Alpha radiation makes sparks, detects smoke, and eliminates static cling

[@TOASTEngineer]

I love how happy he sounds when he says "polonium is actually very volatile"

[@NicolaiSyvertsen]

Nervous laughter

[@MonsieurLeBoucher]

at 11:09

[@cathyerley3057]

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.

[@Jamesvandaele]

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...

[@mrchangcooler]

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.

[@ASCENDANTGAMERSAGE]

Blowtorch is definitely one of most enjoyable ways to light a candle

[@Hopeless_and_Forlorn]

Atomic powered blow torch actually. I believe that will be the subject of the next video.

[@nullvoid3545]

i found the spike upwards on the multi meter when the blowtorch was lit rather intriguing.

[@DrakkarCalethiel]

@@nullvoid3545 That meter is so darn sensitive that it detected the bloody piezo igniter in the torch. Impressive!

[@TheExplosiveGuy]

Pretty satisfying lighting a candle with a laser though as well...

[@rkan2]

Yeah, just what you want near your polonium, apparently.

[@jmpattillo]

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.

[@gesamtszenario]

Holy shit, man! For my Master thesis, I did some very simple membrane potential measurements on leech neurons, under a constant flow of saline. I had periodic noise (~ 1 Hz) in my electrode amplifier. I couldn't find the source, and ultimately just ignored it. Peristaltic pump, static. Doh! Yeah, so that's what that was. Thank you for the epiphany, but you're 9 years late.

[@spike4850]

gesamtszenario that’s so cool

[@upupina90]

well done :)

[@jmpattillo]

gesamtszenario That is so cool!

[@upupina90]

How did you find out that it was caused by static charges?

[@Screamingtut]

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.

[@ColonelAngus101]

Wouldn't that fog up the negative?

[@aerogfs]

@@ColonelAngus101 Not after the film is processed

[@RobinDobbie]

I wonder if it would be beneficial in cleaning digital camera sensors. It's always a chore.

[@TheScarvig]

@@RobinDobbie i guess its not exactly a good idea to shower a highly sensitive photoreceptor with ionizing radiation...

[@RobinDobbie]

That's a good guess! I sorta megaderped regarding ionizing radiation and electronics.

[@Tyler_0_]

@7:40 You are probably detecting the x-rays generated when the high energy beta particles hit the metal Geiger tube.

[@zachreyhelmberger894]

bremsstrahlung?

[@iainmackenzieUK]

@@zachreyhelmberger894 no thanks, I just put one out.

[@szymon5438]

Tubes like SBM 20 or STS 5 were designed to detect gamma ray and hard beta according to their data sheet. www.gstube.com/data/2398/

[@Tyler_0_]

@@szymon5438 Thanks for the link. That tube is very thin, only 50um thick. A significant number of betas from Sr90 (~1Mev) are likely to penetrate inside to be detected directly.

[@MLGJuggernautgaming]

Yeah I was gonna say, I don’t think a tube device like that can detect gamma rays directly. You need a photomultiplier setup

[@tiberiu_nicolae]

Applied Science in quarantine: I have a piece of Polonium 210 on a stick!

[@tiberiu_nicolae]

It would be cool if you tried to do N95 filter material

[@aliksashka]

@@tiberiu_nicolae With polonium to kill the virus :)

[@ColonelAngus101]

@@tiberiu_nicolae Actually, that's a good video idea: homemade n95 mask out of everyday household materials.

[@unlost117]

@@tiberiu_nicolae Tech Ingredients did. He demonstrated last week how to deposit copper onto a substrate (which kills bacteria apparently) :)

[@NapoleonGelignite]

Unlost117 - virus can remain active for 4 hours on copper.

[@adamdapatsfan]

Any excuse to use "transmutation" in a sentence about real-world manufacturing is a good one. We're living in such an awesome universe.

[@paulbuswell6566]

All those poor old alchemists must be spinning in their graves!

[@Marci124]

It reminded me of alchemy as well, never heard about it being an integral part of any industrial process before. I recall some experiment where they transmuted lead into gold basically as a demonstration and I imagine to finally close that chapter in the book of alchemy.

[@Leadvest]

To them it was generations of obsession and failure. To us it's so utterly pointless, I don't even remember where they ended up doing it(probably Dubna or something). We can transmute matter, whoopee, go transmute me a taco.

