SciShow Tangents - Radiation

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangent, such the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green. Joining me this week, as always, is our science expert, Sari sari reilly hello and our resident everyman sam schultz hello but you know what sam schultz isn't ignorant of oh no don't don't do this to me the vampire diaries can you explain to me how the vampires work in the vampire diaries well they use they at the beginning of the show, in the first season of the show. Like normal vampires? Can they go out

Starting point is 00:00:47 in the sunlight? They need a magic ring to go out in the sunlight. Grain? No, no, a ring. A ring. A ring. A ring. A ring. You know, they eat a piece of toast. Yeah, they need a magic grain. That would actually be pretty cool. It's quinoa.

Starting point is 00:01:04 So, yeah, when you first meet Stefan stephan salvator the main vampire of the show he's got this big ugly ring on oh he can go outside that's what he needs to go outside it's a daylight ring and a witch has to make it for you and eventually everybody just has one oh it's okay it's not just like one it can get more so no it's not like the highlander where you have to like stab stephan salvator to get the ring well in the first season that is kind of the way it is there's like there's only two and it's like oh we need these rings but then like the next few seasons it's just like oh yeah my necklace so they're just people who drink blood now yeah yeah do they like garlic uh yeah they can eat garlic that's a very specific there's a scene where where stefan's cutting garlic and he's like i love italian food so that was made up

Starting point is 00:01:44 yeah disregard that piece they can't turn into bats which is really dumb i think they should be able to turn into bats i think that that's like the coolest vampire power i think yeah but it's really hard i understand turning into a cloud of bats but turning into one bat that's just against oh it's hard scientifically i thought you meant yeah i thought you meant like the graphics would be hard to do. Yeah, it's just conservation of matter is kind of a big deal. Give you one really heavy bat. That's right. Yeah, a large bat.

Starting point is 00:02:10 Yeah, it's just all the protein. It's like a neutron star inside of the bat. Yeah, infinitely dense bat. Yeah. Perfect. You've solved the problem. Yeah. Any other questions?

Starting point is 00:02:20 Yeah. So they do drink blood. Do they kill people? Oh, all the time. There's some of them that drink blood so hard that they make the head pop off of the person whose blood they're drinking that's not how that works they're called rippers they suck so hard that it just goes whoop or do they bite it who really could say but they grab a person they bite and then at the end of the biting their head just pops right off their body. It's really cool, actually.

Starting point is 00:02:46 But they're bad vampires. We don't like them. Because they make the heads pop off instead of just killing. They're good and bad vampires. So, are there some like Lestat who just stumble around the streets of Paris, France and chew the heads off of rats? Oh, yeah. That's Stefan. He's like that. Except he's secretly a ripper and he

Starting point is 00:03:06 can't control himself. So he has to drink animal blood because if he gets one drop of human blood he'll go nuts and he'll start popping people's heads off. Does he pop animals' heads off? No, he can drink that stuff normal. He could like eat a cow and be like... Just like mice

Starting point is 00:03:22 with just... Yeah, you're shotgunning mice and their heads are just flying out there. Yeah, these are all better ideas than the Vampire Diary Explorers. Is it like the Princess Diaries? No, they write in a diary like one time in the first episode

Starting point is 00:03:38 and then there's no diaries after that. There's a few and every like once a season somebody will write in a diary. Dear diary, I love garlic. Pop, pop. Yeah. Why are you asking me about this? To make me embarrassed?

Starting point is 00:03:52 No, you seem to know a lot. I do. I feel like I should be aware of how it works. It's a good show. It's an everyman sort of knowledge, I think. Then there's werewolves, too. We haven't even gotten into the werewolves. Do they also drink blood?

Starting point is 00:04:08 No. Do they also pop heads off off they could if they wanted to then there's half wolf half vampire they can do what they can do all of the above okay yeah are there which wolf vampire no you can't be magician you can't be magical and be a vampire or oh that's a rule that's a real rule yeah if you get turned into one of those you lose your magic except stephan's mom there's always one who spoilers okay gonna warm up for halloween guys we're getting in the spirit ready so every week here on sci-fi tangents we get together to try to one-up amaze and delight each other with science facts and vampire diaries facts. While also trying to stay on topic, our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks. And I'll be awarding those as we play. So at the end of the episode, one of them can be crowned the winner.

