Applied Science - 2020-04-06
Interesting applications of a strong polonium-210 alpha radiation source. The half life is only 140 days, so the Staticmaster brushes must be replaced every year or so. Great technical article on ionization smoke detectors: https://circuitcellar.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/CC2011110601.pdf Staticmaster refill: https://www.amazon.com/Static-Master-4331991414-Static-Master-Refill/dp/B0000ALKDH/ Ionization chamber: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32838644316.html Carl Willis' video on spark gap detectors. (check out his whole channel) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8GlzUjYazs Polonium poisoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko https://sci-hub.tw/10.1088/1361-6498/aa58a7 Mightyohm geiger counter: https://mightyohm.com/blog/products/geiger-counter/ Applied Science on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/AppliedScience
Blowtorch is definitely one of most enjoyable ways to light a candle
Agreed.
@Zegarac Robert :
I bought a small device that makes an arc, which I use to light propane or candles. It is from Taclight, I think that is the company name. I think it generates about 2 kV. The spark lasts for 10 s before it auto turns off.
😍😍😍 your videos!!!
@Farah Mckeithen shut up
😊
Shalom
😊 Shalom
Andar nas águas ! (tribos portões pelo qual cada um entrará entenderá , aonde, a Ruach Kadosh testifica o mesmo Espírito )
Shalom
Dos 4 animais
Boi leão águia homem
Boi rumina (medita , salmos 1 ) .?
, casco fendido (sabe separar as 2 casas de Israel , vara de Arão ?
Revelação pelo Espírito Santo, como Pedro em poder ....
asas da grande águia = Adonai e suas asas talite espiritual = Ruach Kadosh.
https://youtu.be/DYp22lkw3YY
A moabita com a sogra é um paralelo midrash com as duas casas de Israel ?😊☺ e Yeshua Ha-Mashiach ?
https://youtu.be/Z0Qdeg602BM
I love how happy he sounds when he says "polonium is actually very volatile"
Nicolai Syvertsen nah, I don't think so. Been really does get a kick from some of the crazy stuff he deals with, and always with good safety practices.
It's very volatile, so much so that it has to be gold plated, so of course I am going to wave this broken piece around that has had its shielding compromised. Nothing bad can happen...
I think he's near laughing at how bad the stuff is. Its like a joke at how bad it is to handle it, that not only is it so poisonous that they don't want to physically touch ot handle it, but it also will poison you just by the vapors it releases.
@James Van Daele Listen carefully - it HAS NOT been gold "plated" - it WAS CREATED, by irradiation of bismuth, WITHIN a gold "capsule". And it is not "broken", what you see is probably couple of those individual "containers" (or "capsules") peeled off the brush and put on the end of the stick.
@James Van Daele that strip is not the coating, its the entire thing.
I used one of those staticmaster brushes to eliminate static from a pump when I was doing physiology experiments in grad school. My patch clamp amplifier was picking up periodic noise that corresponded with the movements of the pump. I finally figured out that it was static from the pump rubbing on plastic tubing. I rigged the brush polonium source to a lab stand and pointed it at the pump. Worked like a charm.
Buck Starchaser maybe, but we already had a polonium brush for cleaning our lab balances
I used to solve this artifact on heart lung bypass machines intraoperatively by spraying the pump head with available saline in the room. Perfusionists usually freaked out because of the artifact.
@Kenneth Hicks Right before you squirted the machine, did you shout "This artifact belongs in a museum‽"
At $200 a pop I won’t get one soon!
Brushing one time was enough, or did you have to keep brushing it later on regularly?
that Staticmaster brush was used mostly in Photography to brush the dust off negatives. My dad was a Photographer in the 40's-70s we had it in our darkroom when I started to take photos back in 1967.
