Slashdot Mirror
Polonium-210 Available Through Mail Order
Knutsi writes "InformationWeek is reporting that Polonium 210, the radioactive material used to poison former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko is not as hard to get your hands on as some have previously stated. American family business United Nuclear is actually selling the stuff, and other equally exotic materials, on their company website. Could come in handy for the xmas shopping season."
Now that guy with the wiggling eyebrows has to be one of the funniest banner ads ever.
I wonder how XBOX LIVE will dectect this?
UberL337: hey thanx 4 sendin over teh drinks!
TehD00d: NP mang.
[...]
UberL337: ug feel sick oh fukkk call ambulsafeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
TehD00d: Polonipnwed!!!
Trolling is a art,
When a lump of coal just won't do...
Running Windows^H^H^H^H^H^H^H OSX and Linux in the home. (I don't have time for Solitaire any more.)
I stopped in a few weeks back to buy some and some Russian dude in line ahead of me bought the last of it.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
great to see the man who runs this place is certifiable
Thanks slashdot, but if I wanted baseless scare mongering about the threat of nuclear material falling into the wrong hands, I'd join the Republican Party.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
http://www.unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm
..... not for long
"Only Legal Source"
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I think Bolonium is a much more appropriate holiday gift. After all, its atomic weight is deliciously snacktacular.
Developers: We can use your help.
You'd be surprised about shops like this. Feds will obviously track the payments and shipments of these things. Even medical devices which contain less damaging isotopes have strict tracking. Don't believe the friendly face isn't watching you.
I wonder how that could have happened...
Indeed...American Citizens cannot be trusted with nuclear materials...shit they can't even be trusted with a goddamn telephone it seems, judging by the evesdropping our government does.
Really getting disillusioned by the land that claims to be "Land of the Free, and Home of the Brave".
Blar.
I have bought a chunk of Uranium ore. It is used for checking that my radiation survey meter still works at least partially.
Read the page, see the bait:
They even say "beware" elswhere. It must be good.
Can you even resist?
Luckily therse things cost money, or noone would care about the Flying Spaghetti Monster anymore. The Flying Magnetatorus would rule supreme.
Have you read my journal today?
.... But *WHY* is this stuff freely available? Shouldn't it be a controlled substance of some sort? It almost seems that there are drugs and booze that have tighter restrictions.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Credit where due: Not over the counter, but how about on the internet [unitednuclear.com]? Only $69!
The amount they sell, 0.1 microcuries, is... well, a tiny amount. Seriously, if you ordered 100 vials and gave the full 10 microcuries of it to someone, the radiation from it isn't going to come close to killing them.
On the other hand, I'm not sure of the biochemical effects of Polonium on the system. Often times these heavy elements have worse biological properties from their chemical interactions than from the radiation they emit. It might well be that it will be chemically toxic to you long before radiation becomes a worry.
Sold online by one company for $69 (US). Valid industrial purposes exist. Company is fairly sketchy and the owner claimed 20 years ago that he once worked on alien spaceships on a secret military base in Nevada - presumably a US military base, but the article was not specific so I suppose that it could have also been an alien base.
Regardless, expect Uncle Sam to land on him like a ton of bricks fairly soon. I hope that his forcefield dome is active.
"Brace for impact!"
I can't take a toothpaste tube on a plane, but Osama can mailorder enough nuke poison to kill all of Chicago on Christmas morning, embedded in gift certificates.
Enough of this simcurity that pretends to secure us.
--
make install -not war
Will work on moose and squirrel, yes?
IAALS.
This site will sell you Polonium 210, but only .1 microcuries of the stuff. The lethal dose is 106 microcuries, meaning you need to by more then a 1000 of this guys samples. Which would likely throw up a red flag somewhere :)
http://www.unitednuclear.com/mugs.htm
Captcha: frothy
I found it a bit amusing when they stated that Polonium was hard to obtain. It is actually drawn from the soil into Tobacco plants and is one of the Really Bad Things implicated in smoking and cancer (along with
the also-radioactive Lead-210, which emits gamma rays and decays into Polonium eventually.)