[@renakunisaki]

@@Marci124 the catch is, sure you can turn lead into gold, but it requires so much energy that it costs more than the gold is worth!

[@Camwize]

I usually use my Horadric Cube!

[@HyperIonMake]

A product that uses transmutation to be manufactured. Damn. That's amazing.

[@noreason2701]

What a pointless comment

[@gytux0258]

@@noreason2701 what a pointless comment

[@illidur]

What a @@noreason2701

[@HyperIonMake]

@@noreason2701 The irony is killing me.

[@lstein8670]

@@noreason2701 oof someone sounds a bit cranky, have you taken your nap

[@p_mouse8676]

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.

[@redoverdrivetheunstoppable4637]

that seems a mildly easy experiment, i didn't know about that, cool

[@p_mouse8676]

@@redoverdrivetheunstoppable4637 Yes, it is, back in the day they were basically fully convinced about Thomson's plum pudding model. Simply this meant a "positively charged soup". Rutherford very clearly showed that this was not the case.

[@vivimannequin]

What's the Rutherford experiment?

[@nibblrrr7124]

​@@vivimannequin Around 1910, it revealed the internal structure of atoms. It showed that the positive charge & mass were concentrated in a tiny dense nucleus, surrounded by a cloud of electrons on the outside, but with lots of empty space in between. This contradicted Thompson's "plum pudding" model, which said that atoms were made of large positively charged spheres that contained the electrons. @Kris Curkovic explained the details well; just wanted to give a broader context of its importance. ;)

[@higamitakaro]

I'd recommend not to have business with Po-210. Use Am-243 instead.

[@scottwilliams895]

"I'm gonna light this candle..."

[@MrJef06]

Loved that too! Prrrrroooofff!

[@Rajamak]

I was hoping for a massive Cuban cigar.

[@DrorF]

That was so funny 😆

[@pilifx]

That's one hell of a meter being able to still quite accurately measure in the nA range

[@mannys9130]

That production method is genius! So cool!

[@dnmr]

man i hope they reward people who cooked it up with some sort of a prize... maybe handed out by a king or something

[@marcmarc172]

"Sold on Amazon" ... for about two more hours! It says they have two left in stock.

[@assadasdasdasdasable]

Such an advertisement!)

[@LutzSchafer]

its ridiculously expensive CDN$ 171.52 already ...

[@azzajohnson2123]

KGB brought all their stock..

[@AsymptoteInverse]

I'm always a little awed every time I'm reminded of just how vicious polonium-210 is. Some back-of-the-envelope math says that a 1-cubic-centimeter chunk of fresh Po-210 (about the size of a sugar cube, and massing about 9.2 grams) would output the same power via decay heat as a hair dryer or electric kettle (circa 1 to 1.3 kilowatts). More than enough to boil itself. And toxic enough to fatally poison something like 10 million to 100 million people.

[@0118uhauha]

Who knows , maybe the dude in Moscow is going to use his special "sugar cubes" in Ukraine. His friends ( who are now high ranking officers in Russia ) once used this kind of "sugar" in a pot of tea in London.

[@bearindawoods6399]

I have three of those brushes. They are used on film negatives for eliminating static. I knew they are radioactive but never knew the radiation source.

[@fleetinggerbil]

This is definitely one of the more interesting uses of a guitar string I've seen.

[@glasslinger]

Sure beats the music from some of the guitars it could have ended up on!

[@JohnRineyIII]

Any product manufactured by "Nuclear Products Company" is sure to be interesting. Maybe good, maybe horrible, but definitely interesting.

[@cgflyone]

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!

[@michaelslee4336]

I’ve seen some pictures and I swear they used a Dust enlarger.

[@Mister_Brown]

@escorpiuser because you use it on developed negatives prior to printing, also basically anything stops alpha probably even the coatings on the photo paper

[@rinner2801]

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.

[@burpleson]

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.

[@jakenkid]

This is one of my absolute favorite things to watch. Not just on YT, but amongst all sources. There's never anything but information. The way he presents is just so pleasant and enjoyable, and so far, most topics are things I would have some active interest in, but occasionally, he will do something and I'll think, "Oh, meh. Not really interested.", but I have to remind myself who the presenter is, and every. Single. Time. I have been open minded, I have been wonderfully surprised! THANK YOU BEN!