@Robert Borchert My brother has my some of my dad's old stuff I think that was with it
@TheScarvig it shouldn't be a problem since alpha particles are just helium atoms (maybe ions, i don't remember now), so it's an atom, not an electron as in beta radiation and not a high energy photon as in gamma radiation, so it cannot penetrate the piece of glass that you want to clean from dust and get to pixels, so it should be perfectly fine if you are using the source of pure alpha particles, because as you can see in video, some sources of ionizing radiation can radiate not only alpha particles, but also beta and gamma radiation and this could probably be bad for your camera
@Christian Riise Wagner exactly as I said!
@TheScarvig What about interfere with the positive (paper used to develop the image)?
Did you die of Polonium poisoning, though?
Any excuse to use "transmutation" in a sentence about real-world manufacturing is a good one.
We're living in such an awesome universe.
@Eidetic Ex The ancient alchemists (including Issac Newton) had a dream of turning base metals into gold.
Some of them dedicated their lives to this pursuit...But they had no idea that it was way beyond the science of the time (outside of transmutation in stars).
I think transmogrification is a better word. Calvin used the word and actually built one, so it's good enough for me.
Marci124 has
The only difference is his transmogrifier would/could also change the form and chemistry,
not just the type of atoms.
Btw, nice to find another C&H fan 'u'
Yea Diablo 2 is a great game
Always great videos.
@7:40 You are probably detecting the x-rays generated when the high energy beta particles hit the metal Geiger tube.
@Max de la Serna The SBM20 tube detects beta very well. Both hard and soft beta are easily counted with the thin wall tube.
Fluggaenkoecchicebolsen
@Zachrey Helmberger I don't think it's "breaking radiation". That tube is great at detecting both soft and hard beta. The Am²⁴¹ has a few soft gamma rays the most prevalent being 59 KeV
Strontium-90, and especially yttrium-90 is easily detectable. Low energy beta emitters like carbon-14 would require a mica-windowed Geiger-Müller tube. Lower energies than that, like from nickel-63 would require a liquid beta scintillation counter.
The branching intensity for Y-90 is so small, that it would barely get registered, especially from a 0.1 μCi source that's seen here.
When having an alpha source, I would HIGHLY recommend redoing the Rutherford experiment. Ideally from his original papers. It's such a good example how dangerous it is to have expectations when starting a certain experiment and how wrong you can be.
@Kris Curkovic Amazing explanation! Thank you.
Interesting, here's a good video on the experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBqHkraf8iE
@日神高露 where can you get Am²⁴³
I think you mean Am-241. Am-243 is pretty uncommon, because it emits 74.6 keV gamma rays, but at near double the branching intensity (68%). It also decays to Np-239, a beta minus emitter which also emits a lot of various gamma ray energies. Am-243 is also not produced as much in the nuclear fuel cycle.
@KarbineKyle that's what I thought
"I'm gonna light this candle..."
<out of nowhere, blowtorch>
I was betting the chance of him lighting up a cigarette and blowing out smoke was close to zero. But the blowtorch was a beautiful touch. :-)
Loved that too! Prrrrroooofff!
I was hoping for a massive Cuban cigar.
That was so funny 😆
A product that uses transmutation to be manufactured. Damn. That's amazing.
*clicks this comment chain happily expecting to see pleasant discussion about even more products manufactured through nuclear transmutation*
surprised pikachu face
Can I do transmutations without circles? Yes, but I'm going to need a particle accelerator...
@Evan Dark me 2
Evan Dark so technically you still need circles then lmao
@Paolo Buccino Unless you use a linear particle accelerator!
That's one hell of a meter being able to still quite accurately measure in the nA range
That production method is genius! So cool!
man i hope they reward people who cooked it up with some sort of a prize... maybe handed out by a king or something
Any product manufactured by "Nuclear Products Company" is sure to be interesting. Maybe good, maybe horrible, but definitely interesting.
So you actually built a ionisation chamber using air as ionising medium. This is actually the basic of some particle detectors (wire chambers).
