Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal

Micahel Tobis, over at Only In It For The Gold, is always a worthy read. Today, he had the image below in a post:

Image courtesy of Only In It For The Gold. Click to go there.

For a much more detailed answer, the go to person is Michael Pollan. Here are two article Dr. Pollan wrote for the NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/opinion/10pollan.html

The second one is best but much longer. It will make your jaw drop.

Open Letter to President Elect Obama

from tiffany jones

Today would be his 75th birthday.

Tomorrow marks the first annual Carl Sagan Day. It will be held at Broward College in the Miami area of Florida. It will be celebrated by people around the world however, by simply pausing to reflect on the life of a man who brought the wonders of Science to millions.

Sagan worried a lot about scientific literacy.  To have a functioning society, where the public makes thoughtful decisions on everything from environmental policy, to the funding of research and exploration, it’s a necessity.

Mouse the image to go to the website.

Science education is not just for those who plan on studying science in college, or going into a field of research!

It’s needed for everyone.

Carl Sagan would be unhappy with the state of science literacy today. Particularly here in America, where large numbers of people believe that solid scientific foundations underpinning evolutionary biology and climate change are wrong.

Where books are published with almost laughable explanations of why these basic theories are supposedly wrong.

A public that has little or no scientific understanding, will not have the ability to recognize when they are being fed a load of political propaganda dressed up to resemble science.

I have written several times about Carl Sagan on these pages. His books and the famous TV series COSMOS are still watched and read by millions. The Pale Blue Dot is simply fabulous.

If you read just one book of his, then buy The Demon Haunted World.

After I published this post today, a viewer sent me a link to this. Feynman playing the Bongos!, Neil De Grasse Tyson, and of course Sagan.

Pause and remember Carl Sagan on Monday. He would have been 75. The world still needs him.

Later,

Dan

Roswell in New Mexico has made itself into the tourism mecca for those who believe we have been/are being visited by aliens. Thousands attend the annual UFO festival and just look at the artwork on the chamber of commerce web site!

Countless TV shows with eyewitnesses and so called experts have looked into the reports that a flying saucer crashed into the desert near Roswell in July of 1947. It was bad enough before the Internet, but now every  conspiracy buff can put their message out to the masses. My personal favourite is roswellufocrash.com. See the snippet from this website below!

There are dozens of sites like this claiming Roswell in New Mexico was the site of an alien flying saucer crash. I really like the note about the truth being released to the public domain in the event of the authors death or disappearance!

They almost got me to click on the Nazi UFO page, but I was able to resist.

Just to be clear here, there is NO scientific evidence that we have been visited by people from another star system. NONE. It would be impossible for the government to keep such an incident secret in any event.

If there really were bodies kept in storage somewhere, a picture would get out. I am an avowed skeptic in these matters. Show me some real evidence. Tangible and scientific to prove your cases. No one ever has in regard to this.

While I’m on the subject, there is NO scientific evidence that copper bracelets, telepathy, horoscopes, mind reading, or psychics are real either. Yes, I know police departments sometimes use psychics, and they are throwing away taxpayer money if they pay for it.

So what really happened in Roswell?

The answer is known. It was a top secret test to detect Russian nuclear weapon tests. In the days before satellites, we had no easy way to know if the Soviets had set off a nuclear device.

Enter Dr. Maurice Ewing. Back in the war, he had discovered something very interesting regarding sound in the oceans. He found that if you make noise at a certain level, it will be trapped in a layer, and travel extremely long distances. This has been confirmed numerous times in experiments.

It even led to the idea to give flyer’s special metal spheres. Flyers would be told that if they were shot down, to drop the sphere in the ocean. The spheres would crush at just the right depth to make a loud noise in the sound channel. The idea was called SOFAR for SOund Fixing And Ranging.

After the war, Ewing had the idea to see if such a channel existed in the atmospheric fluid that surrounds us. IT DOES! These channels are caused by temperature and density layers that tend to bend sound waves back to the center of a layer as the travel. So if the sound heads upward it gets bent back down and the opposite for sound waves trying to escape downward!

So Project Mogul is born. Put weather balloons, with sensitive microphones, high into the air at just the right level. If a nuclear weapon explodes, we should hear it!

This was all top secret and the military bases around Roswell were the perfect place. The atom bomb had been tested there and it was, and still is, among the nations most heavily guarded and secret military installations.

The Famous newspaper headline. Actually it was correct. They did capture flying discs. The same ones they launched with the weather balloon!

So when one of these balloons with test equipment crashed with those strange discs (microphones) with wires, it didn’t take much to kick start a legend. Some horrible reporting by the local newspaper, and the military’s obsessive secrecy about Project Mogul did the trick. That’s it. All there is to it!

The government came clean on it a decade ago. You can read the official report here.

I had never paid any attention to the Roswell stuff, until it was mentioned in an excellent book by Richard Muller. He is one of the nations top physicists. His class called Physics For Future Presidents is one of the top undergrad courses at U.Cal. Berkeley.  More on this HERE.