Polonium-210 is an alpha emitter - something you really don't want to ingest.
I'd have to look up dose-equivalents, etc, but if I remember correctly, it was estimated a two-pack-a-day smoker gets the radioactive equivalent of something like 300 chest X-rays a year. And remember that these are heavy metals that stay in the body for a long time!
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
... polonium-210 find you!!
Why UNIX?
Regardless, expect Uncle Sam to land on him like a ton of bricks fairly soon. I hope that his forcefield dome is active.
From the page "
United Nuclear has been featured on nationwide
CBS television news, "Coast to Coast" Radio
with host Art Bell, Wired Magazine, Maximum
Magazine, and many other publications & shows.
See the 'About Us' page for more on our company." and on the about page it claims "United Nuclear was formed in 1986 by Los Alamos scientist, Bob Lazar." I wouldn't say Uncle Sam is coming down too quickly.
Theorore Gray (of wooden periodic table fame) also says that Polonium 210 is used in antistatic brushes for film negatives
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
According to here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium
"The maximum allowable body burden for ingested polonium is only 1,100 becquerels (0.03 microcurie), which is equivalent to a particle weighing only 6.8 × 10-12 gram. Weight for weight, polonium is approximately 2.5 × 1011 (250 billion) times as toxic as hydrogen cyanide. The maximum permissible concentration for airborne soluble polonium compounds is about 7,500 Bq/m3 (2 × 10-11 Ci/cm3). The biological halflife of polonium in humans is 30 to 50 days.[18]"
The toxic dose is 0.03 micro-curies
http://www.unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm
Lists their polonium source as 0.1 micro-curie. Now Polonium is only REALLY toxic when inhaled, where alpha particles do the most damage.
I know they probably track source sales like mad, but yeah, that seems a bit too convenient. I don't know what the disks are made off. If they are, say, ceramic based, it's probably resistant to most methods of extraction. Anything else, well...
I don't know how much longer then that this will be a 'legal' alpha source.
i dont no if i should smash pbNj into my buddies math book....he did it to me and i dont no how i should get him back....so i just askin u ppl....pbNj or Ham N cheese....IT UP TO U.... His name is CARSON "feelgood" FOLEY.... HELP ME OUT WITH THIS ONE!!!!!!!
I'd do it myself if I had points.
When it comes to pastry theft, I take the cake.
...and is sometimes produced under dubious standards in Central America or India.
It does not meet the stringent FDA requirements that approved CIA spy poisons must and is therefore illegal to posses without a prescription from your local block captain.
dangerous!
Because only people from the midwest laugh at eyebrows...
Duh.
I would know. I'm from Cincinnati, OH. And I love eyebrows.
Bob Lazar. The UFO Area 51 guy. Google him. He's a fraud.
Ok, that was more than 2 words.
Boy, this guy's annual "Desert Blast" looks safe and fun. Yikes. http://www.unitednuclear.com/mag.htm
That's sooo Osama bin Laden.
You are being conservative. According to this source, if you believe them, a one pack a day smoker gets between about 300 and 8000 chest xray doses a year.
-b.
Since then, I've found a place that will send me Polonium *209*. It costs more, but so far it doesn't seem have the self-destruct feature that the Polonium 210 shysters build into their product.
Huh -- we now have front page news that a certain commodity item can be bought on the internet. I'm sorry, but anybody whos ever even just googled "Po210" already knows this. Where is the "news" aspect of this? Are we going to see headline news now that tells us that books can be bought online at Amazon.com?
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
I got a good laugh. I hope you do too.
-----------------
Legal Information,
Privacy Policy & Disclaimer
General
Information and products available on this web site are not intended for Children.
Some of the products offered can be very dangerous in the hands of
the inexperienced. If you intend on conducting experiments with pyrotechnic
chemicals, make sure you are familiar with the materials & chemistry involved
in your project, or are working under the supervision of an adult who is!
Legal Information
Everything we sell is legal to buy and own in the USA with out any licenses, etc.