While for the 90Sr source, it is true that the electrons are stopped by the metal shield, but their interaction with it produces photons via brehmsstrahlung and those are being detected.
Early detectors for "ionizing radiation" were gold-leaf electrometers (the gold leaves spread out when charged, then sank together when exposed to radiation). Of course, if back then they had only had styrofoam packing peanuts ....
Sounds a lot like a leyden jar, so I wonder if this radiation could be used to charge supercapacitors.. 🤔
Time Traveler Tip #213: Bring along trash from the future. :D
2:23 print many different models? What happened to the good old stick enough paper under it until it's fine? ;)
I need to find immortality just to keep this man alive.
This is definitely one of the more interesting uses of a guitar string I've seen.
Sure beats the music from some of the guitars it could have ended up on!
"But then they pass the whole sandwich through a particle accelerator..."
LOL
This is one of those rare times where I actually need 60fps on YouTube.
Your channel is so intellectually satisfying... Thank you for taking the time to explain all of these different phenomena of so many different scientific fields.
polonium known for poisoning a russian spy
Also Applied Science: "But I actually bought this on amazon"
Oh damn, always great videos! Love your test rigs you put together, the explanations along the way, and the little demonstrations (or big demonstrations too!). Keep up the great work!
I love your videos, you remind me of my physics teacher way back in secondary school. He once gave me detention for messing around with an expensive antique CRT (the cross), but during detention he showed me how to set it up and how it worked. That was the day I became a scientist.
"Sold on Amazon" ... for about two more hours!
It says they have two left in stock.
Such an advertisement!)
its ridiculously expensive CDN$ 171.52 already ...
KGB brought all their stock..
That quiet day at the NSA: "Hey Jack, remember that guy that build a Röntgen source in his garage..."
I love your videos learn something every time!
Wow, another practical physics that I didn't know the background of.
Thanks for sharing :-)
Omg yes this is exactly what I need tonight. Not having a good night. Thank you for all the good times!
Washed out on the bike today. Took out a rib (I think/not going to beer19 land to find out proper), and added a new layer of battle scars that are just now starting to make themselves nice 'n warm.
Still, pedalled 13 miles home in a head wind with 1 arm and blood everywhere.
...was actually doing my physical therapy routine bc I'm already partially disabled from a car hit in 2014...
U?
:-)
@Upcycle Electronics Definitely not as bad as you my guy. Thoughts and prayers. I just got dumped by my girlfriend of almost a year. :/ YouTube is here to help tho.
@Ian Luedke
I feel for ya. Yours is probably worse in my opinion, but I've had more dates with the ground than breakups so I'm probably a bit biased. Stay busy, and no regrets. GL :-)
@Upcycle Electronics same as to you my guy. Best of luck as for recovery!
@Ian Luedke Shocking...
As somebody that enjoys records my first thought when seeing this was "how perfect that'd be for vinyl" and then my mind was blown 😂 gotta get me one of those brushes 🤙
Also, on the charged styrofoam thing, there might be an effect of the charged cascade of particles being attracted by the foam and board and neutralising it.
Hi! Thanks for this awesome video! Side comment as to why the Geiger counter detects your strontium sample - Beta decay is almost always accompanied by (secondary) gamma radiation, as it is a way for the daughter atom to release extra energy from the transformation. Alpha decay can also be accompanied by gamma radiation.
Wow my dad was a professional photographer so we have a dark room in our house, little did I know the potassium ferrocyanide was the least of my worries with that brush hanging around. 250,000 times more deadly is quite the order of magnitude, I'm glad I never decided to mess with it being the curious child I was. Lol
I watched this before my online classes today. I guarantee this is the most educational thing I’ll see all day.
Thanks for another great video. This reminds of some work I did many years ago. We were considering the use of mercuric iodide (HgI2) crystals as room-temperature x-ray detectors, and we wanted to look at its sensitivity to radiation damage. The crystals would be irradiated with electrons, then their properties would be measured. When checking the collection of electrons, I could use our standard x-ray sources. However, the hole mobility in HgI2 was much lower, so I had to use alphas from Am241 as a source, so that sufficient charge would be generated.