[@superdupergrover9857]

Angry helium.

[@Yrouel86]

He he he he

[@paulculbert1281]

Super PO'd. Buck naked and down two electrons.

[@SouseMouse]

An alpha particle isn't angry- it has no negativity at all! It's manic helium!

[@bruceanderson7762]

Yeah ..angry helium ...c-4 is angry Pla Doh ...lol.

[@theshuman100]

helium. but fast

[@feha92]

10:40 transmutes

[@feha92]

@hawkturkey well, yeah. But I'm still happy when fantasy-esque words gets to be used in a mundane manner

[@vivimannequin]

Transmutation time

[@nibblrrr7124]

"Rutherford, this is transmutation!" - "For Christ's sake, Soddy don't call it _transmutation._ They'll have our heads off as alchemists." (Actual words spoken in 1901, according to Soddy himself. :D)

[@nibblrrr7124]

I wonder how many stable Au-197 atoms Seaborg's team produced in their 1980 collider experiments?* Apparently they used gamma ray spectroscopy to measure yield for each Au isotope, which only works for the unstable ones (whose half-lives < 200 days). But I assume when you get all the others from 190 to 199, there has to be some 197, too? Also, the yield is stated in terms of... cross-section area in millibarns? Any way to translate that into # of atoms? (more precisely than "probably a couple" :P) ... How high is the energy bill for a cyclotron, anyway? :D * _Akelklett et al. (1981) Energy dependence of 209Bi fragmentation in relativistic nuclear collisions_

[@OzgurAgcakaya]

I need to find immortality just to keep this man alive.

[@HuygensOptics]

I tried to make an estimate of how much Polonium is actually in there by using the intensity of the neutron beam of a commercial nuclear reactor (4.5E+10 cm-2.s-1) and an exposure time of the bisbuth of a few minutes. It amounts to approx a few hunderd picograms of polonium max, much less than 20 nanograms. So you can safely eat the strip (although I would not advice you to ;-))

[@Leadvest]

The atoms are also basically individually encased in metal thanks to the manufacturing process. I personally feel iffy about eating radioactive material, so I'll pass regardless.

[@renakunisaki]

@@Leadvest yes, if you eat radioactive material, you'll probably pass... and if not, it will.

[@Asdayasman]

@@renakunisaki You are hereby required to cease.

[@HuygensOptics]

@hawkturkey But like Ben said, Alpha particles generally don't make it through the very top layer of skin, let alone through a relatively thick layer of.. ehh.. whatever is in your digestive system. So if no Polonium gets into actual tissue (where the Alpha particles CAN do a lot of damage), the risk is relatively small. I think that is why it got admitted in a consumer product.

[@arthurmead5341]

What do neutron beams have to do with it?

[@Alexander_Sannikov]

1:13 i like the knob on the end of the wire you're using giving away the fact that it's a guitar string :)

[@Neptunium]

Polonium has a weak gamma at about 800Kev visible on gamma spectroscopy. The beta from Sr90 are not directly detectable by your geiger but the Bremsstrhalung effect in the glass, plasctic and shell produce xrays .. always loved your videos!

[@inductivelycoupledplasma6207]

This isn't true. Sr-90 betas are more than energetic enough to penetrate the walls of the GM tube. They will travel up to about 1.5mm in steel, and the GM tube has much thinner walls. The amount of bremsstrahlung produced by a small source like the one in the video is essentially undetectable. You're right about the weak gamma line from polonium however! I bet you could easily detect that on a sensitive spectrometer with a 500uCi source.

[@Neptunium]

@@inductivelycoupledplasma6207 1.5 mm in steel????? Never heard of it in beta radiation!!!!!! 200micro meters (o.2 mm) MAX in living tissue is what I learned and nothing passed a thin sheet of aluminum... but maybe I was missinformed? Maybe more people can weigh in?

[@CpTnlAw]

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.

[@byronwatkins2565]

Only neutrons are used for transmutation. Trying to use protons would be 83 times harder than fusing two hydrogen nuclei.

[@AppliedScience]

Hmm that's a good way of looking at it!

