reactor, a strange new lifeform is blooming.
posted by Burhanistan on Jul 25, 2008 - 46 comments

Jonathan Golob at Dear Science.org has a series of posts up about nuclear power. Topics include: The physics behind nuclear power, the inner workings of a reactor, nuclear radiation, nuclear waste, the disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and the future of nuclear power. Also in a truncated podcast form. [more inside]
posted by Weebot on Jun 19, 2008 - 2 comments

When programmers kill. [pdf] In 1982, Atomic Energy Canada, Limited, introduced the now-infamous Therac-25, a solely software-driven successor to its earlier medical linear accelerators. Six patients received massive amounts of radiation, and three died, before AECL was compelled to supplement the (faulty) software-only error-checking with hardware interlocks to prevent overexposure. [more inside]
posted by enn on May 20, 2008 - 18 comments

Meteorite landing confirmed in Peru. Some report illness. Could it be the arrival of the anti-Christ Mabus? Here's what one Doubting Thomas has to say about the whole thing. Some have found it funny.
posted by haunted by Leonard Cohen on Sep 19, 2007 - 58 comments

Don't you know that I'm toxic? Toxic has you controlling a clean-suit wearing bomberman across destructible platform mazes in search of glowing green canisters, powerups and enemies to bomb the living bejesus out of. The chiptune soundtrack is pretty nice, too.
posted by boo_radley on Sep 8, 2007 - 30 comments

Depleted uranium is now understood to have many medical consequences unique to its modern application as munitions, due to its incendiary, aerosolizing behavior when pulverized. (Rosalie Bertell explains, youtube) It has become a leading candidate for the cause of Gulf War syndrome, and was associated with massive increases in cancer and birth defects in Basra. The EU has called for a moratorium on its use four times, and WHO is deeply concerned with its consequences, but the USA (with Canadian complicity) and Russia continue to use it in Iraq and elsewhere. (prev: 1 2 3 4 5)
posted by mek on Aug 22, 2007 - 52 comments

A striking essay with photos documenting a visit to the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Mark Resnicoff, a database programmer and amateur photographer, visited Chernobyl and took a schwack of atmospheric photos. This reminded me of a set of slightly-controversial Chernobyl photos from 2004. Wikipedia provides a little context on KiddofSpeed, the photographer in question with an awesome Engrishesque nickname.
posted by dbarefoot on May 27, 2007 - 26 comments

Undark and the Radium Girls is the fascinating true story of several female employees of the US Radium Corporation at the turn of the 20th Centry. The women were employed to paint radioactive "Undark", a glow-in-the-dark paint for military application (dials that needed to be seen at night, etc) onto the machinery. The women were given lethal amounts of paint & fine brushes, which they all routinely kept sharp by wetting the tips in their mouths. Twenty years later, as their jawbones disintegrated & the tumors began to spread, they started down the path to figuring out who had murdered them, and how.
posted by jonson on Jan 2, 2007 - 68 comments

Blighted Homeland. "From 1944 to 1986, 3.9 million tons of uranium ore were dug and blasted from Navajo soil, nearly all of it for America's atomic arsenal. Navajos inhaled radioactive dust, drank contaminated water and built homes using rock from the mines and mills. Many of the dangers persist to this day." A series of articles and photo galleries examines the legacy of uranium mining on the Navajo (previously discussed here.) [Via Gristmill, BugMeNot.]
posted by homunculus on Nov 24, 2006 - 13 comments

Air samples over North Korea show no radiation "It is possible there was no radiological data. That could be the case if: the North Koreans successfully sealed the site; it was such a small detonation and so deep underground there was no escape of nuclear debris; or the test was actually conventional explosives."
posted by Artw on Oct 13, 2006 - 57 comments

James Van Allen the discoverer of the Van Allen Radiation Belts died today, aged 91.
posted by hardcode on Aug 9, 2006 - 20 comments

Chilling Out Mr. Radioactive
A group of scientists at Germany's Ruhr University may have a way of cutting down the time it takes for radioactive waste to decay to a safer state. Instead of 1600 years for Radium-226, Prof. Claus Rolfs theorizes that he can cut that down to a mere 100 years, by encasing the materials in metal and then freezing them to very, very low temps to accelerate the radioactive decay.
posted by fenriq on Aug 1, 2006 - 28 comments

"The Bible describes how to make ice on the desert. Please describe the procedure and explain how it fits your knowledge of heat transfer."

