Slashdot Mirror
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."
I for one welcome our new irradiated cockroach overlords.
:(
Really, I apologize, I can't help it...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Don't forget to test twinkies as well
I wonder how they will handle the nuclear safety of their own and their crew.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Lets hope they don't get besieged by PETA, who seem to want to protect the rights cockroaches now
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
Strange how little cats and dogs are protected on TV, but our little six-legged friends, well 200 can merrily risk their little lives in the name of pseudoscience television.
My little Linux and tech blog
The Mythbusters are going to take cockroaches and other insects and apply successively higher doses of radiation in a controlled setting.
So, what precautions do they have on hand in the event one of them grows to enormous size and goes on a rampage?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Kari should pass on this on. send in the other ones, just leave Kari alone. She should be protected.
Sheesh, this is obviously an attempt to create giant monsters to ravage America. Why do Mythbusters hate America?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
God spoke to me.
Funny, it seems that a lot of scientists have done just that.
For a pretty decent explanation: the mysterious Dr. Karl!
-----[0_o]-----
We are not amused.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
...otherwise his mustache will become huge and go on a rampage!
Towards the Singularity.
As a proud resident of cochroach-ridden New York City, I can report that the little devils are immune to everything but Boric Acid which--apparently--causes them to become constipated.
Haven't they learned ANYTHING from science fiction?? Geez. Well, there goes the neighborhood.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Where exactly did you go to high school? :)
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Don't get bitten by any of those radioactive cockroaches. Lord knows the superpowers you'd acquire.
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060426175941/http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~maronj/text/roach.html
Still waiting for the episode on Catholicism.
In a former life, I worked as an NDT technician. One of our biggest jobs was industrial radiography. Which, long story short, involves radioisotope cameras and lots of safety training. With an radiation safety expert, radiation alarms, survey meters, and proper equipment they'll be plenty safe.
The biggest problem for them would be to properly dose the cockroaches. What kinds and levels of radiation will they be receiving? Any clown can x-ray a roach until it dies, but what would the fallout profile of a world-ending nuclear war look like? What's the long-term effect of radioisotopes in their bodies? How much ionizing radiation will they receive?
There's alpha, beta, gamma, neutron... What kind of radiation are they going to use? Safety, while incredibly important for an experiment like this, is relatively easy to accomplish if they get an expert. Attacking the correct problem may prove far more troublesome.
I think you answered your own question.
I heard an interview once with a scientist who wanted "endangered species" to include the less cuddly critters. He cited the fact that when the last surviving California condors were captured for breeding, the first thing that was done to them was a delousing. It never occurred to anybody that if a species is endangered, then their parasites must be endangered as well.
Ok so when does the "But all life is valuable" argument begin to sound idiotic. what about the Aids virus? what about that life? what about all other Virus "Life-Forms" that cause all kinds of horrible ailments and diseases? wont' somebody think of them too? is there life any less valuable then another?
... for Paul and Jamie to blast off and land on the moon to provide current affirmation that humanity has been there before. Although I'm sure that the hoax-sayers will just insist that they are part of the conspiracy also. Still... a condensed version of the trip would make an awesome extended episode (and they'd also get to bust some myths about zero-G during the flight).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
o crap....don't want to have a mutant Super-PETA ppl.
besides, this is for scientific research....not solely for entertainment like that roach-eating contest.
(and for the record....roaches have been around for millions of years....they've survived the devastation that wiped out most other forms of life...they can surely survive if a few of their comrades get irradiated.)
I was always told that the cockroaches will survive a nuclear blast not because they are more resistant to radiation, but because of the sheer number and geographic ubiquitous.
-Valiss
It's not even a myth! It's just a common saying stemming from the fact that cockroaches are so prolific and notoriously hard to kill. What's next? they test the theory that there's more than one way to skin a cat?
"Those who think they know everything are of great annoyance to those of us who do." - Isaac Asimov
Hell, I might do it for fun.
These kinds of "dilemma's" are nothing but intellectual masturbation. I'll tell you right now: in a real world situation, that man or that dog would be a greasy spot if it was only thought that their death would save 100,000 people.
And as for the reverse, you can bet, in a quarantine situation, they would kill as many as it took (or as they could) to keep the sick separated from the well. It's the only thing that can be done in that situation, 1, 100, or 1,000,000. The reverse also holds: if you were stuck in a quarantine, and you believed yourself or your family to be in danger of being infected, you'd do whatever you could to break quarantine, even at the risk of infecting countless others...That's why they defend barricades with guns, not pamphlets on disease control.