Please note that assembling and even possessing EXPLODING DEVICES
such as M-80's, Cherry Bombs, Silver Salutes, etc. is illegal and considered
a very serious offense!
Just because it may be possible to make these devices with materials we sell
on our website, does not mean it is legal to do so.
The only exception is for those professionals who posses proper
Federal, State, and Local licenses to do so.
This site should NOT be construed as training material for the manufacture of fireworks or firing of fireworks displays. Although some information may be presented that is usable for the manufacture and use of fireworks, it is presented as general information only.
United Nuclear sells a variety of chemicals, metal powders and supplies commonly used in general chemistry, the manufacture of high power rocket motors and general pyrotechnics. Some of these materials can also be used to make exploding fireworks (such as M-80's, etc.) that can be very dangerous.
Exploding fireworks such as M-80's, Cherry Bombs, Silver Salutes, etc. are no longer considered fireworks. They are considered high explosives. Manufacturing or possessing these banned devices is a felony.
If you live in California for instance, just about everything related to pyrotechnics is illegal.
The California State Fire works Laws are on line, along with the Fire Marshall's Regulations.
Pyrotechnics and explosives are not safe - factories have been destroyed in the past, and they have access to the best materials and equipment, and take the most stringent safety precautions. Some people on the net have also been injured by accidents, and many of them had years of experience and took extremely comprehensive safety measures.
Some knowledge of chemistry and physics is essential - if you didn't do high-school chemistry, get yourself a chemistry textbook and read it. Make sure you understand the basic principles involved for any composition
you might be making. It is a good idea to check a formula out with someone who is experienced in chemistry, to make sure you haven't missed any safety aspect.
This is Important
Be very careful with any pyrotechnic formulas or instructions for building devices you find on the Internet. Unfortunately, a very large portion of the information found on various websites throughout the internet is completely wrong - and extremely dangerous. Make sure you trust the source of the information if you are experimenting with chemicals - especially chemicals & pyrotechnic mixtures.
Just because you might see the same formula listed on more than one website, does not make it correct. People have a bad habit of repeating and reposting bad & incorrect information as if it were true.
Remember, anyone can post anything on the Internet, right or wrong.
Anytime we post an chemical experiment or procedure to make something on our site, we test it as thoroughly as possible before posting it. Even with our safeguards, typos can occur and accidental errors do pop up when pages are updated or copied. Pay close attention to what you are doing. If you have any questions, ask someone who is experienced in chemistry.
There is no information on high explosives on this website,
nor will we knowingly link to any site that provides that kind of information.
I also came across this and thought it was pretty funny: http://www.pocketrad.com/PocketRad5.html Unfortunately, I gather the device that they're selling can't detect alpha particles since it uses a geiger-muller rube, and Polonium, is an alpha-only emmitter, but it's still cool. I want one for Christmas!
So is rat poison.
Check this out: http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.htm l
OK, Christmas cookies. Or maybe free beer, probably even more popular in Chicago (like anywhere else).
At $69:0.1uCi, for a lethal dose of 0.03uCi, that's $66M to poison every Chicagoan. Before the volume rate discount.
I can split hairs with you all day long. It still doesn't get my toothpaste on a plane.
--
make install -not war
I remember finding my dad's old 50's-era chemistry set at my grandma's when I was little, and seeing a little button cylinder with a viewport on the top, so you could see the lump of uranium or whatever glow. Unfortunately, no matter how close I stuck it up to my eyeballs, I didn't see any glow. When I told my dad, he promptly confiscated the cylinder. Interestingly, he left me the dangerous chemicals, organic solvents, etc.
you had me at #!
But *WHY* is this stuff freely available?
It isn't. It's only available in very tiny quantities.
Shouldn't it be a controlled substance of some sort?
It is. Maybe you should read the article, or at least think a bit more critically that perhaps both Slashdot and Information Week are just trying to sell eyeballs here and are willing to overlook the fact that the amount available in incredibly tiny.
It almost seems that there are drugs and booze that have tighter restrictions.
Funny, I don't recall being able to buy arbitrary quantities of Polonium down the street from my local drug dealer (liquor stores included).