[@RobotN001]

low speed neutrons

[@rogueanuerz]

high energy proton

[@byronwatkins2565]

@@rogueanuerz High energy is relatively easy today. Hitting an attometer diameter target is very, very hard.

[@Kirillissimus]

With nice big syncronous accelerators available today giving ionized hydrogen enough speed to penetrate pretty much anything is entirely possible too.

[@blueninja115]

We need more science teachers like this guy. Don't tell me, show me. It's so much cooler to see in action too.

[@albygnigni]

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.

[@cylosgarage]

I watched this before my online classes today. I guarantee this is the most educational thing I’ll see all day.

[@ianluedke]

Omg yes this is exactly what I need tonight. Not having a good night. Thank you for all the good times!

[@ShainAndrews]

OMG... what ever...

[@AdamChristensen]

​ Shain Andrews Huh, that's weird. I thought the same thing, but it was when I read your nasty comment. 😂

[@eddievanhorn5497]

Wow, same here man.

[@UpcycleElectronics]

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? :-)

[@ianluedke]

@@UpcycleElectronics Definitely not as bad as you my guy. Thoughts and prayers. I just got dumped by my girlfriend of almost a year. :/ KZbin is here to help tho.

[@4.0.4]

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.

2:23 print many different models? What happened to the good old stick enough paper under it until it's fine? ;)

[@jamesanderson6882]

I think this is a great way to get vans with innocuous sounding company names printed on the side to park outside your house and helicopters to follow your DeLorean to work. Keep up the great work.

[@SamBebbington]

“I’m going to light this candle” *grabs blow torch* qwkwkkwkwwk

[@KingNast]

I lost it when he did that

[@AureliusR]

what does qwkwkkwkwwk mean

[@KaizerPowerElectronicsDk]

@@AureliusR its the sound of the burning flame

[@michaelslee4336]

Aurelius R Actually saying the word out loud made me laugh stupidly to my self and my wife to look at me like a needed a padded room.

[@dandeeteeyem2170]

*international spy here* - thanks for the timely advice, you're a life saver! 😅 You remind me of Phi-Loh from "The Vidiot From UHF".. ... Today we are going to make plutonium, from common household items. Haha.. I have learnt 100 times more science from your videos than all my high school teachers combined! 😁

[@KarbineKyle]

Very nice! This is a great video! I have about 500 μCi of Americium-241, but no fresh polonium-210 sources currently. Am-241 emits a decent amount of low energy gamma rays with a branching intensity of about 36% for 59.5 keV gamma rays and 5.4% for 26 keV gamma rays. The rest of the over a hundred gamma ray energies are less than about 1% and more, so they hardly contribute to more gamma radiation. Po-210 does have a fairly high gamma ray energy, however it's branching intensity is so low, only about 0.001%, so it's often negated. Po-210 only has a half-life of 138 days, so it has to be used fairly quick. Too bad they can't just use Pu-239. It's a nearly pure alpha emitter, and your brush wouldn't need replacements. Ionizing radiation is fascinating! I love this subject! Thanks a lot!

[@inductivelycoupledplasma6207]

500uCi of Am? That's a lot lol

[@threadtag]

Applied Science No 1 science youtuber! Quality and Clarity of the experiments ensured

[@cometboy1]

The video is quite good and I enjoyed it. One question that I had concerned the method of producing the polonium in place by bombarding a gold plated film of bismuth. The neutrons would also activate the gold film and create a source of beta rays when the Au-198 decays to mercury. Are there any beta emissions from your static master source? Edit: I searched and found that it also has gamma emissions. Another Edit: I had a long talk with a guy from NRD, who make polonium anti-static devices. It was really interesting. Long story short, bismuth is irradiated in a reactor, the polonium is separated by vacuum distillation. The polonium is alloyed with a mixture of silver/bismuth. The polonium forms a eutectic mixture with the silver. The alloy is passivated with layers of gold and nickel. Cheers.

[@cassandra2860]

thank you I came back to this video to figure out how Po-210 was made because I thought that making Au-198 would absolutely not be wanted by the people who make Po-210.

