Yeah, the big hazard is dietary potassium, also sunlight, not manmade sources.
Look up "actinic keratosis," it's a patch of altered skin cells from ionizing radiation, 5% chance of developing skin cancer.
Yes.
This is the way that they used to teach it in US Navy Nuke School in the 1980's in Orlando:
You have four cookies, classified by the type of radiation that they emit: A nuetron cookie, a beta cookie a gamma cookie and an alpha cookie.
You throw one away, you put one in your pocket, you hold one in your hand and you eat the other one; which is which.
You throw away the neutron cookie, it's very dangerous, it has medium penetration which means that it will stop somewhere inside of you; that's bad.
You put the beta cookie in your pocket. The beta radiation is reactive enough because of its charged particles and the lightness of them, that your clothing will stop most of it
You hold the alpha cookie in your hand. The alpha particles are the most reactive and your skin will stop most of them. You don't want't to eat it or breath alpha though, because then your guts and lungs would react with it. You don't want to eat the beta cookie for similar reasons.
You eat the gamma cookie. Most gamma passes through everything without reacting.
-- pete
Bill Beaty expounded in news: snipped-for-privacy@o7g2000prn.googlegro ups.com:
What kind of radiation: Alpha, beta, gamma?
I have an eBayed radiation detector from the Ukraine (which was a slight worry upon receipt- but turned out ok). It counts gamma radiation.
Background gamma radiation in our household fits the low levels of background radiation (including my own bones!)
My wife once bought me a shirt that was on sale cheap, manufactured in some Asian country. For fun I measured it and noticed that it was slightly above all the usual background radiation readings in the house. But after a few washes, it returned to normal.
Warren
Rich Grise expounded in news:ij0b89$4bt$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:
That's exactly my point!
No dental person will tell ya that there is _no_ risk. There's always risk with x-rays, though admitedly small enough to make the risk worth taking when necessary.
It is the "routine" part that I push back on. Why pull the trigger if you don't need to?
To put it in perspective, I'll bet that the odds of getting a cancer from x-ray is waaaaaay above the odds of winning any govt run lottery.
Warren
Martin Brown expounded in news:cNN4p.778$y snipped-for-privacy@newsfe10.iad:
..
When I was young and developed my own B&W negatives, I'd go into my closet (my closest thing to a dark room). I used black electrical tape to tape up the negatives in cardboard for my backyard x-ray experiments.
What I noticed was that when you peel the black tape off of the reel, the adhesive would emit a little light. So I had to do the tape peeling away from unexposed negative for safety.
Warren
Martin Brown expounded in news:jwN4p.433$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe22.iad:
..
I read somewhere that they felt that this is why cancer is more common today. The point advanced was that in the earlier times, when fertilizer use was rarely used, that the cancer rates were lower. With increased tobacco production, this all changed.
Some hard statistics would speak to that better, but I am unaware of any.
Warren
Fred expounded in news:Xns9E87E6EACDEC0nobodyhomecom@74.209.131.13:
QSL!
Try crushing a sugar cube with pliers in a dark room.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal ElectroOptical Innovations 55 Orchard Rd Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 845-480-2058 email: hobbs (atsign) electrooptical (period) net http://electrooptical.net
Phil Hobbs expounded in news: snipped-for-privacy@electrooptical.net:
Will a sugar cube even make it to the dark room in the hands of a diebetic?
Warren
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OK negative muons that get captured around nuclie decay faster than they would in free space. Interaction with the proton.
George H.
_Her_ desk. Sorry!
Rich
Or a wintergreen LifeSaver with your teeth. ;-)
Cheers! Rich
Interestingly, first aid for a diabetic in a state of collapse is to give sugar. Diabetic coma (too much sugar) is far less dangerous than insulin shock (too little), so given the consequences of making a mistake, the default is to give sugar regardless.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal ElectroOptical Innovations 55 Orchard Rd Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 845-480-2058 email: hobbs (atsign) electrooptical (period) net http://electrooptical.net
Interestingly, first aid for a diabetic in a state of collapse is to give sugar. Diabetic coma (too much sugar) is far less dangerous than insulin shock (too little), so given the consequences of making a mistake, the default is to give sugar regardless, and let the ER folks sort it out.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal ElectroOptical Innovations 55 Orchard Rd Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 845-480-2058 email: hobbs (atsign) electrooptical (period) net http://electrooptical.net
Phil Hobbs expounded in news: snipped-for-privacy@electrooptical.net:
Yep yep.