Starting point is 00:04:56 But as always, we've got to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week, it's from me. Oh! A treat. A treat. science poem this week it's from me oh a treat a treat for the for the people who aren't uh watching on video you you only know that the treat made a number of noises yeah a thing we've known through modernity atoms are unchanged for eternity Even when they change their chemicals And oxygen is oxygen And hydrogen is hydrogen Always the same, they never change But then they do Big atoms can decay From one element to another cascade.

Starting point is 00:05:48 Particles emitted, they're emitted. Particles emitted, they're emitted. Whoa, they're radioactive, radioactive. Whoa, they're radioactive, radioactive. Radioactive. Whoa. Whoa. There. Radioactive. Radioactive. No one tell Imagine Dragons we didn't get the rights to this song. Please don't tell on us. We'll get in trouble.

Starting point is 00:06:13 You're allowed to say that was really cool, but you have to be kind of secretive about it. Yeah, yeah. When you're tweeting about it. The topic for the day is radioactive. Specifically, I could have kept going because there's other kinds of radioactive i feel like you're saving that for your new album right but i gotta save it for the new uh you know i think you committed a crime that weird al doesn't commit where weird al changes the uh the the chorus i think that's where you're going to get in trouble. I changed the chorus.

Starting point is 00:06:45 What is it? Their, not I'm, their radioactive. Oh. See? Okay, we're fine, we're fine. Yeah. So, our topic for the day is radioactive. Sari, what does radioactive mean?

Starting point is 00:06:59 Did I get everything in my 85-word song? I mean, you got the gist of it, which is all we can ever hope to do with this definition section. So, radioactivity is just radiation emitted by a radioactive material, and that can be lots of different forms. It can be alpha particles, beta particles, neutrons. These are specific things. One of those things is like a high-energy electron, maybe, or photon, or what are they? Beta particles are electrons that are not attached to atoms, like spinning out an electron. Alpha particles are the chunky ones, so they're two protons, two neutrons.

Starting point is 00:07:39 Oh, so big, big boys. Big, large boys. That's basically a nucleus at that point. Yes, basically like a little bigger than a high, it's basically a that's basically a nucleus at that point yes basically like a little bigger than a height that's like a helium-ish size yeah it's a helium nucleus that's an alpha particle the giant one uh beta particles are like spewing out a little electron the third is a neutron which is like a hydrogen kind of a little smaller but spewing that out and then there's electromagnetic radiation which is like x-rays gamma rays visible light and that's just like light yeah light yeah light and different

Starting point is 00:08:13 and but gamma rays are like light that'll that'll do you a damage yeah there's light that will not do you damage and then there is light that is high energy enough that it'll get in there we can get into atoms and molecules yeah and start messing things up and like so radioactivity is it shooting is that what radioactivity is something shooting off of something i read a lot about radioactivity i couldn't make heads or tails of it oh wow especially nuclear nuclear energy so there's the radiation okay this is the confusing thing there's radiation that comes off of radioactive things and something that's radioactive is i think all it's really saying is that like there are waves there are there are there's emissions coming off of this thing um but i

Starting point is 00:09:01 think that in general when we say radioactive we mean things that are um emitting particles like actual pieces of of themselves and when that happens they can actually decay into other elements okay can we talk about how you said oh wow after i said i read about it and couldn't make heads or tails of it look you know about vampire diary you said the thing i said i was right yeah it's not yeah it's not uh that's that's the that's i wasn't oh wowing you i was oh wowing the like terminology mess that we got ourselves into because we didn't really understand what was going on when we first started naming this stuff okay yes yeah interesting that that is the big problem it's like depends on where you draw the circle because technically if you wanted to be stubborn about it you could claim that well like so many led is radioactive because it's emitting lights is a light bulbs radioactive because it's okay i see i see well because

Starting point is 00:09:56 everything to some extent or a lot of things are emitting small doses of radiation so like there's like a background radiation everywhere yeah i'm radioactive both because i have potassium in me that has some unstable potassium a little bit but also because i emit infrared light because i'm warm that's nice so where does this word come from that we're so confused about yeah radioactivity so i looked up radioactivity but i assume radioactive is similar um it's fairly recent which is probably why we're so confused about it because radioactivity comes from the french radioactivite which i think is like just the same word yeah which. Which was made up by Pierre and Marie Curie in 1898. They were like, what is this new element?