[@cometboy1]

@@cassandra2860 I agree about the Au-198. One thing I remember from reading about polonium engineering during the wartime is that the stuff was amazingly mobile. Early shipments of the stuff for the Urchin initiator would arrive at Los Alamos and be alarmingly spread out. From Richard Rhodes book; 'Thomas shipped the Po on platinum foil in sealed containers, but another nasty characteristic of polonium caused shipping troubles; for reasons never satisfactorily explained by experiment, the metal migrates from place to place and can quickly contaminate large areas. 'This isotope has been observed to migrate upstream against a current of air,' notes a postwar British report on polonium, 'and to translocate under conditions where it would appear to be doing so of its own accord.' Chemists at Los Alamos learned to look for it embedded in the walls of the shipping containers when Thomas's shipments came up short.' Cheers.

[@electronicsNmore]

Always great videos.

[@No-mq5lw]

Right from the get go, I immediately thought of one of those -old- staticmaster brushes. Now I know why it mentions Polonium on the plate. Good stuff as always! Edit: 1:33. Knew it.

[@hyper6500]

We truly live in the future when you can casually buy some Polonium on Amazon.

[@vaj1414]

yeah i think he's the one selling it lmao

[@duncanw9901]

United nuclear used to have a listing for 2kg of weapons-grade plutonium-239 for 250k back in like 2014

[@ThatDamnFosterKid]

Think we can use it to power the time circuits in a DeLorean?

[@hyper6500]

@@ThatDamnFosterKid FREE 2day shipping from Libya!!!

[@Muonium1]

I mean...the people in the 50s were buying down at the corner drug store for the same devices...

[@Spirit532]

The company behind these strips(and StaticMaster brushes) will happily sell you a 500 MILLIcurie source after you sign a waiver. It's nuts.

[@kg5168]

Heck, you can buy tritium-powered radioluminescent flashlights (used by the military to read maps and such at night) online for around 100 bucks, some of them contain a 1.9 Ci tritium source in a fused quartz ampule.

[@archer9338]

@@kg5168 They also use Tritium powered rifle scopes on all their M4 rifles. The M4s cost $900. The scopes cost $1,500.

[@Spirit532]

@@kg5168 Tritium activity is far less dangerous than polonium. Most keychain tritium sticks contain >1Ci. 1Ci of Po-210 would give you contact burns within *minutes*.

[@alexa.davronov1537]

Did you know that you can buy knives and kill someone with them?

[@Spirit532]

@@alexa.davronov1537 Knives don't evaporate and smear everywhere if you mishandle them. There's no knife residue you can inhale that will kill you.

[@137bob3d]

what a thoughtful & stimulating video to stumble across first thing in the AM

[@semireality]

10:17 that is a hell of an elaborate way to make a brush...

[@tsm688]

this man demonstrated how a spark chamber works in 50 seconds. Nice job

[@OlefinTheHusky]

Interesting that at 5:14 when the blowtorch is lit the ion current goes way up by orders of magnitude...

[@leocurious9919]

Its just a spike from the piezo ignition spark.

[@leocurious9919]

@escorpiuser Yes, thats correct. He ignites it twice at nearly the same position, but the 2nd time nothing happens. So piezo noise could be ruled out fairly certain. But its hard to see where he is pointing the flame... maybe its really the ions in there. Would have been great if he just did that for a few more seconds, waving the flame around.

[@stuartcoyle1626]

This is the second best use of a guitar string that I know of.

[@klydolph2]

Ive noticed that the older style ionic smoke alarms sometimes gives off a small beep when a lightning strikes nearby. This beep may also come a spilt second before the lightning strikes. Guess it comes from the extreme electrical fieds that are active during a thunderstorm and the way they interfere with the charges partices in the smoke alarm. Maybe this could be used for a protection system that disconnects sensitive equipment just before the lightning strikes.

[@xw591]

That's really cool to know

[@MrWiseinheart]

Hey man that's a good idea

[@ErikBongers]

That quiet day at the NSA: "Hey Jack, remember that guy that build a Röntgen source in his garage..."

[@ronniepirtlejr2606]

You would be the best neighbor to have! I guarantee you, I would be knocking on your door, wanting to watch you & soak up some of that knowledge! You are one awesome guy!