BTW, the alphas didn't penetrate your detector for the same reason that they generate ionization in the air. Their stopping distance is very low because they plow into the material and produce so much charge.
I had at least one Staticmaster brush specifically for photography use in the late 60's-early 70's (junior high-school and later; H.S. class of '72). I did a lot of (mostly) black and white printing from (mostly) 35mm negatives. I might even still have it packed away somewhere, along with my Durst enlarger. Brings back a lot of fun memories, including getting up before school and going into my home darkroom to finish a photo class assignment. 😊 I had the 1" model.
I'm amazed that they are still made!
I’ve seen some pictures and I swear they used a Dust enlarger.
I don't understand how the photographic film or papel didn't veil using that Staticmaster. I think it was Becquerel who found veils in his wrapped photographic plates after putting a uranium salt on them.
That's genuinely fascinating! Thank you for sharing this vidio.
Thanks Ben, great video as always :)
Staticmasters got hard to buy a while back, so much I thought they'd gone out of business. Their other use is dust removal from film before printing or scanning.
Great application to promote discussion of so much School physics. Thanks a lot :)
Solid usage of a guitar string. :)
Every video of yours makes the world seem more interesting and rich in adventure and wonder. Thank you and hope the quarantine is treating you well.
Holy crap, that was great! Thanks Ben!
As usual, every video you publish is an absolute pleasure to watch. Thank you.
7:30 this is why doctors of the poisoned Russian agent couldn't detect the source of a poisoning for a week, until they started doing alpha-spectrometry. There is a great read on that, google "inquiry into Litvinenko poisoning"
Also, are they delivering to Russia?
Fascinating demonstration, Thank you!
You are a great teacher, I learned quite a lot from you!
An enormous THANK YOU to all YouTube content creators for providing all of us with additional content during this very trying time! I can only speak for myself when I say you are helping me retain what little sanity I have left having been sheltered in place for the last 2 1/2 weeks!!
Great video, cool to see these kind of rarer and less seen phenomena become more exposed. When I stumbled upon these experiments on YT I also found someone doing something similar with UV-C lights, igniting a Jacobs ladder with a UV-C lamp. Would be really interesting to see this explored. Then again ionization, plasma and all the practical applications of which are quite interesting. Great videos in general, thank you.
Tiberiu Nicolae - 2020-04-06
Applied Science in quarantine: I have a piece of Polonium 210 on a stick!
ahmd abdallah - 2020-04-11
What Is Islam?
Islam is not just another religion.
It is the same message preached by Moses, Jesus and Abraham.
Islam literally means ‘submission to God’ and it teaches us to have a direct relationship with God.
It reminds us that since God created us, no one should be worshipped except God alone.
It also teaches that God is nothing like a human being or like anything that we can imagine.
The concept of God is summarized in the Quran as:
{ “Say, He is God, the One. God, the Absolute. He does not give birth, nor was He born, and there is nothing like Him.”} (Quran 112:1-4)
Becoming a Muslim is not turning your back to Jesus.
Rather it’s going back to the original teachings of Jesus and obeying him
One Nerd Army - 2020-06-18
@ahmd abdallah yeah all I see in that block of text is "obey". Get bent, my freedom will never "obey" to your caveman rules.
Кирилл Рагузин - 2020-09-08
@Andy P Not if the copper with a virus on it gets a good exposure to some ionizing radiation. The thing gets rid of any viruses in very little time.
Master of the Universe - 2020-09-28
N95 is just useless. Why are you even here if you're so !GN()r@nts?
Electriceeeel - 2020-10-25
@ahmd abdallah So god is fake. Did I read that correctly? Just like the Bible and the Quran. Fake stories.
Go proselytize somewhere more appropriate. Lmao. You are in the YouTube comments ffs.