Starting point is 00:10:50 They had some predecessors who had studied uranium and the fact that it emits radioactive particles, but they were the ones to first use radioactivity as an adjective or a noun. Whatever part. Radioactive as an adjective. This is a Whatever part. Radioactive as an adjective. This is a science show. This isn't a grammar show. To describe what they were working on in uranium and polonium and radium.

Starting point is 00:11:16 And they were like, radioactivity is a property that these things have. And further back than that, I tried to trace it. And further back than that, I tried to trace it. There are several different ways that we started incorporating radio into words, especially in recent history where radio means the machine, the radio, and then we tack that onto words. But at this point, the use of radio in radioactivity came from the latin radius meaning ray and so it came more from the idea of a ray of light a beam of light and the the emission property of it to get into that like the the radiantness of it as opposed to the straight rod in the middle of a circle it's a little bit frustrating to me that that light is radiation now i i know that that's ridiculous um but it does seem like we we got this

Starting point is 00:12:13 word that uh turned bad you know at first it was like this is interesting and then it was like this is cool this and then this is good we should shine it into our eyeballs and i was like actually it's terrible we should be terrified of it. And that has lasted a long time. And now people sort of like radiation is synonymous with ionizing dangerous cancer causing radiation. Whereas it's sort of important to realize we also get to like people use that word for visible light. It was going to be a Halloween topic, but then i moved it up a little bit because it's scary yeah you can definitely make a uh hulk a giant with a giant ant a giant mantis giant octopus really take your pick giant spider yeah

Starting point is 00:13:00 it's gonna be time to go into the quiz portion of our show where we're going to be playing uh radio radio activity this or that so our bodies are constantly uh interacting with radiation that's coming from space from materials found on earth from things that we make and the national council on radiation protection and measurements estimates the average person in the u.s experiences around uh 6.2 millisieverts per year. So about half of that is from natural background radiation, and the other half is from man-made things like medical stuff, industrial sources. Fortunately, this amount of radiation does not seem to do us very much harm. Researchers have measured the radiation doses we experience from a variety of sources, so today we're going to be playing this or that radioactive edition where I will present to you two things and you will have to guess which one

Starting point is 00:13:49 is more radioactive. Radioactive. Whoa. Whoa. So first we're going to start out with medicine. Which one of the following things requires a larger dose of radiation an x-ray of your chest or a ct scan of your chest couldn't tell you what a ct scan is exactly a cat scan that's yeah it's a cat scan okay now i know at least what the word is but i'm not really sure what that does yeah yeah yeah that's understandable you're not old enough to to need to know all the medical things that happen yeah i just read a biography of antoine lavoisier the guy who uh basically sort of invented the modern concepts of how chemistry works and as he was uh in his little uh cell getting ready to be put to death uh and during the french revolution he wrote a letter

Starting point is 00:14:45 to his cousin and it said something to the effect of at least i have been spared the indignities of old age that's nice he was putting a good spin on it yeah he was like getting old kind of sounds like it's awful hard anyway i don't want to have to learn with a ct scan all right i guess it's probably ct scan because x-ray i feel like it's like, this is the trick. It's a trick question. That's what I think, too. I think it's a CT scan because I think it takes longer. I feel like an x-ray, you just go, you get x-rays at the dentist.

Starting point is 00:15:19 Even in your chest, you could probably do it pretty fast. Well, you are correct. your chest you could probably do it pretty fast well you are correct and all the people who know about medicine were screaming the answer to you because ct ct scans are actually just a bunch of x-rays oh yeah so you take out you take x-ray images from a lot of different angles and that requires obviously a larger radiation dose than a single x-ray would oh that's fine uh yeah so they both produce ionizing radiation uh that involves high energy wavelengths that allow the particles to penetrate the tissue. And a chest x-ray has an average radioactive dose of 0.1 millisieverts. A CT scan of the chest has an average radiation dose of 7 millisieverts.

Starting point is 00:15:56 And we get 6 per year normally? Is that what you said? We got 6.2 a year. That's right. Okay. So, yeah. You only get a CT scan if you need one. Okay. That's for sure. It's like 70 little chest x Okay. So yeah, you only get a CT scan if you need one. Okay.