I'm curious. Are you always so reactionary to news stories, assume the worst, and don't bother thinking critically, or only when the word "nuclear" or "radiation" is in the article?
AccountKiller
http://www.unitednuclear.com/traser.htm Now this is usefull! With a half-life of over 12 years! You won't need to buy any batteries for a flashlight anymore. It's a darn shame they're out of stock. :-(
i hope the seller is sensible enough to cease sales during the current time of popularity. there must be lots of people out there wanting to pin things on the KGB.
Why UNIX?
The fear of all things nuclear is the Democrat or even better the Greens stance. "Why should we worry about terrorists explosives in their shoes when you can by deadly Po210 by mail order".
Get your fear mongering right.
Remember if you outlaw child pornography, only criminals will have child pornography.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Why am I reminded of the episode of Family Matters where Urkel builds a nuclear bomb?
No, I will not work for your startup
That there are many over the counter chemicals that if ingested would have the same result.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
AWESOME!!! Thank you capitalism.
..where Polonium 210 is used as the ionizer in "StaticMaster" brushes, used to clean dust off of negatives.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
I read another article on this company the other day, and it said the amount they sell you is so small that it isn't visible to the naked eye. Um... Anyone wanna buy some? I'll sell you a vial of the same size for 75% of the price charged by United Nuclear.
This isn't just a nice article about United Nuclear, but about the decline and fall of intellectual curiosity among kids growing up in the US, courtesy of the usual coalition of the War on Drugs and blubbering soccer moms. It's depressing as hell.
I haven't seen a website like that since the mid 90's.
Is it just me, or do you hate it when people say "Is it just me..."?
The dose makes the poison. Most people working in buildings with granite sheathing are getting higher gamma doses than nuclear plant workers are allowed by law to be exposed to.
United Nuclear sells 0.1 microcuries. Polonium 210 emits 4500 curies per gram [1], so that is about .0002 grams per curie. So they are selling 0.00002 micrograms, 0.02 picograms, or if you want to make it look really big, 22 femtograms [2]. How toxic is that? Well, I would suspect there is several times more cyanide in a single apple seed [3].
And wouldn't it be cheaper to get the Polonium from a photography shop,
and not a monitored source of radio isotopes?
[1]According to http://www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/polonium.pdf
[2]2's are repeating.
[3]Strangely, I could not find anything on the internet about how much toxin there really is in apple seeds. Polonium that needs a breader reactor to create, sure, but the poisonous apples at the farmers market, no one is talking about them!
Which is why the phrase "loose lips sink ships" was coined. There have been numerous headline-grabbing items like this article on Slashdot and in the media in general which serve no purpose to anyone unless you're making money from the article or you're a terrorist looking for ideas.
The only reason why al Qaeda began to pursue W.M.D. was because the media kept telling them how supposedly "easy" it was. They had previously written off the idea as being too hard. So people need to have some sense before spreading round information which can cause damage like this.
As several others have pointed out, what United Nuclear is selling isn't dangerous. Please don't make it harder for scientists that may need this element. It's already a PITA to get Sudafed that works instead of the PE version. For those who don't know, Sudafed and others who use pseudoephedrine as a active ingredient have a odd thing...you get a CARD off the shelf and the pharmacy has to be open. You may only buy 1 box PER day AND you must show ID to buy that box! The reason is because you can make Meth Amphetamine out of Sudafed apparantly. SO you have to SHOW YOUR PAPERS just cause you want the stuff that will actually WORK!
Gorkman
From reading the Wikipedia it doesn't seem so harmless to me:
"the maximum permissible concentration for airborne soluble polonium compounds is about 7,500 Bq/m3 (2 × 10-11 Ci/cm3)."
So, couldn't it be used as a dirty weapon if you made it into a fine powder and sprayed it into the atmosphere?
Some other facts:
"A great deal of energy is released by its decay with half a gram quickly reaching a temperature above 750 K."
