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Radiation Detecting Android Phone Coming To Japan

Posted by Unknown on from the also-detects-invasion-by-mothra dept.

itwbennett writes "Softbank, Japan's third largest carrier, has teamed up with Sharp to create a radiation detector chip for the latest model in the company's popular, bare-bones Pantone line of smartphones. The chip 'can detect gamma radiation in the air at doses of between 0.05 and 9.99 microsieverts per hour,' according to an IDG News Service report. 'The phone then uses its GPS to place readings on a map. Due to go on sale in July, it runs Android 4.0 and features standard functionality for Japanese handsets, including mobile TV, touch payments and infrared transmission.'"

25 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. That's seems awfully sensitive to me by crazyjj · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Seems to me that's it's too low on both the top end and bottom end. You couldn't use it for detecting real hotspots on the top end and it's so sensitive on the bottom end that even exposure to direct sunlight will have everyone panicking. I think it's more likely to cause irrational behavior than help.

    --
    What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
    1. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I think it's more likely to cause irrational behavior than help.

      It's made to capitalize on irrational post-Fukushima fear. There's no legitimate reason for anyone (who's not a researcher or a nuclear plant employee) to be carrying a radiation detector around with them all the time.

      The device is made to be extra-sensitive because if it didn't pick up something, people would feel silly for having bought one. (Which they should.)

    2. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by jakimfett · · Score: 2

      Yeah, these are going to sell like hotcakes. Not because they are useful, but because people are terrified of the possibility of being "exposed to icky radiation".

      --
      Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
    3. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by Thanshin · · Score: 2

      There's no legitimate reason for anyone (who's not a researcher or a nuclear plant employee) to be carrying a radiation detector around with them all the time.

      Unless you're a spy who might become the target of the russian secret service. Or you live on the apartment next to a spy who might become the target of the russian secret service.

      And you never know whether you live next to a spy who might become the target of the russian secret service, so...

    4. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "there's no legitimate reason for anyone... to be carrying a radiation detector."

      unless you wanted to receive data from numerous locations in real time detailing the exact dispersal of radiation at ground level.... which i would think to be a very useful information.

      just as japan is swarmed by people carrying camcorders providing the most recorded footage of a tsunami ever known...

      invaluable data i would think.

    5. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This phone is a ruse, to captalise by make people think they can manage this. In other words, it is a comfort item, not an actual safety measure.

      It also works as a propaganda item. "Testing radiation levels is the new normal, it's even on my phone, see!" The management of public perception is far easier than the management of spent fuel in reactor 4.

      The real, long-term prospect for anyone living in the Fukushima shadow is too horrible to contemplate.

      The new, official story - just made public - is that the initial release from TEPCO was 2.5 X higher than was admitted at the time. If this is what they are recalcitrantly admitting to, after incontrovertible evidence, how bad is it really? After all, the utility and the government both demonstrate they cannot be trusted to prefer health and safety over saving-face.

      So? Buy a phone and whistle past the graveyard...

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    6. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by Eponymous+Hero · · Score: 2
      irrational behavior is great for sales. this wasn't designed by scientifical scientists who know science, it's the equivalent of cricket cellular in japan. they're years ahead of us in being a technological society over in japan, so your phone manufacturer is the first person you think of when you suddenly need radiation detection:

      "I received many tweets asking for some way to detect radiation" after the disaster, said Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son at a press conference in Tokyo. "So I decided, 'let's do it.'"

      "fuck, why not?" Son continued, "we almost launched a phone that microwaves your food while it's in your mouth, but this fukushima disaster made that obsolete pretty quickly. we had to find some way to recoup those losses and this was an opportunity for us to turn lemons into lemonade."

      --
      insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
    7. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by vlm · · Score: 2

      Sure about your numbers? "one micro" is in the background range (which varies from place to place by about two orders of magnitude total), so 0.05 is a pretty good low that will probably never be reached. High enough that bananas won't set it off unless you bake it into a loaf of banana bread, but low enough to tell that you're in a normal area.