Starting point is 00:16:05 That's for sure. It's like 70 little chest x-rays going pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. The radiation that doesn't get absorbed in these things, that's the stuff that makes it through and produces the final image. And the doctors use these effective dose values to understand the risk that the procedures might pose to the body overall and to balance that with the potential benefits of using these scans round number two we've moved from medicine to travel which of the following exposes airline passengers and crew to more radiation a flight from frankfurt to san francisco or a flight

Starting point is 00:16:36 from hong kong to hartford hong kong to hartford gosh frankfurt to San Francisco. I feel like the polls have something to maybe like, I don't know. You're going over the top or something. I'm going to guess Hong Kong to San Francisco because. You can't. You got to guess Hong Kong to Hartford. I'm going to guess Hong Kong to Hartford because just to, I can't logic through it this is beyond what i can do so the worst the best i can do is guess so as you have correctly surmised space uh is a source of radiation there's x x-rays there's high energy particles there's gamma rays and they also react with our atmosphere and create secondary radiation that can reach us and while you fly you are at a

Starting point is 00:17:24 higher altitude and that means you're less shielded from all that radiation there are other factors that impact the amount of radiation that flyers experience as well like the duration of their flight of course and also the distance from the equator which makes a difference because of how earth's magnetic field pushes radiation towards the poles good job sam you were, but you still got the wrong answer. Well, I wasn't sure where any of those places were exactly, so that was a problem. So, in 2016, researchers used models of solar activity and its effect on the energy of particles impacting the Earth to estimate the average radiation doses that different passengers would experience on different flight routes. And with their model, they calculated that on average,

Starting point is 00:18:04 would experience on different flight routes. And with their model, they calculated that on average, a passenger from Frankfurt to San Francisco experiences an average dose of 70.7 micro sieverts, not millisieverts, so even smaller, while a passenger from Hong Kong to Hartford experiences 93.2 micro sieverts. And in general, they found that the highest dosage flights were ultra long haul flights between US and Asia. and Asia. A lot of those. And above the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole. I'm surprised that you could go from Hong Kong to Hartford. It's Hartford. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:33 No offense to Hartford. The Hartford International Airport, you know? Yeah. Can you really do that? We can go to like four places from Missouri. They can go to Hong Kong. That doesn't seem fair. It doesn't seem fair at all and our last section of this or that it's a it's it's the food edition which one of the following has more radiation one kilogram of beer or one kilogram of bananas

Starting point is 00:18:57 uh beer bananas beer i don't know we talked about like whiskey barrels having the nuclear bomb radiation in them or whatever. So I'll just go with beer. Do you put beer in barrels? I don't know. No. You don't? Some people must.

Starting point is 00:19:12 I feel like I watched an old Popeye cartoon. I'm sure they used to. I feel like I watched a Popeye cartoon where beer was in a barrel. With the XX whatever on it and glugs it out of the barrel. Or isn't that what Dumbo's drinking out of barrels or something like that? I don't know. Well well what do you think i think it's bananas because of the potassium but i don't know what else is in beer beer is like a lot of carbs and water and i don't think that's very radioactive sari is right damn it's it is just it's a lot of carbs and water but all of our foods

Starting point is 00:19:41 to some degree have some radioactivity in part because of carbon isotopes, and there's going to be carbon in anything you eat. But there's also other elements, like potassium-40 or radium-226. The units used to report these values are in picocuries per kilogram, where a picocury describes the amount of ionizing radiation released when an element goes through radioactive decay and emits energy. of ionizing radiation released when an element goes through radioactive decay and emits energy. So in the case of bananas versus beer, bananas have around 3,520 picocuries per kilogram, and beer has 390. Luckily, the amount of radiation from a banana doesn't really add up to very much when we eat them. However, the radioactivity of bananas has inspired an unofficial radioactivity scale called the banana equivalent dose to describe the radiation exposure in terms of bananas where one bed equals 0.1 microsieverts scientists left having fun

Starting point is 00:20:32 that's right all right sam you have one point and sari has three going into the break next we're going to take a short break and everybody. It's time for The Fact Off. Our panelists have all brought science facts to present in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they have presented their facts, I will judge and award them Hank Bucks any way I see fit. To decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. The fungus Cladosporium spherospermum seems to thrive in the presence of radiation. So naturally, research sent a sample to space, monitoring it for 30 days aboard the International Space Station. Their experiments demonstrated that a 1.7 millimeter thick

Starting point is 00:21:30 bed of fungus could lower radiation levels in the area by 2.17% compared to an area that wasn't shielded by the fungi. Based on their results, the researchers estimated how thick of a layer of cladosporium they would need to create Earth-like conditions on Mars.