I always err on the side of a coma- especially at Christmas time.
Warren
Don Klipstein expounded in news: snipped-for-privacy@manx.misty.com:
..
This is begging for a 10 muons and a thorium walked into a neon bar ... and took on 80 electrons joke.
Warren
Tell that to Bruce Banner.
Matthew
Yeah, or Peter Parker. ;-)
Cheers! Rich
I thought the main red emission from the Orion Nebula is the hydrogen "alpha" line, 656.3 nm.
-- - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)
The real reason for the apron and the wall is the common existence of people who use reason in exactly your fashion. If their percentage is large in our population, then bizarre things will arise in human society, with no more reason but "lots of people insist on this, and they all say that this is because lots of OTHER people insist on it." So their fears are based on the existence of common fears, rather than the existence of common dangers.
Those kids who played with the shoe-store x-ray machine, why aren't they all dead?
If you shine a dim, red-filtered flashlight on skin for only a fraction millisecond, there's a risk that it will cause skin cancer. That's not no risk. There's a risk that thermal vibrations, no matter how brief, will cause cancer. There's a risk that all the air molecules will randomly move to one corner of the room, killing the occupants. No honest person will deny any of this, since zero risk doesn't exist.
But if instead we use the word "risk" in the way the general public does, then "risk" is taken to mean "SIGNIFICANT risk," rather than meaning "any risk whatsoever, no matter how small."
In that case this is a true statement:
"There is no risk at all in receiving many hundreds of dental x-ray exposures. But there's a tiny risk in getting many tens of thousands of them, so a wise person should avoid getting several x-rays per day over a lifetime ...unless there was good reason for it."
On the other hand, it would be a bad thing if dental workers completely lost all fear of x-ray equipment. Suppose they stopped limiting their own exposure, ignored dosimetry, played with x-ray machines as toys, left them running all day long. Everyones exposure might increase by millions of times. To prevent this sort of thing, someone has to convince them to respect and fear x-rays. Unfortunately they can end up thinking of x-rays as inherently dangerous, significantly dangerous regardless of the intensity or accumulated dose. Yet at some low value, the hazard is ridiculously insignificant, and x-rays are safe. They become as safe as sitting down to dinner, watching TV, playing with kids. But from the viewpoint of "any risk is too much risk!!!!" sitting down to dinner is horribly dangerous, one must never ever watch TV, and every so often, playing with kids is known to have killed people in the past. Better not try it!
There's always risk with breathing a 80/20 nitrogen/oxygen mixture at
720 torr, though admitedly small enough to make the risk worth taking when necessary.:)
So you've missed the "perspective" up to now? Google what the known odds *actually are*. A single 1mRem dental exposure gives 1:10^7 chance of death by cancer, equivalent to accident risk of driving 4mi in a car. But increase that by 10000 or 100K times, and then we're talking significant risk and genuine worries. If someone is afraid to ever get in any car because of accident risk, then maybe they're scared enough that they should fear dental x-rays too.
Note well that the numbers I've been talking about are overestimated worst-cases, quoted from insurance companies who fear lawsuits and amplify the dangers. Perhaps they overestimate the hazard by many times. But if we assume that they're accurate, they still show which hazards are ridiculously small, and which are not.
If radiation causes cancer, then why would anyone use radiation as cancer therapy? Won't it add to the problem? It's because the phrase "radiation causes cancer" is wrong. It incorrectly implies that SIGNIFICANT cancer hazard always exists no matter what. No. The significant cancer-causing dose is enormous, while the therapy dose is far below. I know someone who died last month from slipping on ice and hitting their head on a curb. Happens all the time. We should
*greatly fear ice,* and rational fears of dental x-rays are many orders smaller.ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.