Mythbusters to Test Cockroach Radiation Myth

redwoodtree writes "An article on the site for the Tri-City Herald sums it up perfectly: 'Contrary to popular belief, not a significant amount of research goes into cockroach radiation.' To test the old saw about 'the cockroaches being the only survivors of a nuclear war' Discovery Channel's Mythbusters are going out to Hanford Site, where plutonium was manufactured for the first nuclear bomb. It's the single most polluted nuclear waste site in the U.S. The Mythbusters are going to take cockroaches and other insects and apply successively higher doses of radiation in a controlled setting."

Comments

I thought it was for a different reason

[CrazyJim1]

Cockroaches are spread out and hidden in walls so they're in places that less radiation will hit. After nuclear winter, they can eat all the carcasses of higher life forms and just plain survive. I never thought,"Hey, cockroaches can withstand more heat than other living organisms." We all know the bacteria that lives in deep sea vents will last because it doesn't get it's energy from the sun, and its shielded from the radiation above ground. Life will continue after nuclear winter, that is certain, but will human life continue is the question.

Nukes? Cockroaches are dead even w/o radiation

[dtolman]

According to "The World Without Us", by Alan Weisman - most of the roaches in the industrialized world will be Dead within 3 years of humanity disappearing! Thats without even the radiation. So don't worry... when we go, the roaches will go with us.

Re:Safety?

[MichaelKaiserProScri]

Gamma irradiator. Basically, big lead tube with a gamma source inside. You can't get it out. You can't expose the source to the outside world. There is a lead "airlock". You put the roach inside. Irradiate. Release. I went to a High School that had a gamma irradiator. We DID this experiment. Exposed roach to greater than 1000, but less than 10000 roentgens. We weren't real precise. But the roach lived long enough for us to decide we better squish it before it reproduced.

Oh, yes, "stuff doesn't glow when you expose it to radiation". Not 100% true. Some stuff DOES. Namely most crystals. One of the most impressive examples is Sodium Chloride. Yep, table salt. Irradiate it overnight. The gamma rays knock the electrons up to a higher energy level. But since salt has a very tight crystaline structure, they don't snap back down immediatly. Remove from irradiator, and over the course of the next 24 hours, it glows pretty brightly (bright as a glow stick) in a funky red-orange light (spectra of sodium). Eventually all the electrons snap back down to their ground state and it quits glowing. Not radioactive at any point while this is going on. The only thing it emits is red-orange photons which are not "radiation" by most people's standards. (Well it is, but ALL light is...)

From Caltech via the Wayback Machine

[rawshark]

http://web.archive.org/web/20060426175941/http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~maronj/text/roach.html

I've done this

[rimcrazy]

I use to radiate parts for Motorola back when I worked for the Military Electronics group. We use to use the Gamma cell over at ASU. We put in a cockroach one Friday and came back Monday to check on it. Can't remember if it was the new gamma cell or the old one. The new one was around 20KRads/Min the old one was around 1KR/min. Either way, it was in the chamber for about 3 days or about 4320 mins. Bounded it got between 86Mega Rads or 4.3Mega Rads. It lived. There is little or no water in a cockroach so there is nothing to absorb the radiation. To Gamma radiation, they are immune. To be a correct experiment they would need to expose across a broad range of particles and radiation and not just Gamma.