#radiation exposure

[between-stars-and-waves]

https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-decry-trump-s-rush-loosen-radiation-exposure-standards

Have Trump voters take responsibility and take those jobs.

[snekdood]

https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/seeking-compensation-radiation-survivors-marshall-islands

[rjzimmerman]

EPA Says Higher Radiation Levels Pose ‘No Harmful Health Effect’

In the event of a dirty bomb or a nuclear meltdown, emergency responders can safely tolerate radiation levels equivalent to thousands of chest X-rays, the Environmental Protection Agency said in new guidelines that ease off on established safety levels.

Excerpt:

In the event of a dirty bomb or a nuclear meltdown, emergency responders can safely tolerate radiation levels equivalent to thousands of chest X-rays, the Environmental Protection Agency said in new guidelines that ease off on established safety levels.

The EPA’s determination sets a level ten times the drinking water standard for radiation recommended under President Barack Obama. It could lead to the administration of President Donald Trump weakening radiation safety levels, watchdog groups critical of the move say.

"It’s really a huge amount of radiation they are saying is safe," said Daniel Hirsch, the retired director of the University of California, Santa Cruz’s program on environmental and nuclear policy. "The position taken could readily unravel all radiation protection rules."

The change was included as part of EPA "guidance" on messaging and communications in the event of a nuclear power plant meltdown or dirty bomb attack. The FAQ document, dated September 2017, is part of a broader planning document for nuclear emergencies, and does not carry the weight of federal standards or law.

Even with those lower standards, the EPA had never before said that any level of radiation exposure is safe, according to Jeff Ruch, executive director of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a watchdog group of government workers and retirees. Ruch linked the EPA’s scientific views on radiation exposure to the skepticism of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt that humans are the main contributor to climate change.

“I knew that under Scott Pruitt EPA is in climate denial but now it appears to be in radiation denial, as well,” Ruch said. “This appears to be another case of the Pruitt EPA proclaiming conclusions exactly opposite the overwhelming weight of scientific research.”

[atomic-chronoscaph]

art by Lee Elias (1954)

[justwhump]

Deadwind 1x12

We might want to remind ourselves how season 1 of Deadwind ended before we learn the truth about what happened to Nurmi between seasons 2 and 3.

I promise, the next gif set will explain what’s going on ;)

[scienceguy22]

The human French fry sunscreen myth.

I'm talking about the latest nonsense coming from TikTok: Use beef tallow sunscreen & the recipe for a human French fry. Beef tallow is a good moisturizer because its fatty acids closely resemble the natural oils (sebum) your skin already makes. Beef tallow, unlike Vaseline, can penetrate, soften, & repair the skin's barrier. It's greasy & melts at skin temperature, so it spreads easily & sinks in slowly. Beef tallow is composed of triglycerides, stearic acid (also found in cocoa), palmitic acid (the saturated fat found in palm oil), & oleic acid (a monounsaturated fat found in olive oil). All well & good, but this is far removed from the claim that because it's a good moisturizer, ergo, it's a good sunscreen. Nothing can be further from the truth. Using beef tallow as a sunscreen is as effective as using those small pina colada umbrellas from your drink.

Various online TikTok influencers & online vendors also say it doesn't merely protect you against the sun & moisturize your skin, but it even helps clear acne, slow aging, & soothe eczema. That's quite a résumé for glorified fat from chopped-up cows whose primary talent is storing calories. Skin aging is driven by UV damage, collagen loss & genetics. Moisturizer helps dryness, but it cannot stop wrinkles or sagging. Only retinoids, peptides, antioxidants, & real UV protection slow skin aging. Eczema can be soothed by the moisturizing effect of beef tallow, but eczema is an immune condition. Eczema requires anti-inflammatory creams, immune-modulating treatments, antihistamines & other prescription medicines—beef tallow cannot treat the underlying cause.

Acne is caused by bacteria, hormones, clogged pores, & inflammation. Adding more fat to oily, acne-prone skin only makes things worse. Tallow has no antibacterial, no exfoliating, & no anti-inflammatory drug-like properties. It fails completely as a sunscreen because a sunscreen must absorb the photons before your cells do. Every second you're outdoors, UV light bombards your skin with photons energetic enough to damage DNA, proteins, & cell membranes. Left unchecked, these photons trigger inflammation, accelerate skin aging, & increase the risk of skin cancer.

A good sunscreen must absorb UV light over a broad range of wavelengths (280-320 nm) for UVB, the sunburning rays, & 320-400 nm for the tanning UVA rays (nm means nanometers). And the sunscreen has to have high photostability, meaning it must survive thousands of rounds of irradiation without falling apart, remain stable on the shelf for years, spread evenly across the skin, & avoid penetrating deeply into the body.

Chemists can determine how good a sunscreen is by measuring the wavelengths of light it absorbs. For example, Bemotrizinol (BEMT) absorbs strongly in the UV range of 280-400 nm, across the entire important UV spectrum. It's a modern "broad-spectrum UV filter" used in many sunscreens. Beef tallow only begins absorption starting around 700 nm, which is infrared, not UV—meaning it cannot protect you from sunburn or skin cancer. So all beef tallow will absorb is some heat. Its structure largely ignores UV radiation. One product was designed to prevent sunburn; the other to clog your arteries.