"When it is mixed or alloyed with beryllium, polonium can be a neutron source: beryllium releases a neutron upon absorption of an alpha particle that is supplied by 210Po. It has been used in this capacity as a neutron trigger for nuclear weapons. "
So they only sell a small amount of it, this doesn't prevent some one determined enough to acculumate the required amount over a long period of time
You cannot get enough from such a source to conduct a poisoning such as what happened in London. This is a TINY sample. Nothing like the right amount.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Annually, whenever I seal my Hemoccult card in the self-addressed stamped envelope my personal physician provides and drop it into a mailbox, I wonder whether I'm going to get a visit from Homeland Security for illegally mailing biohazard waste.
So far, I've yet to have the doctor "The lab doesn't understand what's happened. They couldn't run the test. They say it's almost as if the sample got electron-beam sterilized somehow."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lazar :)
Did this paragraph strike anyone else as nothing more than sensationalism in the article? Did someone along the line actually say "hey, this doesn't have all that much pizzazz, so let's make the owner seem like a real nut job." I mean, come on! How does what the owner claimed he did 20 years ago, have bearing on the current story?
Shane
(These comments brought to you by a guy that claimed some 10 years ago, that he worked in the sweat shop owned by pre-historic midget squirrels. "My past employment with IBM doesn't have any bearing on this story," he's repeatedly stated.)
That website looks cheap enough to be a fake but extensive enough to be real.
Modern magnets are so powerful there are real hazards. When magnets were iron or, at the high end, AlNiCo, they couldn't retain a strong enough field to make much trouble, so people thought of magnets as safe. Neodymium magnets, though, can be made strong enough to be dangerous. The Magnetix building set killed several kids when magnets came loose from the plastic parts and were ingested. The CPSC had to order a recall.
Great! Now I'll have to add a geiger counter to my mailbox. I'll have to figure out a way to make my anthrax detector smaller.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
The radiation children get from the sun, just from playing outside can kill too.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You can't even use it to generate the 1.21 jigawatts necessary to fuel the flux capacitor. Thats why its available at the corner drug store.
... no more looking for giant thunderstorms to power your time machine or trick terrorists into stealing stuff for you, nowadays you can just buy nuclear material via mail order.
Bob Lazar!
m l
Yes! THAT Bob Lazar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lazar
This is the second time United Nuclear made the news this year-there was a story in Wired about them being raided, several months ago.
http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.ht
Somebody should do an interview with that guy, he sure sounds interesting!
If they changed their company name to United Ponies, most people wouldn't give them a second thought.
Unless they sold nuclear ponies, of course...
Plutonium is much more dangreous than Polonium yet Homer Simpson gets the stuff all the time from Mr. Burns' plant, even MAILS IT (at the expense of the factory)
The ban of dangerous stuff is useless; they should ban knowledge. People should not be allowed to study physics or chemistry unless they have the proper security clearance.
The luminescent phosphour wore out. Get some luminescent paint and paint it on then look at it under a stong lens and you can see the scintiliations.
Or get an old watch off ebay with a radium dial and in a very dark place look at it under a strong lens. You can see little nuclear fireworks there.
Need Mercedes parts ?
They already HAVE been raided; they sell stuff you can use to make fireworks. They're were totally cool with the BATF, the the Consumer Products Safety Commission got grumpy with them. Huge fine, armed raid, bunch of BS.
Damn! Why didn't they publish this before the trick-or-treaters came knocking?
United Nuclear Scientific Supplies - looking for some URANIUM? CLICK HERE.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
you don't have to look hard to find radioactive material... Would you like a dose of potassium 40? Let me throw a banana at you...
cool. I'm going to stop giving out big scoops of ice cream on halloween and switch to doling out small supermagnets.
I'm guilty... I'm from the MW and I found it funny as hell.
Good sire,
This company is pretty much the best mail order company for science products that exists. In a number of items, they have their entire stock bought out by homeland security for their own uses. Like their UV flashlights that are useful for searching for explosives.
They also have a great page up about the Po. It would take 15,000 times the dosage of that $69 vial to get into the lethal range. Which ends up at over $1 million. And then you'd have to combine all the 15,000 needles they come in, which is not gonna happen. You get 10x more in a single smoke detector for far cheaper.