Starting point is 00:21:48 How thick would this fungus blockade need to be? What units do you want? Let's do feet. Oh, feet. Oh, sorry. Maybe I gave something away. That's big. Yeah, I was going to get it wrong. Also, meters would be fine.

Starting point is 00:22:04 Okay. I'm imagining swaddling myself in a blanket of fungus. What would make me feel safe on Mars? I think 20 feet. Oh, that's a lot! Okay, I'm going to say 2 meters. It's just dang mushrooms. Sari says 2 meters.

Starting point is 00:22:18 It's 2.3 meters. Wow. My mental... My mind palace did me well. Wow. My mental, my mind palace did me well. Just picturing being enveloped by two meters of fungus on every side. Yeah, and do I feel safe now?

Starting point is 00:22:35 Yes. I feel safe now. That's the only way to feel safe. Just as long as you have a snorkel. Yeah, yes, a straw to breathe out. So that means you get to decide who goes first. Sam, you can go first. Oh, no.

Starting point is 00:22:52 I'm taking the coward's way out. I wasn't prepared for this. The Boy Scouts of America, just for those of you out there who don't know, is a youth organization devoted to teaching kids junk like tying knots, catching fish, identifying plants, whittling, good forest-based activities that all blue-blooded American children ought to know. When you get good enough at these things and pass some tests, you get a little badge to put on your sash,

Starting point is 00:23:15 and those with many badges are most esteemed among Boy Scouts. But in addition to your more traditionally outdoorsy array of badges, there are some weird-ass badges, like dentistry or fingerprinting or one that indirectly led to a Michigan Scouts backyard being declared a Superfund site. Atomic Energy. David Hahn, a Boy Scout, was awarded the merit badge in Atomic Energy in 1991 after completing some rudimentary tests and projects like building a model of a nuclear reactor with cans and straws and household items.

Starting point is 00:23:49 But David Hahn was also a naturally born scientist and had been studying chemistry since he was 10, inspired by the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, which was given to him by his grandpa. And he had spent the intervening four years doing things like learning how to make nitroglycerin and blowing up his bedroom numerous times to the point where he had been exiled to his backyard as kind of like his little laboratory where he was doing his chemistry experiments. So David at this point was a bit drunk off the power of chemistry and decided that he didn't just need to leave his exploration of nuclear

Starting point is 00:24:17 power at a mere model. So he started sending out letters to various nuclear energy organizations, including the nuclear regulatory commission posing as a high school teacher and asking for educational material to use in his classes like where in the natural and man-made world one could find radioactive material and they sent him all kinds of info back enough that he eventually figured out that uh he could create purified thorium out of parts of gas lanterns combined with lithium from $1,000 worth of batteries. So he just poured lithium on this. Then he put a Geiger counter on his car's dashboard and drove around town

Starting point is 00:24:52 finding all of the radium he could from old watch faces and instrument panels and used that to irradiate his thorium, which he then combined with americium. Americium. Americium? Oh, shoot. I wasn't even close. Which is what's in smoke detectors that makes them detect smoke. It's radioactive as well.

Starting point is 00:25:14 And he built a breeder reactor, which I don't entirely understand what a breeder reactor is or how it works, but it's a reactor that can somehow make more fissile material than it uses. And they were a major source of interest of nuclear scientists in the 50s, but a couple of the major experimental breeder reactors ended in near meltdown, so they lost popularity.

Starting point is 00:25:36 But David made one, and it worked. But it started working too well, so well that radiation was becoming detectable up and down his block, so he took the reactor apart and hid it in his car trunk but in a case of weird mistaken identity a cop ended up searching his trunk for something not even related to him basically and ran across the reactor and started messing with it and david said i wouldn't do that that's radioactive then uh a few days later flash forward a few days later the fbi the ep EPA, and the NRC are in David's backyard, detecting background radiation 50 times higher than normal background radiation.