[@josephmagniez9580]

I don't know how he's doing but every single video is more surprising and interesting than the previous one ... Congrats! And thank you so much for all that physics :)

[@kestergascoyne6924]

"But then they pass the whole sandwich through a particle accelerator..." LOL

[@pierre8588]

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.

[@masonp1314]

I'm now more intrigued in the particle accelerator being used to make polonium.. like, so you know for certain you're holding something that MAN created an element inside that. Ancient alchemists would be in awe of the fabled converting one thing to another. I just always found it amazing how elements can turn to other elements with radioactivity

[@Pcat0]

...And then sell it on amazon for $60

[@noreason2701]

What a stupid comment. Any ancient person would have been in awe of absolutely anything in the modern world. Stop making stupid comments kid.

[@xametic2248]

@@noreason2701 don't say that you salty 12 yo

[@maximeruys1460]

no shit and also if you mean with "man" made by like putting togheter with adding neutrons, elektrons and protons than your wrong. They just shot at an element with like a highly energetic neutron or something to make it unstable and start to decay and turn into polonium or something.

[@SirChristian100]

i love your handson approach! "I used a guitar string and printed something" *bonks on the table*

[@Krzys_D]

I love your videos learn something every time!

[@andredepaulagomes]

Wow, the current spike after you light the blowtorch (5:13) is just crazy! I think some plasma from the blowtorch got to the plates, and that lowered a lot the air resistance. Please, try to do the high voltage experiment with a bug zapper, that would be nice to see. Btw I think that's what happens when you let those things charged up and they randomly spark; some background radiation ionizing the air could explain the zap after it has been sittig still for 5 minutes

[@Pants4096]

You should get another cheap geiger counter without a metal shield around the tube so you can detect alpha. My orange fiesta-ware dishes with uranium-oxide glaze are great alpha emitters! Now I want to get a HV power supply and make an arc detector like this!

[@irukard]

LND712 tube has a special window to detect alpha particles. Tube itself cost about 55USD.

[@Hexalyse]

You can also get soviet SBT-11A (СБТ-11А) geiger-muller tubes for less than $30 on eBay. They are great at detecting alpha, and can be hooked to any geiger counter (if the voltage is right)

[@stevenclark2188]

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.

[@JesusisJesus]

Fun fact, that brush is made from the hair that fell out of the worker’s head as they assembled them.

[@f00z129a]

Solid usage of a guitar string. :)

[@technobird22]

Awesome! Thank you so much for your amazing videos!

[@technobird22]

Basically a horizontal spark chamber!

[@alec4672]

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 🤙

[@jhonbus]

5:13 you can see the sudden jump in conductivity when some ionised particles from the blowtorch flame get involved. Which is how the other, other fire alarms work!

[@themonkeymoo]

I love that one of the electrodes is clearly a guitar string

[@eat_ze_bugs]

This is one of those rare times where I actually need 60fps on KZbin.

[@BuckJolicoeur]

So fascinating. I could see how it's properties can be very useful.

[@martinsalko1]

Wait so I just need a particle accelerator and bismuth to make polonium... I might be able to do that, I mean I won't I'm not stupid, but ye particle accelerator is on my list of DIY projects

[@xponen]

I am seeing a guy that look like Tony Stark making a material for his Arc Reactor using particle accelerator in his house....

[@Kirillissimus]

You probably already have a particle acceletator in your house. It is located in the back of one of the big boxes you plug to electricity when you want to watch some new stupid show for free. The accelerators are pretty good but not very powerful or versatile as they are. But with enough dedication it should be possible to upgrade one up to the required level. Pretty much the only thing you need to do is to cut off the scteen, to modify the electron gun to allow for local discharge and slow gas introduction, to replace the magnetics, to build a semi-sealed chamber with enogh space for accelerstion pathways and target, to add a vacuum outlet and to design new beam control circuits. It is not a single weekend project but I belive that you can have a personal particle accelerator if you really want it bad enough for whatever reason.

[@tiporari]

Fantastic experiments. Seems obvious once you've seen it, but it never ocurred to me to use ionizing radiation as an arc initiator. Great stuff! Love to see this with a plasma globe, or some light emitting gas under extrmemly low pressure.

[@jrmbayne]

Could you use this at a nuclear power plant to prevent someone contaminated with radiation from walking out? "Please walk between the electrified prongs, if they vaporize you you're contaminated."