Your assignment: make ice in the desert. Without electricity. Without extra chemicals. Without extra gadgetry or imports. Oh, and the temperature is about 55 degrees (13C). It can be done, there is science behind it. And yet we seem to have forgotten something that everyone used to know.
posted by jessamyn on Aug 1, 2006 - 43 comments

The Chernobyl Legacy
posted by rinkjustice on Apr 25, 2006 - 17 comments

This is a stunning set of photographs by Robert Knoth, taken in the regions of Mayak, Semipalatinsk, Chernobyl, and Tomsk-7. [via]
posted by 327.ca on Apr 22, 2006 - 37 comments

The BBC reports that twenty years on "the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power station is teeming with life." Lynx, eagle owl, wild boars, horses, wolves—even signs of bears which haven't been seen here in centuries. British scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock (recently discussed here) speculates whether "small volumes of nuclear waste from power production should be stored in tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by greedy developers." Lovelock describes Chernobyl as "a nasty accident that took 45 lives." This article in the New Scientist claims that that the death toll may ultimately reach 60,000.
posted by 327.ca on Apr 21, 2006 - 49 comments

The Office of Human Radiation Experiments , established in March 1994, leads the Department of Energy's efforts to tell the agency's Cold War story of radiation research using human subjects. We have undertaken an intensive effort to identify and catalog relevant historical documents from DOE's 3.2 million cubic feet of records scattered across the country. Internet access to these resources is a key part of making DOE more open and responsive to the American public.
posted by Dome-O-Rama on Feb 16, 2006 - 7 comments

Three Mile Island - a study in bad human interface design. Chernobyl in text, pictures (posted previously), and eyewitness accounts. Those are two of the most famous incidents involving mishaps with radioactive material. There have been many more (see also) including suicides, homicides, assaults, and motives forever unknown. But US citizens need not worry - the NRC is on it. What do you know about radiation poisoning? Take the test.
posted by aberrant on Jan 31, 2006 - 55 comments

Need a power source for your electric car? Be careful building a nuclear power plant in your back yard, or you could be the center of the next suburban superfund cleanup.
And it is perhaps best that he does not work on the ship's eight reactors, for EPA scientists worry that his previous exposure to radioactivity may have greatly cut short his life. All the radioactive materials he experimented with can enter the body through ingestion, inhalation, or skin contact and then deposit in the bones and organs, where they can cause a host of ailments, including cancer.
posted by b1tr0t on Jun 28, 2005 - 19 comments

That American forces use depleted uranium in our weapons isn't news, but these statistic are a little spooky. According to Bob Nichols at the Dissident Voice, we've unleased 4,000,000 pounds of DU in Iraq. That's the radioactive equivalent of 250,000 Nagasaki bombs (pdf) says Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, former chief of Naval Staff in India. And since it's dust...it travels with the wind, which means Europe will see some fallout. It also turns out that most of the soldiers didn't know they were using DU, didn't know what DU was, and are now suffering reactions to it.
posted by dejah420 on Apr 6, 2004 - 32 comments

Nuclear plant operation correlates with increased infant mortality rate. Correlation may not prove causation, but these numbers are pretty dramatic.
posted by alms on Nov 3, 2003 - 19 comments

Bizarre results showing elevated levels of NON-depleted uranium in Afghan civilians who showed symptoms of uranium poisoning following Operation Enduring Freedom. "Uranium levels found in the Afghan civilians’ urine are 4-20 times higher than those of a control group and the isotopic signature is that of Non-Depleted Uranium. The only explanations of this finding are either anomalous geological and agricultural conditions (fertilizers) or the presence of uranium extracted from the front-end of the fuel or weapons production cycles. [...] There are no geological, commercial and agricultural phenomena or activities and uses in the environs of the contaminated populations that might explain the contamination." This is very odd. [via wrh; these preliminary results are unpublished but UMRC’s Gulf War Veterans’ studies are in peer-reviewed journals]
posted by Bletch on Jun 29, 2003 - 13 comments

