Slashdot Mirror
PDA/Radiation Detector
sgpennebaker writes "This article tells of lab rats who've built a cell phone/PDA/GPS device that also lets you surf the web and, oh, yeah, sniff out any dirty bombs that might have gone off in your area. Then you can cancel your meetings, call family and friends and send GPS coordinates to whoever it is that cleans up afterwards. I'm waiting for the next generation; I want one that also tracks hungry, angry bears and emits a loud noise when it senses their proximity."
Thinkgeek.com has a watch that detects radiation. No GPS though
Radiation Watch
The actual researchers on this project. And a video on the air quality experiment with the palm using gps and air quality sensors to track data.
Why do I h8 apple?
http://www.antirad.com/sources.htm
Pottery glazes and art glass, some ceramic glazed jewelry and cloisonné enameled jewelry contain high percentages of uranium oxides to produce bright yellows and oranges. Fiesta Red china dishes by Fiestaware produced through 1971 emit gamma and beta. Acidic foods left in contact with this chinaware will dissolve small amounts of these radioactive elements which will be ingested. Enameled jewelry made with these glazes and worn next to the skin is hazardous.
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
Depleted Uranium is not spent the fuel rods leftovers most people assume from its name. It is what is left over after extraction of the fissile material from refined Uranium.
Significant amounts of refined Uranium are stable isotopes. To get enriched Uranium you force the refined metallic Uranium through a series of filters that select the isotopes based on physical characteristics. Uranium ions in solution are large enough a special porous ceramic filter can pass the ions of the desired atomic weight. Using several passes with different sizes of pores you get the nice hot Uranium you need for bombs and such. One of the byproducts is a nice very dense metal, Uranium. Almost as hard as austenitic steel and much denser than lead. Not much hotter than the tritium illuminator sources in the standard issue compasses carried by infantry. The dust is however a mechanical poison that works much like ionic silver. Silver nitrate is just as dangerous a compound.
radioactive boyscout
... June 26, 1995, was not a typical day.
Ask Dottie Pease. Cruising down Pinto Drive, Pease saw half a dozen men crossing her neighbor's lawn. Three, in respirators and white moon suits, were dismantling her next-door neighbor's shed with electric saws, stuffing the pieces into large steel drums emblazoned with radioactive warning signs.
The cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn. He had attempted to build a nuclear reactor in his mother's shed following a Boy Scout merit-badge project.
I don't think he turned himself in, but he did realize what he had put together was too 'hot' and he had started dismantling it.
When David's Geiger counter began picking up radiation five doors from his mom's house, he decided that he had "too much radioactive stuff in one place" and began to disassemble the reactor. He hid some of the material in his mother's house, left some in the shed, and packed most of the rest into the trunk of his Pontiac.
At 2:40 a.m. on August 31, 1994, Clinton Township police responded to a call concerning a young man who had been apparently stealing tires from a car. When the police arrived, David told them he was meeting a friend. Unconvinced, officers decided to search his car.
They opened the trunk and discovered a toolbox shut with a padlock and sealed with duct tape. The trunk also contained foil-wrapped cubes of mysterious gray powder, small disks and cylindrical metal objects, and mercury switches. The police were especially alarmed by the toolbox, which David said was radioactive and which they feared was an atomic bomb.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Yup all various penetrators from DU rounds. My wristwatch is a hotter radiation source. The issues with DU are due to the dust. The radioactive nature of the metal is a hysteria button used by the leftist enviro-terrorists to whip up the panic in the unwashed masses.
The dust is a mechanical poison that works much like ionic silver. Silver nitrate is just as dangerous a compound. Heavy metallic ions are bad in general. Heavy metal poisoning is bad. Cadmium, Lead, Tungsten, Polonium and Rhenium dust are just as bad. Mercury is worse. Uranium Oxide dust is non-water soluble and settles very quickly. Now if you crawl around a knocked out tank without a dust filter you'd die of silicosis faster than DU poisoning from the residue of an anti-tank munitions.
On the other hand if it is a Soviet built tank it is the Boron, Molybdenum and Osmium dust from the vaporized armor that you should worry about. It'll cut your lungs out in just a few months.