[@dustinbrueggemann1875]

A very Aperture Labs approach to the problem but a conceivably viable one if equipment is less expensive than employees.

[@nunyabusiness8538]

you always come up with amazing video ideas and your intuitive knowledge surpasses everyone else i have watched on youtube

[@xcofcd]

Now I know exactly what Saul Goodman was crushing in these smoke detectors and how they work...

[@HaydenHatTrick]

That scene got me upset because he pretty much guaranteed himself cancer

[@SafetyLucas]

@@HaydenHatTrick Maybe he can start a meth empire if Cinnabon doesn't work out.

[@cappuccino3444]

@@HaydenHatTrick smoke detectors only emit alpha radiation which cannot penetrate human skin. The only realistic way for it to harm you is by eating it

[@HaydenHatTrick]

@@cappuccino3444 or breathing it. The fact is he got it all over his cloths and body. He then didn't go home right away, therefore introducing the dust into the guy's house. Then risking any dust blow up during the day from the stunt. Then he probably gets in his car to go somewhere. Even if he goes straight home, when does he put his cloths in the wash? Does he have a shower right away? Honestly, I don't imagine many scenarios where he doesn't inhale it or ingest it once he got it all over himself like that.

[@cappuccino3444]

@@HaydenHatTrick Oh I haven't seen the clip I just assumed there would be a solid lump in there. Dust is cancer for sure

[@chrissscottt]

Very cool. I'm amazed that such a product is available to buy and fascinated by its properties and how it's manufactured. Thanks.

[@666Blaine]

Now you just need a bit of beryllium and you can initiate your gadget.

[@squib308]

Great explanation, I would have otherwise thought the smoke make the air more conductive. I tried to make one of these (spark gap detector thing) but I don't have an alpha source handy; thoriated welding electrodes didn't seem to do the job. I spaced the grid out with pieces of cut up old hotel room keys that I had laying around for misc projects.

[@jimsvideos7201]

7:50 Secondary emission?

[@dwaynezilla]

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!

[@ilyadorokhov7827]

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?

[@PepekBezlepek]

quite incredible there is an OTC Po-210 source. but explains why a brush costs $100 :D

[@StefanGotteswinter]

The process you describe at Minute 10 sounds incredible complex for a really stupid novelty item like that brush.

[@MatthijsvanDuin]

I'm pretty sure most antistatic brushes are used professionally. using it to clean LPs sounds like a minor side-market to me.

[@impeandroid2554]

It is easy to make, probably a couple of minutes of exposure to a commercial cyclotron. The total yield will be ridiculously low. 500uCi is some small fraction of a nanogram.

[@extrastuff9463]

A few other comments here also mentioned using it for photography to remove dust from negatives. And compared to many other things integrated in our stuff today, probably not that bad really. Produce enough of it at a decent scale and many things can work out to economically make sense.

[@NipkowDisk]

Many years ago I had a Staticmaster brush for cleaning photo negatives; it worked great. The refills were not cheap, though!

[@pierretremblay9378]

I'm very curious to see what would append if you put this source inside a plasma ball.

[@redoverdrivetheunstoppable4637]

nothing actually, the power is too low at the end

[@Sunny-hc1bf]

You are a great teacher, I learned quite a lot from you!

[@John_Ridley]

2:30 - Print different versions or...just add shims under the magnets.

[@leocurious9919]

Talk about solution in search of a problem :D

[@frac]

@@leocurious9919 3D printers are like that. Last week I printed out 4 taco holders (basically plastic trays shaped like sine waves ;-) ). A trip to the dollar store probably would have got me a pack of 10... but I have a 3D printer... why take a 5 minute drive when I can print them off myself in only 5 hours...

[@leocurious9919]

@@frac Hahaha, nice! I higly doubt that I would be any different if I had one. But so far there was no "need to have" moment where I needed one :D

[@MrJef06]

Po-210 in a dust brush, wow! Who would have thought? That's quite interesting.

[@kanetw_]

Me, a while back: "Why would the Russians use Po-210 if not to make a statement? It's incredibly hard to get" Me, now:

[@daa3417]

We are told the Russians did it, they say the Brits or Americans did it. Truth is we’ll never know the truth.

