Hi

Just watched HBO's Chernobyl series for the 2nd time (wow that is some good TV) and I was a bit puzzled about why the graphite blocks were so radioactive.

Is it simply because they were coated in fission products, or were did they become radioactive themselves as a result from induced radiation from being present in the core?

I'm wondering the same about things like the 'Chernobyl claw'. Is that still radioactive because of induced radioactivity while it was working near the exposed core?

Thanks

I read that ionising radiation cannot make other materials radioactive; it just removed electrons from the shells of the atom.

I also read that Marie Curie’s papers are radioactive and are kept in a lead lined box. How have these papers become radioactive? Is what I previously read incorrect?

Thanks :)

So it often comes up in the show that objects, people etc are contaminated with radioactivity and are a threat to those around them because they are now radioactive. My understanding of radiation is that the danger of it is the high energy potential to penetrate through cellular structures and, especially, DNA causing irreversible harm. But if this radiation can penetrate through these structures, how then do the objects themselves become radioactive because theoretically the radiation should have gone in and out? They must absorb them in some capacity and I'm thinking about the effects of radiation incorrectly, but anyone could provide some clarity I would really appreciate it!

Hello all, FTP/LTL and all that, I'm wondering if you good folk could help me out with a question? Please bear in mind I don't have a hard science background and am thoroughly prepared to be chided should my question be ridiculous.

I have ordered a little (unknown type. Poss steel?) metal statue from the Ukraine manufactured in the 60s/70s. This has caused quite the conversation at home, as in, what if the item has been affected in any way by the Chernobyl Event of 1986? Speculation has ranged from would an item like this originating from Bila Tservka (point of postage, and slightly lower on the map than Kyiv) be affected at all, to "What if it was looted from Pripyat, would it still/have ever been contaminated?"

This has lead to me researching the bejesus out of information regarding radioactivity and developing quite the amateur interest, however, I still haven't found the answers anywhere to the original questions postulated above. Plus I have a flatmate who is now very nervous about the incoming home decor item. I'm hoping the brains trust on this subreddit might be able to answer the above questions, as I can't find the relevant information anywhere. Thanks in advance!

Hi all, not sure this is the proper sub, but I'll give it a shot.

When considering alphaparticles, betaparticles and their damage on, say our bodies, is the charge of importance or is it mostly the impact that does the damage. Put another way, upon ionizing atoms in our body is it mostly the energy or the charge that causes the detachment of electrons. Or put yet another , simplified way, would you mostly consider these particles bullets or reactants :)

In a nuclear reactor, how do they get the uranium 235 to actually begin fission? I've tried to find out how but have no idea. I understand that you need a neutron to hit an atom of U235 which then splits into fission products and an average of 2.45 neutrons, but where does the first neutron come from?

Do we just stick the material into a moderator I.e. water, and let stray neutrons slowly begin the reaction then use the control rods to slow it down once it's going? Or do we inject a big spike of neutrons to begin the reactions? What goes on when we need to restart the reaction?

Hello! I hope you don't mind me making a silly thread like this, but I rarely complete long RPGs anymore and I feel a little accomplished!

https://i.imgur.com/H0g8XTh.jpg

Close to 219 hours logged. 234,000 bottle caps accumulated. Every location explored and every quest completed, all unique gear found. According to my mod that allowed for leveling past the normal 30 cap, I hit level 63. And yes - I saved 11,796 times. I'm a saving fiend, I save at least once per minute and when I'm sneaking around anticipating combat I might save multiple times as I try to avoid detection and find a good place to sneak attack. My save folder is currently over 90 gigs in size (individual saves were up to 18MB each by the end). This is the first Fallout game I've ever finished (I did try to start with Fallout 1 but bounced off it, I'm too much of a spoiled modern game baby to really appreciate what is surely an incredible game).

Some thoughts:

I really enjoyed the game. I used to be really into MMOs, but I no longer have the time for them, and I also got tired of all the ways MMO developers try to induce FOMO with limited-time events and rewards that (if missed) means you can never have a complete collection of items or sometimes even fully experience the story. Fallout 3 really scratched that itch for me, and every time I 'logged in' it was like returning to a cozy familiar world. Which is weird because the world is a miserable radioactive wasteland.

I was surprised at how I continued enjoying the game even after it stopped being challenging. I played the entire way through on Very Hard for maximum XP rewards, and by the time I was a hundred hours in, nothing was really a threat anymore. Even Feral Ghoul Reavers and Super Mutant Overlords were mostly just bullet sponges. Nevertheless, I loved exploring the remaining locations and finding new weapons and learning more about the lore.