The guy might be slightly batty, I don't know, but I do know he's got the best chemistry kits you can still buy, and taking this guy outta the market is a blow to future scientists.
I'd say more, but my guild is raiding.
I agree - depressing. Thanks for the 'mod up', btw.
http://www.unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm Here's their explanation.
Not enough to poison someone, almost impossible to extract, etc. Poor United Nuclear will probably be run out of business just like everyone else who helps amateur scientists.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Po210 is an alpha emitter, so the radiation from it won't penetrate the walls of a Geiger tube to register a reading. Geiger counters are only useful for Beta and Gamma sources.
What you need to detect an Alpha source is a scintillation detector.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
I built a cloud chamber (dry-ice cooled chamber to better view tracks of elementary particles) last year as an independant study project, and decided to get some radioactive material in order to better isolate tracks made from beta sources, alpha sources, etc. One of the sources we got was Polonium 210, all we needed was the permission of our physics teacher.
Now the project is done, but I still have a radioactive source sitting beside me on my desk.
So yes, this radioactive source is very easy to come by, and if anyone needs a source with just about one half life gone, look me up..
The man behind this 'business' is Bob Lazar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lazar)
He has seen and reverse eng. UFOs among other things.
Do you trust him? Is this news for nerds, stuff that matters, or just yellow press stuff?
Why wouldn't they just kill him outright?
I haven't been involved in extra-national assassinations (but I did stay in a Holiday Inn recently...), shouldn't it have been easier to get to him on the street or in his home and then either garrot him with piano wire or shove an icepick into the base of his skull?
It could have been made to look like a robbery or some other type of crime. Poisoning him with some weird, hard-to-get chemical nobody has heard of only makes it look like some weird, KGB plot to begin with, with all the attendent bad publicity (unless of course they wanted it as an initimidation factor.
Of course, all of this is assuming it WAS a KGB plot, and not a plot to make the KGB look bad.
(Yes, I know its not the KGB anymore, at least in name...)
Am I the only one who enjoys reading comments down to the last line?3 8&cid=16981042) on the article mentioning the ex-spys' death (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/ 24/1948246)
this information was already posted as a comment (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2082
Reminds me of a Furturama episode
NRA Spokesperson ". . . and that over there is my mutated anthrax. For duck huttin'"
And don't let your kids swallow beryllium coated capsules of Polonium 210 either!
you had me at #!
This is posted directly from their website in response to the incident of polonium being used as a poison. Apparently, there ARE regulations on purchasing polonium. Being a terrorist and buying $1 million worth of polonium from that website will most likely set off a tick on the radar of either the company or the government.
I'm pretty sure that people who are in need of Alpha emitters will be able to safely obtain it from this website without worry of the site being shut down due to assistance of terrorists. If you want to be able to obtain a larger amount from them, a license is required.
The matter now is... how much polonium was used in the poisoning?
clips that went onto the headshell of a tonearm.
now you have to take smoke detectors apart to get it.
surprised nobody posted a statement about a nice book, The Radioactive Boy Scout, which will give the !! OMG !! crowd heart attacks by the pound.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
alphas will kick neutrons out of the aluminum foil, and some occasional betas and gammas should come out due to interference which are detectable. alphas are much more destructive to biological tissue due to the mass they have, but the glass wall of a geiger tube will block them from carrying a charge across the gas and causing a click.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Most terrorists, politicians, and journalists are woefully ignorant. Supermarkets, Home Depots, and many other common storefronts are rich sources of dangerous materials for those who are alert and do their homework.
...are we scared yet?
whatsoever effect ill no felt and
Dr. Emmett Brown: "I'm sure in 1985 plutonium is available at every corner drugstore, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by." Only 20 years late.
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
Red Rover, Red Rover,
Bob Lazar's comin over
so hurry clear the airstrip
and light up that stove. By Jove,
I think it's started. Oh yeah!
ESCAPE FROM THE PRISON PLANET
Tau-neutrino.
