More about the author (read tweets):
http://www.thefrisky.com/2013-04-19/meet-rebecca-martinson-the-rabid-sorority-sister-from-delta-gamma/

Not according to David Thompson, a NASA astrophysicist and deputy project director on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope who compares the risk to Earth from a future gamma-ray burst to "the danger I might face if I found a polar bear in my closet in Bowie, Maryland. It could happen, but it is so unlikely that it is not worth worrying about."

There's a greater chance that one (or more) of the stars within about 6000 light years or so could give off a gamma ray burst that would wipe out any life in the solar system, no matter where we hid it. It's been postulated the previous-to-the-Yucatan-asteroid large scale die-offs could have happened due to GRB.

actually -- Earth being hit by one of those mega gamma ray bursts out there in the universe, that's my favourite

O by the by, neutrons decay in free-space, in other words, free neutrons are radioactive. With a decay time of less than 15 mins, it means 2 things: slow neutrons will be less detectable at distance because they decay, you still need to be relatively close to the source of neutrons to detect them regardless of speed. Neutrons are also the only form of radiation that will make things radioactive, meaning if you get to close and the bombardment is to intense , you can cause damage to your equipment via internal radiation of beta and gamma rays.

This is also why they use water in nuclear reactors, hydrogen, and in particular deuterium (hydrogen with a neutron) slow neutrons better than anything. Water is mostly hydrogen by mole, so it is a very good moderator, both light water (regular water) and heavy water (deuterium water).

What is happening in this particular case is known as nuclear spallation. When a high energy proton hits something like carbon or nitrogen, it will at times knock a proton or neutron loose. Those neutrons are moving at relativistic speeds in most cases, so on the flip side, when those neutrons bounce their way out back to space, if there is water in the way they get slowed way down...enough that they decay before they reach the detector.

This is the same exact effect that allows for carbon dating, sometimes, the high energy neutrons that come out via spallation will in turn knock out a proton from a nitrogen atom, it then becomes mildly radioactive carbon. This happens at a relatively predictable rate, and since the decay of carbon 14 is also predictable, dating is possible.

Science rant over

*promote anyway. super secret *powerpoint override *code alpha 1 alpha beta gamma 0

No riskier than lethally high doses of gamma radiation or being bitten by radioactive spiders I suppose.
Walking through a rain storm covered in the stuff would be interesting, I could imagine a spray-on umbrella would be pretty cool.

The actinides are, generally, "safe" to handle, like those Uranium Oxide pellets. You are more likely to damage the pellet with your nasty human oils than the uranium will you...unless you eat the whole thing, but its chemical toxicity will do you more harm that its radioactive toxicity. Uranium oxide just isn't that radioactive, that is why none of the containers or work areas were shielded in this lab.



Now, if they were dealing with a "hot" substance, one that has hard gammas (like when you do MOX fuel recycling), you have to take even greater precautions because then the radioactive problems really do start to show their heads. Not only will it damage your cells faster than they can repair, but it can start to take out unshielded electronics. This is generally only true for fission products, and a few actinides like protactinium which is highly radioactive AND chemically toxic, and generally only man-made (normal occurrences are less than a few parts per trillion in the crust).



These complications are pretty good generalization to why normal LWRs are not the best way to do nuclear, they just generate far to much waste compared to alternatives. You burn less than 1% of the mined uranium in current reactor tech and fuel cycle choices. With a thorium cycle in a molten salt reactor, you can burn greater than 90%, pushing up to 99% or higher if you try real hard. This means you generate an order(s) of magnitude less waste, and that waste generally is safe after about 300 years (radiation is about the same as naturally occurring radiation). There are also other alternates that use uranium in a faster spectrum that perform better than current tech.



A second age of the atom is fast approaching. Unfortunately, those great pioneers which made this industry in the shadow of "the bomb" failed to realize the full potential of e=mc^2. If nuclear power was developed along side the Apollo instead of the Manhattan project, we might already be in that future, alas...it was not to be.



Radiation is fascinating though! I used to believe what I read in the fear news about any radiation leading to death..turns out that isn't so true after all. The planet is a far more radioactive place then you normally consider, and FAR more radioactive when our primordial ancestors evolved. In fact, there are many people living today in what are dubbed High Background Radiation Areas that seem to suffer no ill effect, and some suggest, have lower rates of cancer than other groups. More studies need to be done, but initial findings fly in the face of the notion of radiation I grew up with (that it all is bad and it all kills you!) Some have even suggested that the creator of the entire model used for evaluating radiation risk knowingly lied about it. The entire basis for today's evaluation of radiological risk is evaluated by Muller's findings as supported by the National Academy of Sciences’ of the time. And in fact, might just be based in fear instead of evidence.