Not as easy to understand as those self-install satellite dishes The video the army remembered to forget? Just like he Treasury Department's amnesia regarding Hemp for Victory.
posted by KidnapCounty on Jun 4, 2003 - 15 comments

Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation gives a map of the curiously unsymmetrical early universe.
posted by Pretty_Generic on Mar 3, 2003 - 12 comments

Swan song for a great explorer. Tomorow, the Galileo explorer will make a flyby of Jovian moon Amalthea ending pehaps the geatest unmanned mission in NASA history. Galileo telemetry may not survive the flyby having already receieved much more radiation than it was designed for. Even if it does survive, this will be its final orbit scheduled to crash into Jupiter in September of next year. In spite of antenna difficulties, the spacecraft returned many beautiful images of Jupiter's moons, along with coverage of the Shoemaker-Levy collision and the first atmospheric probe to decend into Jupiter's weather.
posted by KirkJobSluder on Nov 3, 2002 - 9 comments

Odd, counter-intuitive finding re: radiation
posted by grumblebee on Aug 24, 2002 - 33 comments

Physics inside a microwave oven. I came across this informative link while looking up some physics information. I thought this short movie of a grape in a microwave was amazing. My microwave has never done anything as cool as this.
posted by jragon on May 24, 2002 - 11 comments

"Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor ... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here ... nothing valued is here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill." How do we mark our radioactive waste so the warning will be clearly understood for 10,000 years?
posted by webmutant on Mar 6, 2002 - 25 comments

Nuclear power for the home... A group of woodcutters found an object that had melted the surrounding snow, so they drag it back home to warm the camp unfortunately turns out it was jam packed full of Strontium90...
posted by zeoslap on Feb 1, 2002 - 26 comments

Of the three ways in which the A-Bomb can hurt you, RADIATION IS THE LEAST HARMFUL. An earlier post reminded me of this pamphlet from the Massachusetts Civil Defense Agency. Not as much fun as Duck & Cover, to be sure, but terribly earnest. Remember: Stay down for at least one minute.
posted by idiolect on Mar 14, 2001 - 3 comments

Woman exposed to radiation dies at 124 years of age Just to lighten your day and to avoid being called a troller! Perhaps this is the secret to longivity that science searches for.
posted by Postroad on Mar 4, 2001 - 9 comments

Finally! Relief from the Orbital Mind Control Lasers EMF-induced cancers getting you down? Are aliens eating your brain? Aren't you tired of regular, fabric-based clothing? These folks have the latest in tinfoil hats and so much more.
posted by Skot on Feb 8, 2001 - 8 comments

'Gulf War Syndrome' cause? An interesting potential link (via thewebtoday).
posted by Sean Meade on Nov 15, 2000 - 5 comments

You thought this man was cranky before? Now he has radio active balls.
posted by tamim on Sep 15, 2000 - 7 comments

Headcheese?! According to Wired's Infoporn, if you are the unlucky sap who own's an analog Sanyo SCP-4000 the you run the risk frying yoru brain. Perhaps if we all looked to the future for handy solutions, our problems would be solved.
posted by Brilliantcrank on Sep 13, 2000 - 8 comments

Voodoo science? I've been seeing these things at CompUSA lately: little gizmos that you stick on your home appliances, cell phones, monitors, etc. to protect you from all those eee-vil EMF's. The site appears to contain more marketese than convincing science. Does anybody out there know: 1) whether everyday Electro-Magnetic Fields are as dangerous as these guys are saying, and 2) if so, whether a little chunk of inert material is going to have any positive effect? The whole thing sounds kind of fishy to me.
posted by harmful on Jun 6, 2000 - 5 comments