[@Nill757]

Polonium 210, *by itself*, is impossible to get without either a reactor or a particle accelerator. The sample here is sealed in gold and silver.

[@kanetw_]

@Lenny69 シ Of course. But it limits how many people can access it and thus be suspected of it.

[@kanetw_]

@@Nill757 nothing you can't un-seal

[@RazorSkinned86]

@@daa3417 radioactive material and even most industrial chemicals can be easily traced back to their place of origin/manufacture. If any third parties with the right resources were able to do an audit and test the samples, they would have been able to tell where the po-210 originated from, what products (if legitimate) it was used in, and even what month of which year it was originally produced. Due to various international organizations tracking nuclear material so closely and the ease with which such materials can be fingerprinted back to their source or origin... it makes them popular for commiting an act a violence or intimidation by nation states. Anyone with the resources to "read the calling card" gets the message loud and clear while due to the technical barrier it still being easy to sow doubt with the layman of the general public.

[@SHMIDTEY]

I've also seen polonium-210 used in a laboratory environment to de-ionize crucibles for moisture analyzers and balances.

[@biswajitjun]

Interesting, Could you show the "Staticmaster brush" working?

[@symonf1966]

Not now i'm guessing.

[@craigs5212]

Nice video Ben, always wondered how the spark detectors worked. Have one of Static brushes but don't think there are very may alpha particles being emitted any more. The half life of Po210 is 138 days and the brush is 20 years old. You should try the standard physics demo of activating some silver by moderated neutrons. A little Beryllium foil in front of the Po source, some paraffin or UHMW moderator and a bit silver to activate.

[@Flumphinator]

"I've got about 15 kV across this." >casually taps plate surprisedpikachu.jpg

[@letterslayer7814]

well hes not touching the live part sooo, and those sparks looked whimpy so not much to worry about

[@Broken_Yugo]

The plate is grounded and the supply is current limited, if you get too close to the live wire it'll hurt but probably no more than that.

[@letterslayer7814]

@@Broken_Yugo thats more along the lines of what i was talking about but im just too tired to work up decent sentences... and just made myself look like a knob...

[@ifluro]

@@Broken_Yugo I'm guessing it's similar to earthing a spark plug lead through your hand.

[@rkan2]

Welder every day? :P

[@tomlovesmon]

The soot in the smoke are large enough particles to effectively shield the scintillation detector from some of the zooming alphas - that’s the reason for the decrease in current. Geiger-Mueller tubes can normally detect beta and gamma radiation through normal means. In order to detect alpha radio there must be a “window” where the casement is made thinner in order to decrease attenuation

[@SuryanIsaac]

Yeah, I think I know what I'm going to spend my pocket money on from Amazon

[@dnmr]

be careful to not burn a hole in your wallet, or anything else for that matter

[@SuryanIsaac]

@@dnmr Thanks, I'll remember

[@MLGJuggernautgaming]

Fascinating video to keep me sane during quarantine

[@EwingTaiwan]

It never occurs to me that I got PTSD from the sound of the arc from watching too many ElectroBOOM.

[@kennethkustren9381]

Ouch !

[@michaeldeloatch7461]

Dude, you didn't even have to mention that was a guitar string, I spotted it right away. You have checked all the boxes of my areas of interest: music, high voltage, sheet metal, and ionizing radiation. What's not to love? ;-)

[@michaeldeloatch7461]

Not to mention, lighting a candle like a BOSS! My 30-something kids like to tease each other putting on a birthday candle per year not just for each other but their poor old parents, too. They usually have half the candles burned down to stubs before all are lighted. Not with your method!

[@linagee]

I would have liked to see a "control" rod with no polonium, just wood.

[@paulwyleciol3459]

you are right - not unlikely the wood is poisened by one of the thousands nuklear Tests (and desasters) over the last decades

[@jimsvideos7201]

This fkin guy right here.

[@KingNast]

I wouldn't.

[@Geolaminar]

wat wat

[@proskub5039]

that just sounds like graphite-tipped control rods with fewer steps!

[@jj74qformerlyjailbreak3]

I just seen that exact static brush in GoodWill store. Didn’t know this about them or I would have bought it for 99 cent. Might walk back over there today to get it.