Perhaps ancient man went through the same struggles as he tried to adopt fire, some impassioned move against the dangers of fire prevented some groups from using fire and advancing their way of life. Fire, though, allowed the groups that adopted it to improve their life dramatically. The energy released from a fission event is over a million times more energy rich than any energy tech we currently use, imagine what that could mean for mankind. Fusion is over 4 times that of fission (but much harder), and antimatter over 2000x that of fission (and MUCH MUCH harder). Yes, the age of the atom has only just begun, and who knows were man will be a result? Don't settle for solar dandruff, the power of the atom will reign supreme.

Light doesn't have one set speed. Each frequency of light travels at slightly different speeds. I've long had this theory, and NASA has since confirmed it. We have detected very slight differences in the time it takes different frequencies of light to travel a set distance.

As such, we cannot say light has "a" speed, but rather a range of speeds. Therefore, could it also then be possible that the speed of an individual photon can be adjusted by various means in order to either speed up or slow down?

The answer is yes. Scientists have managed to slow the "speed of light" all the way down to 38mph. How is this possible? Well, as light has mass (albeit, a very miniscule amount), it will slow when traveling through a material, such as water, glass, oil, or even air. Passing the light through a super-dense, ultra-cooled material magnifies this effect.

As we already know different frequencies of light travel at slightly different speeds, and as we also already know, we can only visibly perceive a very narrow range of frequencies (for example, we cannot see infra-red or ultra-violet, or x- or gamma-rays), isn't it then perceivable that there are frequencies of light outside of what we can see that do travel faster than "the speed of light"?

And if this is true, then what else could travel faster? Are there things we can't even hope to detect simply because they exist in our timeframe for an impossibly short amount of time?

Part of the reason light is able to travel as fast as it does is its incredibly small (by our standards anyway) mass. What if mass is infinite? What if you could shrink yourself down to the size of a photon, or better yet, small enough to live on that photon as if it were the Earth. From your new perspective, the photon would appear to be very large, and as you are now traveling with it, that photon does not seem to be going as fast. You may see things that are even smaller and appear to move even more quickly, but something like the Earth would be imperceptible to you because you are so miniscule. It would be as the Universe to you--impossibly large, and inconceivably tangible. While you would know it is there, it would stand before you as a gigantic, unknowable concept, and things even larger than that would exist merely as mists of an imaginary daydream.

Now, imagine that the electromagnetic spectrum is infinite in both directions as well. Consider the possibility that, along with light, x-rays, gamma radiation, radio waves, and all the other things we know to make up the electromagnetic spectrum, sound is also part of that spectrum. Consider that light, being high in frequency exists near the top of what we can perceive of the spectrum, and sound is near the bottom. The vibrations become so slow and so wide toward the bottom that they effect the air and other matter around us, creating sound. And while we cannot see it, we perceive it with other sensory organs. Imagine that you could slow down light to the point that you can hear it, or speed up sound to the point that you can see it.

Now take another hit before that feeling goes away.

I might be wrong but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that they are pretty much normal.

[edited to add:] Not that I'm trying to say that radiation's not dangerous or anything like that. I left my tinfoil hat in the closet where it belongs.

>> ^Jinx:

Is either model even relavent? aplha radiation has a hard time passing through a single sheet of paper or just several metres of air never mind layers of skin. I'm not sure how much beta or even gamma radiation you might be getting from the decay products though. I definitely wouldn't want to eat off it.
Part of the UK have sufficiently high radiation from radon gas that nuclear sites cannot be opened there because they'd already exceed legal radiation limits. I'd like to know what the cancer rates are like in those areas.

Is either model even relavent? aplha radiation has a hard time passing through a single sheet of paper or just several metres of air never mind layers of skin. I'm not sure how much beta or even gamma radiation you might be getting from the decay products though. I definitely wouldn't want to eat off it.

Part of the UK have sufficiently high radiation from radon gas that nuclear sites cannot be opened there because they'd already exceed legal radiation limits. I'd like to know what the cancer rates are like in those areas.