Starting point is 00:26:12 And ultimately, his shed was declared a super fun site, dismantled, sealed in barrels, and buried in the Utah desert, alongside material from nuclear bomb testing. And all of this after he had already gotten his merit badge so the lesson is as story editor alex billow put it when i sent him this story there is such thing as trying too hard oh don't i know it um that's amazing i'm not sure what my favorite part is the part where he drove around with a Geiger counter on his dashboard so he could find radium watch faces and apparently that worked that seemed like it was a bit of an ostentatious

Starting point is 00:26:52 move on his part but it actually accidentally did end up working out because he passed an antique store and it like went crazy and then he found an old clock and inside of the old clock he found a vial of radium that had been left so you could like touch up the the clock face oh wow and that was what he used mostly

Starting point is 00:27:10 to to shoot his thorium with but i think probably the best best part is that they buried his shed in the desert i think that's my favorite part too they put it in barrels and took it away and put it in the desert i like the email or the the sending letters to the government pretending to be a teacher that is also very good all right sari what do you have to compete with uh nuclear boy so certain radioactive isotopes of elements have an ominous nickname they're bone seekers they tend to accumulate in our bones if they get into the human body somehow so for example strontium 90 is in the same periodic table group as calcium so one of the columns and acts chemically similar to it this radioactive form has 38 protons like a stable strontium atom but what makes it an isotope

Starting point is 00:27:58 is its whopping 52 neutrons and in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as nuclear testing was ramping up and isotopes like strontium-90 were getting released into the environment as waste products, there was a lot of curiosity about how much people were getting affected by them. What's happening here? So the physician, Louise Rice, along with her husband and some other scientists mostly environmental scientists led a project where she was basically the tooth fairy but in a scientific way and by that that's a great i was like are they gonna are they gonna grave rob are they gonna grave rob that's not allowed and by that i mean her team collected and analyzed thousands of baby teeth from kids in the st louis missouri area in the U.S. for their Strontium 90 content.

Starting point is 00:28:48 Why not? They're around. There's plenty of teeth. We're not doing anything with all these teeth. Yeah, why keep them? That's creepy. It's so much easier than grave robbing. They just gotta get in touch with the tooth fairy and be like, here's a grant and so in a massive public outreach effort rice's team visited schools and

Starting point is 00:29:06 other community centers and explained to families how strontium 90 from nuclear tests could make its way into human bones by being sprinkled into water or dairy products and then making its way into food and that the kids are eating and they talk and then it seeks your bones yeah seeks your bones and gets in there and just makes a little home uh swaddling itself up in the rest of the bone like me and the fungus and they talked to caregivers for consent and spread scientific literacy which is honestly very exciting to be able to say about an old science experiment really seems ethically sound and families that wanted to participate sent in geographic information about where they've lived their kids baby teeth and in return got a fun

Starting point is 00:29:51 little button that said i gave my tooth to science which in my nerdy opinion is much more fun than a couple of quarters get both ideally after the first two years of analysis on over 65,000 teeth, Rice published a paper on November 24th, 1961 in the journal Science and reported that they did find elevated levels of strontium-90. And therefore, the stuff getting into the environment from nuclear tests was also getting into humans through children, but also adults, presumably. And this paper, along with some testimony from her husband in front of the Senate, helped influence the U.S. government to sign on to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. That's awesome. But there was still plenty of tooth research to do. This team kept collecting baby teeth from St. Louis kids through 1970 and ended up with around 325,000 teeth in total.

Starting point is 00:30:43 And further analysis led to findings like children born in 1963 had around 50 times as much strontium 90 as children born in 1950 which was before many but not all nuclear tests and so there was a pretty big difference and the whole using teeth to study radioactivity things stuck around as later studies showed that strontium-90 in baby teeth decreased by around half in kids born in 1968 after the treaty had been put into effect. And so we had this peak around peak nuclear testing, and then the governmental policies, environmental policies, really did help people be less radioactive. And even nowadays, the Baby Tooth Survey inspires other initiatives to detect various kinds of pollution that can end up in bones and impact human health. And it's very cool to me that this weird, wonderful collaboration between scientists and the public and a scary amount of teeth existed, and people were excited about it. That's wild.

