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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."
Can't they just use frequent flyers?
Sounds even more fun than a barrel of radioactive monkey parts!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
In Soviet Russia, animals treat people ethically.
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.
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!
I'm not sure that you're winning your argument here. For most people, random insertions and deletions would likely improve their grammar.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
There's not been actual scientific evidence for radiation hormesis in humans, despite it being your pet theory.
These were animal studies and it's not my pet theory. I was directly involved in many of those studies as a staff scientist and I don't give a rat's ass what UNSCEAR says, I saw it over and over again.
The background cancer rate in humans is 1 in 3, so there would have to be a huge population study to validate the findings in humans and it's just not going to happen unless large populations of humans are exposed to varying yet highly precise levels of ionizing radiation.
And, just for the record, UNSCEAR couldn't find a black cat on a white field at high noon with a microscope.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
There's not been actual scientific evidence for radiation hormesis in humans, despite it being your pet theory.
It's not hormesis, per se, but it's clear that humans (and other lifeforms) can endure at least the low levels of radiation coming from their own bodies. Humans are about 0.35% potassium by mass; 0.0117% of potassium is potassium-40; potassium-40, which undergoes beta decay, has a half-life of 1.248 * 10^9 years. Each 1 kg of body mass has about 410 micrograms of potassium-40; that's 6.2 * 10^18 potassium-40 atoms. 1.248 * 10^9 years is 3.938 * 10^16 seconds, so roughly 1 out of every 3.938 * 10^16 potassium-40 atoms decays every second. Out of the 6.2 * 10^18 potassium-40 atoms in each kg of body mass, that's about 160 atoms. Average adult weight is something like 70 kg, so figure 11200 potassium-40 atoms are undergoing beta decay inside the average adult body every second.
If you were restricted to only viewing through the microscope I can see that being difficult.
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
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477708/
The conventional approach for radiation protection is based on the ICRP's linear, no threshold (LNT) model of radiation carcinogenesis, which implies that ionizing radiation is always harmful, no matter how small the dose. But a different approach can be derived from the observed health effects of the serendipitous contamination of 1700 apartments in Taiwan with cobalt-60 (T1/2 = 5.3 y). This experience indicates that chronic exposure of the whole body to low-dose-rate radiation, even accumulated to a high annual dose, may be beneficial to human health. Approximately 10,000 people occupied these buildings and received an average radiation dose of 0.4 Sv,