time travel, parallel universes, and other useful illusions
Your bananas are irradiated. Don’t worry; they’re perfectly safe. But the average banana contains at least 0.1 micro sieverts (0.1 μSv) of radiation. Not enough to harm anyone, no, but it’s something. In fact, this is what’s known as the Banana Equivalent Dose, or the amount of radiation exposure you’ll receive from eating that singular …
Continue reading “How Much Radiation Is In A Single Banana?”
In Ends of the World: Gamma-Ray Bursts, I raised the possibility that millions of years ago, Earth may have experienced a catastrophic gamma-ray burst, an immense beam of energy that forms when high-mass stars collapse, or after a collision between binary neutron stars. Well, a new study claims that it actually may have happened, but …
Continue reading “Did A Gamma-Ray Burst Hit Earth During The Middle Ages?”
There’s something out there. Something that happens every day. If it were to happen at the right distance, and point in just the right direction, it would obliterate everything on Earth’s surface. We wouldn’t have much warning, and any preparation would be meaningless. There would be nothing we could do to stop our impending annihilation. …
A plutonium core is, simply put, the heart of an atomic bomb. During the development of the first atomic bombs at Los Alamos, Nevada in the 1940s, scientists performed experiments on these cores to assess their critical mass, or the point at which they would “go critical” and experience a nuclear chain reaction. This was …
From 1951 to 1957, the United States military and the Atomic Energy Commission collaborated in a series of human radiation experiments called the Desert Rock exercises.
On Friday, March 11, 2011, an “undersea megathrust earthquake,” one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded, hit off the coast of Japan. The earthquake and tsunami that followed caused unimaginable damage, not the least of which being several nuclear accidents, including the Fukushima Daiichi plant meltdown, the effects of which are still being felt today. …
So, what do you do when you find low-level traces of radiation in the atmosphere and you don’t know where it came from? That’s exactly the problem the International Atomic Energy Agency is facing after trace amounts of iodine-131 were found hovering over Europe a few weeks ago. It was initially detected in the Czech …