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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."
Try any radiation monitors on old orange glazed Fiestaware in granny's house, you'll be suprised how much it makes a geiger counter tick! I tried it with my old 50's era CD counter and a plate was as hot as the calibration source. Also smoke detectors have a radioactive ionizing source in them.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I just saw 'Bowling for Columbine' yesterday. It sheds a different light on this kind of inventions. I mean, how many weight are you willing to carry around to protect yourself from all possible terrorist attacks? These things will not help, they will just make some company rich.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Are these things going to be available to the general public? If they are how many digits are we talking about for one of them?
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
I want a pda that can scan for cellular phones (gsm included), and if possible jam them!
Why? One word: Movies
`But the advantage of RadNet is that it is a "smart" sensor that can pick up on the difference between radiation emitted by a so-called "dirty bomb," a mix of conventional explosive and nuclear materials, and the radiation from a recent hospital treatment.`
I'm highly skeptical about this point. Gamma radiation all looks the same, except for varying intensities, regardless of the source... and background neutron radiation almost never exists (unless you're hanging out near nuclear weapons or a running fission reacor.) I don't think the device could really discern between a dirty bomb and other radiation sources.
::diatonic::
figure out someone simply ported the old HP48 Tricorder program to the PDAs and cell phones.
Method of processing duck feet
If you have a Motorola i88s and download a midlet I wrote you can track your cell phone and have it's position update a web page in real time. You can also mark an interesting location to see where it is on a map or aerial photo later. This is possible thanks to Nextel's always on internet connection for $9.99 for 1 Meg per month
Free cell phone tracking
It's a pretty cool way to detect radiation, but I wonder about its effectiveness. They say it's the size of a '95ish cellphone, so how close to the source would it have to be to get an effective reading? They say it measures gammas so it depends on photo-interactions (ie compton scattering, pair production, photo-electric effect...not an acutal collision like the article implies). It's most likely that compton scattering and photo-electric effect will occur (they are based on essentially the proximity of the gammas to an electron) as opposed to pair production (which requires a highly charged nucleus and how many of those can you find at 1K??)
In any case, all of those rely on the probability that a gamma will interact which means that size does matter: the bigger the counting material (the tin) the more likely a gamma will get measured. IMHO the best radiological defense wouldn't be portable little devices (which are good for measuring personal exposure) but rather some large detectors placed in strategic locations (say wiring a metal detector with some of this tech and turn it into a metal/radiation detector?).
All in all a pretty cool devicewhich has some limited use but I doubt it will turn out to be any major solution to discovering a dirty bomb randomly, I'd say they are much better suited to scanning suspicious items (or monitoring your own gamma exposure!).
--Jubedgy
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis hebes