But if you still insist on using beef tallow at the beach, here is your recipe: 1. Coat yourself liberally with beef tallow. 2. Go to the beach around noon, preferably on a cloudless day. 3. Put on itsy bitsy teenie wienie yellow polka-dot bikini on your Bluetooth speaker, & 4. Lie there for 3 hours & voila! You're now the world's best moisturized French fry.

[scienceguy22]

Four astronauts, four bone marrows, one lunar testbed.

The 4 Artemis astronauts are taking their bone marrow, made from their cells, on a handful of chips the size of a USB thumb drive, known as "organ chips." They are completely functional as living bone marrow. While out in deep space, the astronauts will be showered by intense radiation—not just from our Sun, but from the rest of the cosmos. The bone marrow organ chips will provide a precise measure of how that radiation impacts a fundamental part of biology. Bone marrow is the body's blood cell factory, producing red blood cells, white blood cells, & platelets. The bone marrow produces hundreds of billions of cells every day. That's on the order of the number of stars in the Milky Way. Because these systems are highly sensitive to radiation, marrow acts as an early warning "bellwether" for health risks in deep space. The experiment is being called AVATAR for "A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response."

We already know spaceflight does strange things to the human body. Without gravity, load-bearing bones like your legs & spine do less work, which reduces density. Muscles lose mass. Neurological networks become befuddled by the lack of clear orientation. & floating about. The backs of their eyes can swell up. Their heart starts beating out of sync, & their ability to process oxygen drops. It becomes harder to go to the bathroom, & the immune system weakens, allowing dormant conditions to come to the fore or opportunistic, hitchhiking microbes to attack them more effectively. A few experiments aboard the Artemis II will chronicle changes to their immune system & their ability to perform both as individuals & as a team.

Organ chips are not new. These are collections of cell types through which fluids can flow, simulating a living creature or person. If it's a lung on a chip, it literally breathes. If it's a heart, it functions with the same electrical output that a heart tissue would. This is the first time that we're going to have a crew with their matched organ chips. This experiment will help identify health risks to the blood & immune systems during long missions. It will establish countermeasures such as drugs, shielding strategies, & mission protocols. It'll create personalized medical kits catered to each astronaut's biological vulnerabilities. You can't just send every type of medicine into space, not least because small increases in mass equate to large increases in launch costs. After the mission, scientists will perform single-cell RNA sequencing to see how blood-cell development changed at the genetic level.

Thanks to Wiseman, Glover, Koch & Hansen, we'll know a lot more than we ever did before. We could even send organ chips on missions ahead of time, made from crew members, to understand what biological, genetic & physical changes might happen. If AVATAR succeeds, it won't just be NASA's triumph. It'll be important to everyone. The same data can improve biomedical technology, develop personalized medicine and drug response prediction, comprehend aging and immune decline, and advance cancer treatment on Earth. It'll also be important to scientists, engineers & even bougie tourists with dreams of bouncing across the Moon.

[scienceguy22]

Life finds a way in Chernobyl—but not a longer one.

When the nuclear reactor exploded 40 years ago, many assumed the surrounding land would be biologically dead for generations. It was hard to imagine a future Chernobyl as anything other than a wasteland. At first, the pill prophecy seemed to be true as the pine forests nearest the plant turned an orange-red & died. But remarkably today, great white egrets hunt in the shadows of the reactor. Large mammals are usually the first to disappear, yet in Chernobyl they are thriving. Wolves roam widely, & brown bears have reappeared after long absences. What's strange is that wolves exposed to daily radiation levels 6 times higher than human safety limits are showing enhanced DNA repair & immune modulation resembling those of patients undergoing radiation therapy—potentially conferring cancer resistance. European bison move through abandoned farmland. Clear genetic mutations may not always be clearly evident, but the absence of apparent harm does not mean Chernobyl's impacts are not playing out.

Elevated chromosome abnormalities are seen in bank voles. There are higher mutation rates in birds & rodents. And there is increased embryonic lethality. The increase in large mammals is due to human absence, no hunting, or any human interference. Frogs on average are 40% darker than those outside the zone. Why? Because darker skin (corresponding to higher levels of melanin) protects tissues from radiation by neutralizing some of the cellular damage it causes. The individuals that survived & turned darker reproduce slightly better. Clinically, the darker frogs show no improvement in overall health. Another example of life getting darker is fungi growing where almost nothing else can survive, coating the walls of ruined reactor buildings, creeping across debris & colonizing environments saturated with ionizing radiation. Even more befuddling, some of these fungi appear to grow more vigorously in high-radiation environments.

Hundreds of feral dogs still live in & around the exclusion zone, all descended from pets abandoned during the 1986 evacuation. These dogs are genetically distinct from dogs even 10 miles away. Some of the more contaminated areas have localized declines in the number of insects. All of this shows us that species are adapting fast, even if they don't live as long, have higher tumor rates, have higher cataract incidence, have reduced brain size in some birds (5% smaller), & have up to 40% increased sterility in high-radiation bird populations. Large mammals are thriving ecologically, but not biologically. Many individuals still carry radiation-related damage, but the population rebounds because the ecosystem is safer without humans. Chernobyl's ecosystems have been changing for 40 years. Silence was once a part of the story, but not the final chapter.