>> ^CelebrateApathy:

Get up off your couch, walk to your bathroom and look in the mirror. Be honest, If you woke up tomorrow and could all of a sudden do the things this man can, you would likely think you were bitten by a radioactive spider and had become a superhero. It truly is amazing what the human body, even sans gamma rays, can accomplish.

I'd be pissed off that I didn't get a useful superpower.

Get up off your couch, walk to your bathroom and look in the mirror. Be honest, If you woke up tomorrow and could all of a sudden do the things this man can, you would likely think you were bitten by a radioactive spider and had become a superhero. It truly is amazing what the human body, even sans gamma rays, can accomplish.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

>> ^garmachi:
It's been many years since I studied physics. What does the lowercase gamma in the bottom left represent?


Me to, I think the answer is in here, but eff if I can remember.
Edit: ok I think it is the "Lorentz factor" . 7.089 Lorentz factor is 0.990 ratio to the speed of light (or very very close)


Lorentz sounds like it to me too. There are only a few other choices it could be, but I don't see them really relating very well to the what's in the video (gamma brightness for the "video", or gamma radiation factor from nuclear sciences--both I highly doubt).

Lorentz transformations (which is linked above by @GeeSussFreeK ) would be the way you would calculate many of the dilation effects caused by relativistic effects traveling near the speed of light.

Traveling at the speed of light you would have a pinpoint in front and in back. The light up front, the size of a point and basically nothing behind, as it would be shifted to very low levels of radiation. If you're going at the speed of light you wouldn't be doing any calculations as time has stopped, but from your vantage point everything happens at the same speed. As you slow down though far from the speed of light, in less than a second you instantly see things change all around you depending on how long of course you had been going at the speed of light (if you had been going that speed for 10 years you won't see too much; but, what about one billion years--can you imagine...).

But, to you a second was still one second even at that speed, or any speed, even as time slowed down the closer you got to the speed of light. Everyone else will of course still count their seconds the same as well. Hence, relativity.

If you did go that fast, yet had mass you would be facing some HUGE problems. At the front you would find a tremendous amount of energy (I'd guess all of it would be shifted to the highest energy level; one huge one-dimensional jet of gamma radiation) and at infinite amounts. In other words, it's impossible to do it. that is why a lot of Sci-Fi uses space warping/tearing/etc... to connect yourself to another place, like a wormhole; or bend space in front and back of you like Star Trek and use warp.

Gotta love Einstein and his little revelation--and all revelations in science or otherwise that add to the understanding, the expanses created, broadening our horizons, windows to the wondrous mountains of the mind put into view, and all of reality's grandeurs still there to be conquered and our dreams explored. It makes this world just a bit more interesting and worth bothering to get up every morning and go about our daily routines.

/corny

Hi, thank you for taking the time to reply, and sorry I didn't write back straight away. Obviously you're right in that they clearly don't mean to say that everything beyond the visible is pink, because that's self-evidently not true, and they know it, because they're not stupid. So yeah, it's all bit "well, obviously", if you see what I mean. Again, thanks for the considered reply

In reply to this comment by oritteropo:
I watched it again, and they're not saying that radio waves are pink, they're saying that you can't see them... but that pink fills the spot on the colour wheel that would otherwise be filled by the invisible radiation.

They could've made it clearer, but they didn't say what you thought. What they did say isn't exactly wrong just not clear.

Fair enough that it's hardly worth counting UV vision in certain lens enhanced people, I just thought it was cool.
In reply to this comment by FlowersInHisHair:
>> ^oritteropo:

I think they mean that if you try to wrap the visible spectrum around a colour wheel, then it works for the red,green,blue,violet part and then stops working when you get to the magenta/pink/negative green part.
To quibble a little with your claim that anything out of the visisble spectrum is invisible, people who have had cataract surgery can see potentially light slightly outside the normal visible range (all right, not gamma rays, but still)... http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/605905
>> ^FlowersInHisHair:
The claim made in the video that we see all the non-visible wavelengths of light/EM radiation as pink is patently false. We know this because gamma rays aren't pink, they're invisible.


That's not what they're saying though. They are quite clearly saying that the vast area outside the tiny wavelengths we can see are perceived by human eyes as pink. If that were true, there would be so much light bouncing around that that we percieved as pink that we wouldn't be able to make anything else out.

And I quibble with your quibble: anything outside of the visible spectrum is invisible by definition, isn't it? The slight increase in the visible spectrum in a minority of the people who've ever had cataract surgery is hardly worth counting in this regard as it's not considered normal vision.