I tried to use every weapon and armor I found for a while, to try them all out. The Terrible Shotgun and Chinese Assault Rifle were my early game MVPs. Mid-game, I kept coming back to the Burnmaster, and Jack (the unique Ripper) was incredibly useful against those Reavers and Overlords. I forget exactly what makes it so good - maybe it ignores armor or the damage ramps up over time - but it was so much more efficient than chipping away at their health for over a full minute. Late game, the Firelance and MPLX were so fun to use, especially on those super tanky aliens on Mothership Zeta.

This is technically a hypothetical question, but I am asking how it relates to reality. Transmutation is only alchemy, but we do something similar by inducing atoms to release alpha particles through fission, right? (Maybe just differently than Newton thought.) We also create new elements, like 93-118 (Source: IUPAC.org).

I already googled the terms and what comes up mostly explains alpha particles and how they work, not really relative to my question.

I was pleasantly surprised by the strong reception I got from my previous story (1200+ upvotes, holy crap!) so I decided a sequel was in order. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

"This meeting of the Stellar Assembly will come to order" said the Speaker.

"The next item on the docket is a proposed revision to the Convention on Space Warfare, Article 20: Planetary Vandalism".

The delegates from nearly every single species present gave their equivalent of a groan.

The Terrans must have gotten "creative" again during their ongoing war with the Karthreen.

Ever since the Karthreen Theocracy had gotten pissy about the "incident" on that Holy World, they had been petitioning for changes to the legal codes at each meeting. The first time had seemed reasonable enough, after all, nobody wanted subcontinent sized Terran Genitalia drawn on their planets with ship based particle beams.

But it was quickly realized by everyone, except the Karthreen, that this only seemed to encourage the Terrans to find ways of keeping to the word of the law while thoroughly violating it's spirit.

In every sense of the phrase.

As a result, the Karthreen Theocracy had used up any goodwill they had left with the Assembly. The fact was, not only had THEY started this war (against advice by multiple parties), but they refused to listen to anyone regarding Terran psychology. It was obvious to even a first year Xenopsychology student that every time they accused the Terrans of "atrocities" or demanded changes to the Convention On Space Warfare, they were essentially pouring fuel onto the fire.

"For reference, Article 20 and its subsections will be displayed on your holo-screens, along with the details regarding the previous revisions":

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

STELLAR ASSEMBLY CONVENTION ON SPACE WARFARE

ARTICLE 20, PLANETARY VANDALISM: No member polity, or intelligence (collective or artificial), shall use orbital weapons to alter an inhabited plane

The Beginning | Wiki Page | Sixth Part | Eighth Part

Ah the Shimmerlands, the one place I have been repeatedly, religiously, indisputably told not to go, and, coincidentally, the very place I happened to be riding through. Everyone gets so hung up on magic blowing up when used, but I—clutching a semi-auto shotgun—didn’t mind that quite so much. Gods can ban guns, but they can’t take them from me here! (As a… [former?] American, I am obligated to say some variation of that phrase. Cold, dead hands, etc.)

Magic going splodey is still quite an inconvenience, however. The frustrating thing is… it’s inconsistent, kinda. If a spell works once, it will work every time, if cast in the same way. Unfortunately, the only way to test this is to put your hide on the line and cast it your damn self. If you roll a 99 or 100, congratulations! You have a spell you can use. If not, then it’s nuke-meet-face. (I am told the explosion is enough to reduce a log cabin to splinters...)

This leaves a disappointingly small list of magic that is available in non-splodey form. Vitally to me, this includes featherweight, if cast outside the Shimmerlands. This spell—while not applied to myself due to prohibitive duration—is enchanted onto every piece of equipment I’m carrying, reducing several hundred pounds of kit to about forty. Other spells relevant to me are beacon-stones and their connected compasses, which are my guides to the Tomb of Instability; and placebo-grade healing potions, which, arguably, aren’t actually magical.

The rest of the spells I either don’t know and cannot learn fast enough or can’t use outright. Next, some (1/3 or so) creatures with innate—'organic' magic as hippiemancers put it—can use their abilities. The rule of thumb on that is: If it's in the Shimmerlands, it hasn't exploded, therefore it's good. Dormant magic is all but guaranteed to last until used, then you roll the dice on whether it's splodey. And, finally, any magic item looted in the Shimmerlands works as it should… until removed from the Shimmerlands, at which point you can’t take it back in without risking you-know-what. On top of that, magic items of meaningful

http://web.archive.org/web/20110915180839/http://wsyachina.narod.ru/history/lpheoktist_1.html#gl3

