OT: Heart warming

Big market, The article refers to something sold by Amazon called 'smartDOT' ye will find hyped by googling it.

HM Gov needs to implement a 50% VAT 'charlatan fraud' tax rake ...

ha ha korma ...tee hee

It does, doesn't it.

I had thought that Covid-19 might have at least a small beneficial effect if it preferentially removed anti-vaxers from the human race, but with a death rate of only 1% or so, and with most victims being too old to reproduce, the effect is bound to be rather small.

But these radioactive devices really might have a beneficial long-term effect on human intelligence if they were widely enough used by the young. So how can we encourage stupid people to use them? :-)

Radioactive isadope.

"The Dutch authority for nuclear safety and radiation protection (ANVS) issued a warning about ten products it found gave off harmful ionising radiation".

I'd only accept a statement like this if they said how the levels compare with the standard international exposure limits. Maybe they did, but I couldn't spot it in a quick skim of the source.

I'm not (especially) a BBC knocker, but this is typical of the abysmal quality of so much journalism these days.

The Dutch just said that exposure for a year (likely with a necklace) would exceed their fairly stringent limits. Their own statement:

Thanks for that. Always good to have context.

Probably made out of basalt then. Most things have about 2ppm of uranium in them straight out of the ground. Uranium is a lot more common than most people think - what is really rare is mineable ore concentrations.

My dad's WWII radium dial wristwatch very was close to setting off radioactive contamination alarms and a wonderful alpha particle source if you took the lid off it (which I did after building a cloud chamber).

OK, so it is a skin dose, not a whole body dose. Not a good thing, but not quite as alarming as it might be.

Or granite?

I have a nice WW2 prismatic compass, I used to use it when I gave talks on nuclear power to the public, using this and also ordinary fertiliser as "sources". In those days plenty of people in my audiences were familiar with them from WW2 or national service. It would easily have set off detectors at the exit to radiation controlled areas. I suspect that it would now trip the hidden detectors at airports and rail terminii that you can't see (not that I have tried).

Back in the old days when there were active labs on the site where I worked, it was fairly common for radiation workers to take their film badges home with them. One guy used to put his in a Cornish granite ash-tray on the mantlepiece. Occupational doses were significantly higher in those days (and quite variable, because of the nature of the work), but eventually Health Physics spotted that this guys readings were unexpectedly high given his activities. After that, a big film-badge rack was put up in a walk-through building just before the security gate, and we were all expected to use it.

Identical looking "devices" have been around for years, see

They contained thorium.

Though he did say the thorium oxide powder was quite crumbly and could be inhaled/ingested as it came loose from the surface of the plastic, a follow up version included a sleep/blindfold mask stuffed with the powder.

:-)

"Any sample of thorium or its compounds contains traces of these daughters, which are isotopes of thallium, lead, bismuth, polonium, radon, radium, and actinium".

to hell with radioactivity, those are all poisonous heavy metals that cause cancer anyway. Or things that decay into them...

The death rate is 0.22% and many had underlying health conditions anyway, so the saving in pensions and/or benefits and/or NHS costs are quite significant overall. Also releases a lot of under-used assets to the beneficiaries and also to a few of those folks forced to become renters over the last 25 years or so.

Do you have a source for that Dartmoor data? I can get a source for Ramsar (

At a guess, is that an estimate for the average dose from radon to people inside buildings, rather than the gamma dose coming out of the ground.

Possibly, I suppose. I came across a figure of 200 buggeralls for Dartmoor from radon, but haven't found much on Sieverts.

But that level is more serious for radon because the decay products are

"Most cancers from radon are produced by radon daughter decay products (polonium, 3 isotopes; bismuth, 1 isotope; and lead, 3 isotopes) adhering to the delicate cell lining and passageways leading to the lungs."

To do the "Sieverts" sum you also need to know the biological residence time and the half-life of the elements. Those in the field have done the sums, and the regulators read the literature.

Divide by 8500 and that's more in the range of 2-8 µSv/hr...I was thinking of annual in msV not hourly in µSv

so out by nearly a factor of ten.

Yes. Its not radioactivity per se, its heavy metal poisoning