      I agree the high end is ridiculously low. That thing is going to go bonkers if you have it in your pocket while getting a dental xray. You read stuff on wiki about modern dental xrays being ten micros or so, and that may be the case with a brand new CCD imager blah blah but in ye olden days it was quite a bit more. A mammogram is about a fifty times more (well, think of the volume difference, unless you've got some mighty weird bodily proportions). Wonder if that would burn out the sensor...

      I think it's more likely to cause irrational behavior than help.

      The only behavior for the general public regarding radiation is irrational behavior.

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    8. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by cpu6502 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Samt thing happened on 9/11 where the government claimed the air was safe to breathe, but then people started getting sick, so the government had to admit it lied. What use is having regulation if the politicians or bureaucrats simply ignore them (or lie)? Regulations don't work because the regulators aren't doing the job

      --
      My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
    9. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'd love to be scared by the radiation release at this point, as I enjoy a good fright, but how many people have died to date of exposure to the radiation? How many people will die as a result of the exposure? Will it really top the loss of life on the day of the earthquake? Is it worse to be exposed to that much radiation, or the amount of toxic agriculture pestiside and industrial era polution crap I live with every day in the suburbs?

      We are surrounded by risks of many types both within our bodies genome, the enviornment, and behaviors we have. I just can't wrap my head around hyper focusing on one and ignoring all the others.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    10. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by squizzar · · Score: 2

      Well since the WHO don't seem to have found any particularly nasty areas ... not that bad? Safety standards are set incredibly low and this generates an intense pressure to give out the lowest possible numbers when reporting radiation. If there was less irrational panic then people might be more honest about the numbers. Think of it this way: It's at least 2.5x as bad as it was declared to be, maybe a whole lot worse (as you seem to think) and yet there are no discernible health effects (except those caused by the ensuing panic).

    11. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by Alwin+Henseler · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There's no legitimate reason for anyone (who's not a researcher or a nuclear plant employee) to be carrying a radiation detector around with them all the time.

      I call BS. You might as well say "There's no legitimate reason for anyone (who's not a researcher or a nuclear plant employee) to be carrying a detector for NOx levels" or something like that.

      You live in an environment, and you're interested (for whatever reason) to measure 1 aspect of that environment's condition. That's all there is to it, and that's all the 'legitimacy' you need.

      For that purpose the range seems appropriate... I've got a radiation chart here, some figures from lower end of the scale:
      0.1 microSv - airport security scan (backscatter X-ray)
      0.25 microSv - airport security scan maximum permitted
      1.0 microSv - using a CRT monitor for a year
      5.0 microSv - dental X-ray
      7.5 microSv - per day in Tokyo, 250 km SW of Fukushima plant
      40 microSv - Flight from New York to LA
      100 microSv - chest X-ray

      So that sensitivity range seems reasonable - note the "per hour" in there. Not radiation levels that would put you in hospital with 3 weeks to live, but the kind of levels above background that might be a concern longterm. Having a sensor that allows you to measure that throughout the day, wherever you go, sounds more useful than spot checks or relying (solely?) on government-provided figures.

      Whether you should bother, what levels are safe, etc, let people figure that out for themselves. I don't see any harm in adding some datapoints...

    12. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by h4rr4r · · Score: 2

      Too horrible to contemplate?
      A few cases of thyroid cancer?

      Way to blow this out of proportion.

    13. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by h4rr4r · · Score: 2

      The granite one, it will last longer and look better.
      The levels of radiation you get from one are nothing to worry about.

      You must never get a dental xray or dare go near the fruit in the supermarket.

    14. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 2

      Regulators use their favouritism towards the regulated, to secure employment with those subjects at a later time - often as influencers on future, toothless and industry-biased regulation.

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    15. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 2

      "one micro" is in the background range (which varies from place to place by about two orders of magnitude total), so 0.05 is a pretty good low that will probably never be reached. High enough that bananas won't set it off unless you bake it into a loaf of banana bread, but low enough to tell that you're in a normal area.

      Umm, no. Typical daily background in 10 uSv. Which is 0.4 uSv/hour.

      Which is considerably above 0.05 uSv/hr.

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    16. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by LateArthurDent · · Score: 2

      The real, long-term prospect for anyone living in the Fukushima shadow is too horrible to contemplate.