The desire to protect yourself and your loved ones trumps it all, when it comes down to it. That's just human nature.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
does not mean coackroaches would inherit the earth. A good experiment would need to test radiation exposure over different generations... what if radiation makes them sterile? What if they have so much mutations due to radiation they start to drift and look the precious genetic information that allowed them to survive. We are constantly degenerating and are constantly evolving to preserve our fitness... would the coackroaches be able to do that if genetic drift was significantly increased? Maybe, maybe not.
\u262D = \u5350
I can assure you that Catholicism does exist.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Seriously though, Mythbusters just plain old has a policy of not testing any religious myths. Saw it mentioned in their forums.
So every time they fumigate a TV studio, it's wrong? But it's okay to take a magnifying glass to the ants in your yard, because you feel like it?
You're way too sensitive.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Seems mythic enough to me.
You are mythtaken, it is actually a mythtery
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
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.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
Wrong on both counts. Most parasites co-evolve with their hosts. That means that most parasite species are unique to the hosts they inhabit. (Pediculus humanus capitis, for example, lives on the human scalp and nowhere else.) It also means that parasites can't do too much damage to their hosts, because they have nowhere to go if the hosts die off.
Of course, there are parasites that jump species, and humans, having invaded almost every habitat on the planet, have encountered (and been infected by) most of them. Such species haven't co-evolved with their hosts and do indeed present a threat to them. But these are the exceptions, and it's only due to our spreading them around that they're threats to other species.
Actually, I think that's morally indefensible.
Who are you saving? What are you actually doing? You're just torturing some slob for dated information that's not going to help anyone. And torture is a crappy way of getting accurate information anyhow...Witness all the people who "confessed" to witchcraft during the inquisition, and the witch trials.
Traditional intelligence gathering methods were sufficient to get the information that would have stopped 9/11, if the methods of analysis were good enough. Now, they're gathering so much more information, and I've seen no proof that their methods of analysis have improved by anything even resembling a similar amount...Basically, they're drowning themselves in un-analyzed crap information, while giving concrete examples to the people who think that we're corrupt torturers, that we are in fact, corrupt torturers, and screwing the people at home who're finding it hard to think we really are the good guys when we're torturing POWs, and yes, if we're "at war" with terror, then people we capture in the war, are POWs...That's what it means.
In short, it's stupid, it's pointless, and it's immoral. We may be forgiven for taking the moral low road for an end like saving a million people, but when you take the moral low road for a worthless end, you should expect to be strung up by your nuts for it. Make no mistake; you sacrifice a human life because of something you think is right, that's still murder...If enough other people think you were right to do so, society may forgive you. Otherwise, they may put your ass in the electric chair.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I think it's faster to come up with something funny to say, rather than something profound.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
That seems a little unscientific. I'm going to wait for the results of properly peer-reviewed experiment data before I make a judgement on that one.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Whereas you, noble and virtuous, will refuse. You will tell your pregnant wife, and your three kids, "Okay, we're all going to die so that the people outside can go on living their corrupt and venal lives like we don't exist."
I haven't been in that situation, so I'm not quite sure what I'd do. It'll depend on a lot of things. How long do I stay in quarantine if there is no food? How long if no water? No vague attempt at medical aid from the outside? No idea.
But you apparently know...Unlike all the "trample your fellow man" sheep of the world, you'd never act in anything but a selfless manner.
Or you're talking out of your ass. I've seen a lot of people talk a big line, and the bigger the line, the faster they crack when the shit hits the fan.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Luckily for us all they are not capable of enforcing such a ridiculous declaration.
If they ever were able to do so, their first act would be to abolish the Nuclear Force which , ironically, would result in the most spectacular explosion this world has ever seen (and apparently that was specifically what they were trying to discourage).
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Roaches, in fact all insects, are very resistant to short doses of radiation. The reason behind this is that radiation does the most damage to cells when they're dividing. It just so happens that roaches molt about once a week, which is a single cell division. If you aren't radiating the roach when this is happening, your radiation will mostly fall on deaf ears.
However, after a nuclear blast, the fallout would be a source of constant radiation and would probably kill any roaches that had to live in it for a week or two.
A bit offtopic, but I recently discovered that soapy water kills cock roaches faster than all commercial poisons I tried!
Try it, its pretty amazing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They do not limit it to just religious myths, but any "oogie-boogie" myths (in Adam's own words).
They've done a few in the past (such as the "pyramids of power" myth [or something along that name]) and on that show, Adam specifically said that he hoped that they would not have to do any more "oogie-boogie" myths. It was later explained to be anything along the lines of bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, psychics, astrology, aliens, et cetra.
Really, they limit themselves to things that are truly testable; they avoid just about anything where there is no real ability to lay claims along one line or the other without getting into otherwise supernatural beliefs.
Calling a sword by a pretty name is no more than adding perfume to poison.
Do I believe in The Bible? Hell! I've seen one!