I was researching some stuff on the Soviet PNE program and I found that text from the weapon designer L.V Feoktistov (Л. П. Феоктистов) about... a lot of stuff (early studies work on a classical super design, the third idea, Tsar Bomba, miniaturization of nuclear charges, etc, etc). A portion is related to the design of clean nuclear charges used in for the Soviet PNE program and it may interest some of you

"Thermonuclear detonation, which did not take place in its original "tube" form, developed much later on a different basis, in the light of new ideas. The reasoning that led to the actual construction can be summarized as follows. Imagine a hollow cylinder, inside which balls filled with deuterium are located at equal distances. The reaction in the first ball by compressing it is initiated by a low power atomic explosion. The thermonuclear energy released from the first ball is transmitted to the second ball, from the second to the third, etc. Such a "clean" design charge (except for the initiation) was used in the construction of the route of the channel for transferring water from Pechora to the shallow Caspian Sea. (NB : Taiga shots) (...)"

(...)

"Later, we came back to the idea of thermonuclear detonation, but on a new basis. It is a structure capable not only of heating each subsequent layer with the energy of the previous one, as is always the case with detonation, but also of compressing the substance beforehand in the strongest way. We are not talking about compression several times, which is usual for a shock wave, but of hundreds or even thousands of compressions. This design, in which the combustion took place in highly compressed deuterium, finally allowed the emergence of a new type of "peaceful" product. It even predicted that the radioactivity induced by thermonuclear neutrons in the building materials was also minimal. This was achieved primarily through careful selection of the materials themselves. A test based on these principles, as I have already mentioned, was used in the Perm region to facilitate excavation work on the route of the proposed canal to transfer the flow of rivers from the north to the southern regions of the country."

(...)

*"Another experiment was i

I don't want to step on anybody's toes here, but the amount of non-dad jokes here in this subreddit really annoys me. First of all, dad jokes CAN be NSFW, it clearly says so in the sub rules. Secondly, it doesn't automatically make it a dad joke if it's from a conversation between you and your child. Most importantly, the jokes that your CHILDREN tell YOU are not dad jokes. The point of a dad joke is that it's so cheesy only a dad who's trying to be funny would make such a joke. That's it. They are stupid plays on words, lame puns and so on. There has to be a clever pun or wordplay for it to be considered a dad joke.

Again, to all the fellow dads, I apologise if I'm sounding too harsh. But I just needed to get it off my chest.

So I know that external beam RT doesn't "make you radioactive". But I think that's not as trivial as it's made up to be and the explanations I have read must be wrong. I've read things like "People don't get radioactive because radiation passes through the body" and I find that hard to believe given that radiation is applied in the firsts place because it *does* interact with biological matter.

I know that metals can be radioactive because they are activated by cosmic rays over time or material used in nuclear reactors becomes activated and I suspect that some materials are prone to this type of activation while others aren't (like carbon/oxygen/hydrogen) - but which ones are and are not? And is the body really entirely free of atoms/molecules that don't get activated?

Or is it purely an energetical thing and RT isn't at a big enough energy? And would people who have been exposed to higher energy radiation (like reactor accidents) actually become radioactive?

[A/N]

I am presently traveling for the military and am unsure of my schedule so not a full chapter today. To give you guys something interesting, however, and to give you some insight into the Haunted Worlds universe, I figured for times like these, I can take my notes about different things, such as technology, notable places, or notable people, and publish those as a sort of interlude chapter I'm calling the "Tech Primer" hope you all enjoy seeing my thought process and how things work!

[A/N]

[ |< ] [ < ] [ > ] [ >| ]

The gate network, a primer.

The Einstein-Rosen Bridge Anchor Portal, known commonly as a "Gate" was the culmination of centuries of work by thousands of highly trained professionals and scientists throughout a wide variety of human societies and cultures. The final breakthrough that let it all come together was accomplished by a team of dedicated researchers at MIT approximately 500 years pre-diaspora.

In the 2 thousand years since then, gate technology has rapidly become cheaper and more easily produced, forming the backbone of modern technological infrastructure.

Gates today are found in nearly every walk of life. Portable electronics have a gate-based charging system to connect with a power source, radios have gates built in to prevent light delay in everything from ship communications to personal cellular devices and broadcast television. Gates deliver goods, power, signal, you name it.

There are two major drawbacks to these gates, however. The first being that transiting a gate exposes anything going through to a massive dose of lethal exotic radiation. So we can't use them to casually cut short your commute or travel extreme distances by walking through. Instead, anything living must be heavily shielded against this radiation so that it may continue living. As a consequence, gates are not typically used for intra-system travel. With modern technology allowing for constant acceleration, the cost of the extra mass of the shielding means it's simply not worth it, so such shielding is reserved for inter-system travel from one stellar system to another.