      Yeah. Maybe 0.4 extra people will statistically get cancer 30 years from now that wouldn't have gotten it anyway. Oh wait, I've contemplated it.

      The new, official story - just made public - is that the initial release from TEPCO was 2.5 X higher than was admitted at the time. If this is what they are recalcitrantly admitting to, after incontrovertible evidence, how bad is it really? After all, the utility and the government both demonstrate they cannot be trusted to prefer health and safety over saving-face.

      So? Buy a phone and whistle past the graveyard...

      Did you even read the article you linked to? "Because radiation sensors closest to the plant were knocked out by the March 11, 2011 quake and the tsunami, the utility based its estimate on other monitoring posts and data collected by Japanese government agencies." This isn't some grand conspiracy of people trying to save face, it's about not having information because their sensors were knocked out. They were able to gather more data since.

      By the way, even 2.5x the original estimate is really no big deal. Now it will approximate the yearly dose from natural potassium in the body.

    17. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by Derek+Pomery · · Score: 2

      Googled...

      http://ecso.swf.usace.army.mil/PublicReview/Oakland%20-%20HEMXR%20_eagle_%20FEA%2020090810.pdf

      HEMXRIS Occupants
        â"
      HEMXRISs are designed so that the radiation dose levels within the driverâ(TM)s cab and at the inspector work-stations (systems operators) will be below 0.00005 rem in any one hour. With an annual work limit of 2,000 hours, this hourly dose limit will prevent annual cumulative exposures that exceed the limit of 0.1 rem in a year.

      --
      -- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"' /. ate my old sig. Bastards.
    18. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by subreality · · Score: 2

      I actually foresee the opposite: people are scared of radiation because they can't sense it directly - it's dangerous, but they have no idea of the magnitude of the radiation around them, other than some officials who promise them that it's too small to be worried about. Well, those officials are often full of shit, so why believe them now?

      So give people a bunch of sensors. They'll watch them constantly for about a week, and pretty soon they'll discover that ambient radiation is negligible in everything they do. They'll amuse themselves watching it spike during flights and x-rays. And in the end, they'll realize that compared to even safe things like that, the amount that's around them in the rest of their lives is completely negligible, and they'll quit worrying about the "unseen killer".

      As a bonus, we'll get some high resolution, wide-area radiation maps.

    19. Re:That's seems awfully sensitive to me by toQDuj · · Score: 3, Informative

      Or, you know, none. I counter your "Experts" with the UN "Experts": http://www.nature.com/news/fukushima-s-doses-tallied-1.10686

      Outside of those directly affected (i.e. evacuated from the area or traumatized by the tsunami), worrying about radiation will carry a higher cancer risk due to stress than the actual radiation.

      --
      Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
  2. it's a trick by swschrad · · Score: 4, Funny

    if they get up to a half mS, you probably get pop-up ads for the closest pharmacy with iodine pills.

    --
    if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
  3. Re:Geiger by tom17 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Maybe because it (probably) doesn't use a Geiger counter?

    A Geiger counter is just one of many radiation detectors (or particle detectors).

  4. Re:Geiger by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why don't they call a 'radiation detector' by its name? It's a Geiger Counter. Way to make a name for something fall out of common usage...

    Unless it contains a Geiger–Müller tube, it isn't much of a Geiger counter. Since this phone apparently contains a 'chip'(quite possibly just a CCD of some sort packaged so that most of the pxel hits can be assumed to be from high energy radiation, possibly something cleverer/more specialized), and since cramming a gas tube and high-voltage driver circuits into a cellphone is a pain, I'm guessing that there is nothing 'Geiger' about this counter...

  5. Re:Geiger by Ruie · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why don't they call a 'radiation detector' by its name? It's a Geiger Counter. Way to make a name for something fall out of common usage...

    There is not much description in the article, but I don't think it is a Geiger tube, as that requires high voltages and is fairly bulky. This is probably some sort of silicon detector.

  6. Huh. Can it be used in an RNG? by Dr.+Manhattan · · Score: 2

    That'd be a nice 'bonus' application, to add some entropy by using it as part of a hardware random number generator.

    --
    PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!