What we see once again is that the western mainstream media cannot be trusted. It's a propaganda machine.
Look, I like this company. I need a lot of what they sell. And they are the only supplier that I don't get pissed with. I even buy refills for a lot of my sons chemistry sets there. I teach with this material. If Slashdot makes a big fuss over it, its going to draw attention. Which might get it shut down like all the other decent chemistry companies.
So please, ignore this... Don't let the normals get ahold of this information, or the scumbags that run this country.
Everyone now already knows that this is FUD and what UN sells is just a tiny fraction of the toxic amount which is already just a tiny amount.
What I still do not understand is why anyone would want to use Polonium210 to kill somebody in the first place? There are dozens of substances available to everyone and probably thousands available to a secret service and all of these substances would be as efficient, cheaper, and less problematic for the one who applies them.
So why on earth use Polonium210?
My only explanation so far is that it is an extremely sadistic way to kill somebody: no antidote, it takes days and is extremely painful.
I certainly hope whoever modded this "insightful" was doing it out of some misguided idea that I needed more karma. The idea of some slashdot moderator sitting down and thinking, "You know, he's right! I probably SHOULDN'T suck the juice out of thermometers," while not actually outlandish given my perception of the IQ of the average /. mod, certainly gives me a moment's pause.
Well, with that said, here's some more insightful advice:
You probably shouldn't eat broken glass.
Fire is hot! Best not touch it...
Attempting to breath underwater without the aid of SCUBA gear can be dangerous.
If a woman asks you if something makes her look fat, say no.
And of course:
Do not taunt happy fun ball!
There, if my last comment is any guide, that should get me A +5 insightful.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Call 1-800-ALQ-AEDA and place your order with the
world's most dangerous ex-cokehead.
Thanks in advance.
Yours patriotically,
Kilgore Trout, C.E.O.
Just increase the amount of natural predators. Problem solved.
So I eat it, and poop it out in a few hours. Little harm done.
Low grade stuff (Co-60) I handled in lab was encased in plastic. We washed our hands afterwards because the lead blocks we stored them behind when not in use was more dangerous.
Oh, goddamnit, folks, keep up on these things.
When you buy $70 worth of 210Po, you get one one-trillionth of a gramme more or less. About 1/5250th of a fatal dose, and more like 1/20,000th or less of what was used in London.
So to buy a fatal dose it's only going to cost about a third of a million dollars.
You can buy lens brushes with 210Po sources, too.
Jesus.
The dodgy website that always gets drug out anytime something "nu-cle-urrr" gets mentioned in the media is back? They don't actually sell anything you know.
Hey gang, just thought I should remind everyone that the Eugene Levy fan club meeting is being held at my house this week.
That means Bush can be added into list of potential suspects.
... if a fray boy attempts to cross a room without planning his route carefully. I don't see what the magnet has to do with it.
(Actually, one of my best friends in college was a frat guy, and really bright. So my comment is exclusive of him. Now, the frat boy who in a drunken stupor stepped on my head when I was a visiting high school senior, yep, thats the guy who needs the warning label tatooed on his keister.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
But I thought that I also read that it sublimates for unknown reasons? Of course, *hopefully* the stuff would just disperse enough that it wouldn't poison anyone, but I know that I certainly won't be buying any of this stuff.
Because it's such a sophisticated and exotic way to kill someone that it "has" to be Putin/KGB that did it... and this is so obvious that it almost certainly wasn NOT Putin. Putin is no dummy - he'd have the guy killed and made to look like an accident if he wanted to kill him (which I sincerly doubt he did). It was presumably done by someone who wanted to people to think it was ("obviously") Putin to discredit him.
Man, their prices on aero gel are expensive. $$0 for a little fragment that came off of a larger piece they accidentally broke apart? Rip off. Aero gel is pretty nifty, it looks like a solid gas, but it feels like styrofoam.
My wife is really pissing me off tonight.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
I don't know about you, but I want the H-bomb shirt to walk around in an airport or police station.
http://www.unitednuclear.com/tees.htm
From the United Nuclear Polonium-210 webpage:
In addition, there are dozens of other far more toxic materials, like Ricin and Abrin, which can easily be made using common plant material, and are also undetectable as a poison and untraceable.