Below is a clip of him explaining what happened to his class. He starts by talking about those spheres that would be given to flyers.

It’s an interesting question isn’t it? Something you should probably know.  A little bit if information that you HOPE you never NEED to know. As my sister once said, “Once you’ve seen one nuclear war, you’ve seen’em all!”

In general people are afraid of radiation, and that is a good thing. It can be dangerous. It can also kill off a cancer that is eating you up. It can, and in many places, does keep you warm on a cold winter day. Electricity is dangerous too, but we usually don’t hesitate to change the batteries in our flashlight!

Radiation sources from the NRC

First of all a question. Will you will get a higher dose of radiation living next door to a big power plant that burns coal, or next to a nuclear power plant? The answer of course is you will get more radiation from the plant burning coal.

Radiation measurements can get complicated, but a simplified and generally correct summary is this.

Radiation is measured in Seiverts. That’s the new term. The old unit is called REM. REM stands for Roentgen Equivalent for Man.

100 REM = One Sievert

Most of the time we are measuring radiation in thousandths of a REM. Called milli-rems. If you live on the East coast of the USA, you get about 50-60 milli-rems of radiation a year from natural sources. Some of it comes from radioactive material naturally in your body.

If you live in Denver, built on top of granite and a mile a high, you get about 150 milli-rems a year. You get more if you are an airline pilot and spend a lot of time at 35,000 feet. You also get about 40 milli-rems every time you get a whole mouth x-ray of your teeth. (I should be positively glowing in the dark by now!)

There are three types of radiation. Alpha Rays, Beta Rays and Gamma Rays. Alpha and Beta rays are easily stopped by paper, clothes and skin. Gamma Rays are the bad ones. It takes a few inches of lead or a few feet of concrete and dirt to slow or stop them. A detonating nuclear device will produce a LOT of gamma rays. Even if the blast doesn’t get you, the dose of radiation could be very high, and perhaps fatal.

Gamma Rays are the most dangerous type of radiation.

A dirty bomb is not a nuclear explosion. It’s just taking some radioactive material and blowing it up with conventional explosives. It will not go far and it will spread highly concentrated material over a wide area, and thus greatly reduce the radiation.

I worry very little about a dirty bomb and you shouldn’t either. If you don’t get hurt by the explosion, you are unlikely to be hurt by the radiation. (Unfortunately it appears the terrorists know this now, and it’s even more unlikely you will have to worry about it.)

Cancer cells are very susceptible to radiation. More so than healthy cells, and that is why many cancer patients are given enough radiation to make them sick. Because of this, most people know the symptoms of radiation sickness. Nausea, fatigue, and loss of hair.

How much does it take to get sick? Usually more than 25 rems. That’s 2,5000 milli-rems. A lot more than the 40 millirems you get at the dentist.

LD50

If 100 people get a sudden dose of 350 rems of radiation, about 3.5 sieverts, then about half of them will die in 60 days. 350 rems is considered LD50/60. It means what you think. 50% death rate in 60 days. There is some disagreement about this, some say 3 Sieverts, and it depends on your whole body getting that much. If you get 1000 rems of radiation, you will be dead in about an hour.

If you are unlucky enough to get dosed with 500 rems, you may vomit right away, but the next day you will probably be ok. Experts call this the walking dead phase. You will most certainly not survive beyond two weeks, or so I am told.

Interestingly, if you go to the EPA web sites or local Emergency management sites, you will not easily find this information. Plenty of information on radiation, and the like, but nothing about how much it takes to kill you!

Gamma Ray exposure in USA from Nat. geog. Survey. Elevation above sea level is a key factor.

One last thing. How much radiation to absolutely, positively give you cancer? Answer: Probably around 20 Sieverts.

Notice anything?

5 Sieverts will kill you!

This is where the Linear Hypothesis comes in. If 20 Sieverts gives 100% of those exposed cancer, will 1/100th as much (20 rems) give 1% cancer. Seems that way.

The latest Science from the National Academies is that 100 milli-rems per year over a lifetime will cause one cancer in every 175 people. Since about 20% of the population dies of cancer anyhow, the risk goes to 20.05%.

Suppose someone sets off a dirty bomb and it will give me 100 milli rems a year if I stay in the house I love. My risk of cancer will go up by 1/2 of one percent. I’d take that risk. You think the government would let me?

Doubt it.

Congrats, you now know more about radiation than 95% of the population.

Dan

Sources:
http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/rert/radfacts.html
Dr. Robert Muller Lecture on Radiation U. Cal. Berkeley and PHYSICS FOR FUTURE PRESIDENTS also by him-on amazon btw

http://www.beyondweird.com/survival/1hrrads.html

National Academies of Science, Prepublication Copy, Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation BEIR VII Phase 2, June 29, 2005 page 500 Table 12-9.