The second major drawback is that the gate has to b

Note: The dreamlands is focused more on surrealism than horror for the most part. However, some Unnatural threats are decidedly more horror themed. In this section those would be the Symphonists and Gnoph-Keh.

The Dreamlands

The dreamlands are a world beyond our own - composed not of maths and atoms, but of ideas and perceptions. The dreamlands are not one world, but rather an entire universe fashioned out of ideas - alien Dreamers inhabit alien worlds. Time and space do not exist in the way we understand them in the dreaming realm - a cat may jump to the moon and back again, and a man may found an empire and live hundreds of thousands of years in a single night on earth. Thus, a man who has been dead on earth for thousands of years may speak with a man born three hundred years into the future through dream. Four classifications of beings inhabit the dreamlands; Dreamers, Dreams, Dream Beasts and Dream Parasites.

Dreamers

Dreamers are beings from our universe that access the dreamlands through sleep. Time is without meaning in this transition, entire lives in dream may be lived in seconds that could be spent awake. Terrestrial Dreamers that may be encountered are most commonly humans and cats with exceptionally high POW, ghouls, hyperboreans, men of K’n-yan, Gnoph-Keh and serpentfolk may all be found roaming the dreamlands, even shoggoths can be encountered deep within the seas and caverns of dream. Star-Spawn of Cthulhu dream too, but they are found in stranger dreamlands than the ones accessible to humankind. All Great Old Ones manifest in the dreamlands, but only a select few are likely to be encountered in earth’s dreamlands: these include Tsathoggua, Yig or Igg, Nodens or Iod, Itla-Shua, and most commonly, mighty Nyarlathotep. Other Great Old Ones, never seen on earth, can be encountered here, such as Bokrug, Mnomquah and Oorn. Stranger still are the Gods of Earth, weak and petty immortals under the protection of Nyarlathotep. Perhaps they are nascent avatars, or sorcerers and Dreamers who attained great power (in human terms).

Dreams

Dreams are the ever shifting masses of life native to the dreamlands. Unlike Dream Beasts, Dreams are totally subject to the whims of powerful Dreamers, they can be created consciously by those with great power, or come into being through the subconscious feelings of lesser Dreamers. Dreams do not understand the nature of the dreamlands, and may not even be sentient, their actions chosen based on the thou

So I spent some time looking at some scientific articles on minoxidil, and want to update and question the received wisdom that gets repeated here and elsewhere online.

The main thing - people really need to stop referencing (often incorrectly) that small study on 22 people from the 80s from which the 1hr ~ 50%, 4hrs ~ 75% figures come. It was a small, unsophisticated study that I guess was just meant to provide some preliminary data of clinical relevance at a time where almost nothing was known about how minoxidil worked to actually grow hair.

First of all, they didn’t actually measure amount in the skin, they measured the amount excreted in the urine - ie what you don’t want (the amount that “goes systemic”). Their objective was just to look at the general rate of minoxidil absorption of liquid through the skin, and their reasoning was that since the skin is the limiting absorption factor then the amount of minoxidil going through the skin is proportional to the amount excreted in the urine, which by itself is probably correct. But they were only measuring “roughly how fast minoxidil goes into the body when you rub it on your skin”, not how much is actually in the skin and more importantly how relevant it is for actually growing hair.

Second point refers to something I see written all the time, and it annoys me so much because of how wildly wrong it is – the comments like “50% of the minox is absorbed within 1 hour, 75% in 4 hours”. The FAQ even states this! This is not even remotely true, and is a completely incorrect interpretation of what they said. Their claim is that when leaving minoxidil liquid on the scalp for 1 hour, the amount excreted in the urine is 50% of what it would be if you left it on for 12 hours. That’s it. From the exact same study: “minoxidil is poorly absorbed after topical administration, with <3% of a radiolabeled dose recovered in urine.” A more recent review states “approximately 1.4% of topical minoxidil is absorbed through a normal scalp”. So yes, when you apply minoxidil on your face and wait 4 hours, almost an entire dose is still sitting on the surface of your skin, and then when you go to bed or kiss your sweetie or whatever, that rubs off. For those going to bed with a face full of minoxidil, another study says: “Recovery of radioactivity from the skin surface and from scalp and pillowcase washes was in the range of 41% to 45% of applied dose” (they assume the remaining ~50% was lost or rubbed off the skin befo

Do your worst!

I'm surprised it hasn't decade.

For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.

I said "hey look, an escaPEA"

No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!

Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂

It really does, I swear!

Because she wanted to see the task manager.

Heard they've been doing some shady business.