Even though they were just making a point, it is still funny... "Our stuff isn't good as a poison, but here's some stuff that is!"
1 voice in a sea of voices
That was =precisely= what I though of when I read the article :-) Glad I had the patience to search all the way here to page five before posting.
Great, so now we can all expect spam asking us if we want Pol0n!um.
The Dread Pirate [R]oberts & [V]izzini have a battle of wits to decide whoh shall win the Princess, based on the old posioned goblet trick...
R: All right. Where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right...and who is dead.
V: But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
R:You've made your decision then?
V: Not remotely. Because iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.
R:Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
V: Yes, Australia. And you must have suspected I would have known the powder's origin, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
R: You're just stalling now.
V: You'd like to think that, wouldn't you? You've beaten my giant, which means you're exceptionally strong, so you could've put the poison in your own goblet, trusting on your strength to save you, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But, you've also bested my Spaniard, which means you must have studied, and in studying you must have learned that man is mortal, so you would have put the poison as far from yourself as possible, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
R: You're trying to trick me into giving away something. It won't work.
V: IT HAS WORKED! YOU'VE GIVEN EVERYTHING AWAY! I KNOW WHERE THE POISON IS!
R: Then make your choice.
V: I will, and I choose-- What in the world can that be?
[Vizzini gestures up and away from the table. Roberts looks. Vizzini swaps the goblets]
R: What? Where? I don't see anything.
V: Well, I- I could have sworn I saw something. No matter.First, let's drink. Me from my glass, and you from yours.
R: You guessed wrong.
V: You only think I guessed wrong! That's what's so funny! I switched glasses when your back was turned! Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!! Ha ha ha--
[Vizzini stops suddenly, and falls dead to the right]
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
A thousand ways to do it (even a fake robbery resulting in death would've been less suspicious), but Polonium poisoning was chosen. It's like someone rents a Bentley for a hit&run: it has flair.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
is that everybody is perfectly willing to assume that the President of Russia personally ordered a critic poisoned in another major country - thus threatening Russia's diplomatic relations with said country if it ever is proven - just to silence a guy who basically was a raving nutcase that nobody paid any attention to. All the while ignoring the billionaire oligarch who was BEHIND said raving lunatic and who is KNOWN to be a criminal and whose associates are KNOWN to be criminals wanted in Russia for crimes against the government and the people,
Meanwhile, the same morons vehemently deny the possibility that Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq in order to secure oil for his family's oil company cronies, or that Cheney has ANY connections with the amount of money Halliburton has made out of Iraq, or that Israel, KNOWN to commit assassinations practically anywhere on the planet regardless of legality, could have anything to do with the assassinations in Lebanon, despite being the only known beneficiary of such assassinations.
Double standard, anyone?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
A friend in Moscow tells me that the Russian media - such as every "investigative" programme - are carefully putting forward the sychronised line that Putin has nothing to do with the killing. I speculate that the proposition to media outlets could have been:
"Of course Putin had nothing to do with Litvinenko's murder! Publish this, or you'll end up like Litvinenko."
(One counter-theory put about very quickly was that Litvinenko committed suicide in order to "raise awkward questions" as Putin attended the EU summit. This of course echoes the line put forward immediately after Anna Politkovskaya's murder, that she arranged it herself to discredit Putin. Yes, this was seriously suggested! I was in Moscow at the time.)
you had me at #!
>> If you want my Polonium 210 you'll have to pry it from my cold dead hands.
Sorry, Dude -
If you want my Nyodium MAGNETS, you'll have to
pry them from my cold dead intestines.
- Deja VU!
.
- aqk
F U
lock stock and smokin beryllium
.
- aqk
F U
Why am I not impressed by the level of knowledge in geography from our fellow US citizens?
Yes... but-Ireland is in the
choke) (gasp)
British.... ISLES!
.
- aqk
F U
Good point. If I still had it, I would try that. Thanks.