Starting point is 00:31:40 Hundreds of thousands of teeth is a significant haul if you get them to the tooth fairy yeah and it makes me wonder like is that part of the deal like somebody's got to be funding the research is it the tooth fairy big tooth could be tooth fairy is very interested in this niche field of research i like the idea that there's a bunch of tooth fairies and a lot of them are like independent like operators they have small businesses but then there's like one that's like sort of rolled them all up it's like a corporate it's called big tooth yes gosh i thought i thought sam had it in the bag this one's pretty good though and she got three points so let's just say that sam got a hundred points in the first section and sarah got 100 points in the first section,

Starting point is 00:32:27 and Sari got 300 points in the first section. Okay. I just feel like I need more Desmond voices to work with. And for these facts, I think that Sari's was probably like a 500-point fact, and Sam's was like a 450-point fact, which still both are very high. But I got more than Sam. That leads me to believe that sari is the winner of the episode oh wow they ground up hundreds of thousands of teeth i also have never really reckoned with just how many teeth are out there like this was their 12 years of actively collecting with people's consent yeah yeah it's not it it's it's by far

Starting point is 00:33:07 not anywhere near the majority of the teeth no it's a tiny fraction of the teeth we're fighting about sand tooth as a renewable resource we keep making babies we keep making teeth someone needs to start communicating with the tooth fairy about these grants about the research we can do. Tooth sand? Is that what you're suggesting? I don't know. We're going to make concrete with it.

Starting point is 00:33:29 Yeah. Look, if this is your first episode of SciShow Tangents, this is it. Congratulations. Thank you so much. And if you're wondering which episode to send to a friend, and you're like, well, I'd like more people to know, this is the one. This is the one. This is the one that puts you over the edge. You're like, it's got a Imagine Dragons song in it.

Starting point is 00:33:49 The first part's all about vampire diaries for some reason. Both of the fact-off facts were just totally unhinged and amazing human endeavors. And you're not even done yet because now it's time to ask the science couch where we ask a listener question to our finely honed virtual couch of scientific minds. James on Discord asks, how did we determine fatal dosages of radiation other than error? I'm hoping nobody trialed that. people who have died from radiation exposure so it's not like intentional trials in as much as like war is an intentional trial uh but like one of the biggest um research institutes for it uh is the radiation effects research foundation the rerf which uh is a collaboration between Japan and the United States. And a lot of what we know about lethal doses and cancer frequencies and stuff has been by studying long-term health records of the survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So that, at least in English language, is where most of what we know comes from as far as risk to cancer, exposure to different amounts of radiation, LD50.

Starting point is 00:35:11 We study, with radiation specifically, LD50 slash 30 is the figure I found more than once. I don't know. Which is the dose of radiation expected to cause death to 50 of an exposed population within 30 days because radiation sickness has to set in it's not like an immediate vaporization at the amounts that we have learn is pretty, it seems like the right thing. Especially because it's not like we are done with radiation on the planet. And also, it's a super important thing when it comes to space travel. I guess you could swaddle yourself in fungus, but we don't have solutions to all of those problems yet.

Starting point is 00:36:07 If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShowTangents Patreon and ask us on Discord. Thank you to Bunz on Discord, at BoyWithHeadache, and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. Did you laugh at the way I said buns? No, I just laughed because of buns. I laughed both at the way you said it and the name buns.

Starting point is 00:36:32 If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's super easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash sideshowtangents to become a patron and get access to things like our newsletter and our silly little bonus episodes. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show,

Starting point is 00:36:47 and also it helps other people learn about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz.

Starting point is 00:37:01 Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Charpovardi. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our executive producers are Caitlin Hoffmeister and me, Hank Green. And we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon, of course. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing! The Hanford site in the US churned out radioactive plutonium during the 1940s,

Starting point is 00:37:48 during the Manhattan Project, and is now a huge government cleanup project. Ongoing efforts involve searching for radioactivity with detectors mounted on helicopters so they can monitor for any unexpected leaks and waste can be disposed of safely. Now, rabbits or other small wildlife can burrow into contaminated areas without realizing it and lick up the radioactive salts. And because what goes in must come out, they leave radioactive poop piles across eastern Washington. And that poop is radioactive enough to get picked up by these detectors

Starting point is 00:38:20 and become one more thing that needs to be cleaned up. Although, it is apparently not a top priority just looking for the big spills and then it's a little right oh man jim it's another

SciShow Tangents - Radiation

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