Microblog Memes

Paper and skin can stop alpha particles. Glass, plastic, or a little bit of metal can stop beta. It's gamma that will get you, often because of what the gamma does through the material, knocking off new particles as it exits.

The uranium in one of these kits probably had the same potency as the radium pendants you can buy now. It's fine as long as it stays in its container and never gets inside your body.

When people need help after injuries from a knife, what happens? Surgeons go at them with little knives. What a scam.

The reason for this is a little bit of radiation damages your DNA causing the cells to go haywire, whereas a lot of radiation kills the cells outright.

So if you get cancer, you blast the cancer cells with radiation to wipe them out. The radiation is targeted so you don't wipe out healthy cells.

If you think this is obvious satire, then I have to wonder when was the last time you actually spoke to an average human person? There are people on this site who would unironically say something like that

Glass vial, not bad, not great.

Seriously though, those older chem sets had natural samples, so likely not enough to really do damage unless you used it as a jade stone or suppository.

That sounds fun

Which modpack was that?

That was the one topic that always baked my noodle at DoE. In animal tests the low dose group consistently outlived the controls. I wanted to write papers on the topic but consistently got shot down. The upper tiers were worried about public perception of "radiation can be good" papers.

It's such a common thing in medicine, mental health, weight loss, IT troubleshooting, etc. It's not impossible that the answer is complex, but we always feel like we're a special case and it can't possibly be as simple as "eat less", "get more sleep", "turn it off and on again".

This is the argument that cigarette companies used for a long time to avoid accountability. It wasn't the fault of the cigarettes. It's all those contributing factors.

I saw a lot of that during lockdown. "She didn't die from COVID! She died of pneumonia!" Wow, a lot of people are dying from pneumonia this year! That isn't normal, is it?

My dad recently got bladder cancer fortunately they are well off enough financially that they are able to pay for treatments, thank God!

But I learned that the over 20 years of drinking was less likely to cause the bladder cancer than the fact that he smoked cigarettes. Belive it or not cigarettes have a higher risk of inducing bladder cancer whereas alcohol is more likely to destroy your liver and kidney directly.

He was also exposed to a shit load of chemicals throughout his entire life.

Cancer is a hell of a thing and I don't wish it on anyone.

And you'll be exposed to more radiation from being at cruising altitude than from the rocks!

yeah because uranium actually decays so slowly that the radiation it gives off is barely worth mentioning. the actually hazardous stuff is what comes out of nuclear power plants spent fuel rods.

https://youtube.com/shorts/Dd2Bn_YshSA

Bring a Geiger counter to an antique store to find these spicy plates.

Technically, we get tumor cells all the time and your body kills them all the time. It's when your body can't handle them that it gets bad

Naturally occuring Uranium is, really, not very radioactive. You can even eat it and have it pass through your digestive system without any significant negative impact - there was a scientist who (slightly facetiously) used to do this in lectures to prove the safety of nuclear power and lived to a ripe old age. That said, it's not exactly advisable.

We use it in power plants because it's fissile, not because it's radioactive, it's easier to sustain chain reactions with constant output.

Spent nuclear fuel, however, is extremely radioactive because when we fission Uranium it splits into very radioactive isotopes of Caesium, Iodine, Xenon etc. plus a ton of minor actinides.

I don't think this was uranium glass but a glass vial of uranium that was likely a part of those Atomic Lab kits they sold to kids in the 1940's and 50's.

This reminded me of the Japan/smoking/lifespan thing. Turns out decent healthcare is pretty helpful. The most helpful, really, when it comes to determining average length of stay on this hellrock.

Yes, like millions of people who don't have any uranium. Hmm.