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Jars of Irradiated Russian Animals Find a New Purpose
scibri writes with bits and pieces from the article: "From the early 1950s to the end of the cold war, nearly 250,000 animals were systematically irradiated in the Russian town of Ozersk. Fearful of a nuclear attack by the United States, the Soviet Union wanted to understand how radiation damages tissues and causes diseases such as cancer. Now, these archives have become important to a new generation of radiobiologists, who want to explore the effects of the extremely low doses of radiation — below 100 millisieverts — that people receive during medical procedures such as computed-tomography diagnostic scans, and by living close to the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan."
I want a jar of irradiated Russian animal remains!
Can't they just use frequent flyers?
Sounds even more fun than a barrel of radioactive monkey parts!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So THIS is what happened to all the bonsai kittens.
the fine members of Soviet Russia would do something like this. I can easily see a few portly Soviet generals overseeing labs of svelte Soviet women systematically irradiating squirrels for the Motherland.
Back in the day we were still doing radiation experiments in the U.S., the low dose groups consistently outlived the controls. The theory of radiation hormesis has been fairly well documented since the 50's.
The most supported version of how it works is that low levels of ionizing radiation do minor damage to DNA while triggering the repair mechanisms. While the DNA repair is happening, it fixes more than the damage from the ionizing radiation, cleaning up other little problems along the way. Obviously that's the highly simplified explanation, the details are mind numbingly complex. The interesting conclusion would be finding the exact line between a helpful dose and one that does more damage than the repair mechanisms can fix. It really takes a hell of a dose to raise your lifetime cancer risk, so I'm curious to see the study conclusions.
So those people who used to go sit in old uranium mines to inhale that radon gas might have been on to something.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States
In Soviet Russia, animals treat people ethically.
What's the news?
Well, its probably telling that even the Russians have not yet found a way to permanently deal with radioactive waste that does not offend people. :P
Joking aside, why would you discard this stuff? Unless such biological samples are contaminated, completely decayed or have completely lost their essential and interesting properties, the cost of storing them is usually negligibly in contrast to the cost of recreating those samples if you need them.
After all, back then nobody much cared about irradiating 250k animals. Nowadays even the Russians would be up to their gills in activists and their local kind of PETA members if they did something like that even semi-publically.
That was obvious based on the fact that bears rode unicycles. And yet, people try to tell me dogs don't have morels. The hell is wrong with people.
They don't. They prefer white mushrooms to morels.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Yes! Read about the Mega Mouse project. It used 7 million mice. http://www.e-radiography.net/radsafety/rad_biology.htm
It is still doing. Did you think the TSA exists for your security? :p
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
There is only one sane, rational thing to do with these things.
BUILD AN ARMY OF GLOWING SUPERMUTANT BEASTS!
Seriously, research into (pffft!) cancer? Fuck that pansy noise.
The TSA is actually a complex study that uses a huge sample:
TSA agents are the chronically exposed
Frequent travellers are the regularly exposed
Occasional travellers are the occasionally exposed
Backscatter scanners are the real deal
mm-Wave scanners are the placebo
The Australians and the British simply had their soldiers walking through the falling mushroom clouds of nuclear tests. They then denied that this activity caused cancers later in life and refused to provide compensation or support for it.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!