If radiation is a flow of particles and wave, then square area should be more meaningful such as the unit of pressure. If by acumulation the a volume is more significant because if treated such as poison the more concentrated the worst.
Thank you for this. More people need to know about the Banana Equivalent Dose. It helps give context to how much radiation you're getting. Because the 50 bananas worth of radiation from a dental x-ray doesn't sound too bad. The 200,000 bananas that an average nuclear plant worker should get is easier to conceptualize. Like that's a lot of bananas in a year.
@@ObadiahtheSlim power plant workers dont experience that much radiation. We've progressed well beyond that point. Nuclear power plants are amazing. You can swim in the water containing fuel rods and still not get enough radiation to damage you.
david burrus> And he gave up. He seemed invested then he just kind of ehhhd the end. He didn't give up, he followed the trail as far as he could. The only thing left was to go home or to book a hotel until after the weekend when the museum opened again just so that he can hit another dead-end.
Brandon Stoppel> …to answer a seemingly insignificant historical question. Theoretically, he could have dug up some information that could throw the whole thing into question and allow New Jersey to make a claim on Staten Island which would hardly be insignificant.
Transmitting signal with ionizing radiation would be a dumb thing to do anyway. It's going to run into something, ionize it, and then your signal is lost.
that depends. you see unlike alpha particles, electrons and positrons, which only have a range of a few metres in air, gamma photons are actually very unlikely to interact with anything, in fact gamma radiation can actually travel through materials other electromagnetic waves couldn't.
@@windhelmguard5295 then again, they are pretty hard to modulate an actual signal onto them. Also, to have higher energy radiation, you need to put more energy into it. For everyday use, it's highly impractical
@@moag2000 How in the world could you modulate an ionizing source to send a signal? The best I could think of is a shutter in front of a hot object; that or turn on and off an xray fast enough.
@@BlackWolf42- Changing the rate of decay and measuring the changing amounts of energy given off could work, but it would be rather imprecise, since the rate of decay is not constant or regular.
Scientists should use it when they need to tell someone that this place isn’t radioactive enough to be dangerous. “Oh it’s just like standing in a room full of bananas” is a lot more reassuring than fancy science lingo. As Chernobyl famously pointed out, the seemingly insignificant 3.6 Roentgens from the cheap meters are equivalent to 300 chest X rays and the physicists took iodine pills when they measured 8 milliroentgens in their office.
I received a total of 25 Greys spread out over five weeks when I was being treated for cancer. Since the radiation was directed at my abdomen, I got a small amount of "radiation sickness", nausea and diarrhea, along with light radiation burns. When someone says, "Don't eat that food - it's been irradiated!", my response is, "So have I!" ;-)
But, "remember you can never have too much water in a nuclear reactor." An old SNL skit where, leaving out all the punctuation gives you a somewhat ambiguous statement.
So in a nutshell: The raw energy given off by something: eV (electronvolts) The number of nuclear decays happening per second: Becquerels The number of nuclear decays happening in 1 gram of radium-226: Curie The amount of electrical energy being produced through ionisation of air: Roentgen How much radiation is being absorbed by your body (energy per kg of mass): Gray (old version - rad) How much radiation is being absorbed by your body (accounting for radiation type) Sievert (old version - rem) Have I got that right? This episode was pretty confusing.
Now which one is used in Chernobyl. The USSR used 'roentgen' which there are multiple completely different units, and some dosimeters show 100 roentgen = 1 uSv (or some other power of 10), so is it really the cubic centemetre of air like he said in the video, or is it rem/rad that was referred to as roentgen
Good video! One small note though, Rad and Rem are the standard units of measure for ionizing radiation in the US. Gray and Sieverts are considered international units of measure like other SI units.
Wow, all the different type of measurement really makes this difficult. Thanks for this episode, I did enjoy. Wish you had given more examples of everyday exposures.
That’s actually not right, though (and yes, I saw the quotation marks). The becquerel measures decays per second, and there are no decays in X-rays by definition because if it’s the result of a nuclear decay, it’s called gamma rays (yep, actually the difference between X and gamma rays is not the energy, but the source). X-rays are made by accelerating/decelerating electrons in a vacuum tube.
Okay, you got me a bit #triggered here. As a former nuclear engineer (ELT) in the US Navy, I can tell you that rad and rem are not outdated. The civilian world might not use them as much anymore, but the nuclear Navy does. When you take into account all the submarines, aircraft carriers, shipyards, prototypes, and various other shore based facilities that support the nuclear Navy, there's still a lot of people that use rad/rem on the regular.. Saying it's outdated is like saying a book is outdated because everyone uses e-readers or audiobooks.. It's not the newest form, but it's still used a lot. Aside from that, video still good. Spot on on what radiation is and all that, making it interesting and informational, which is what we really need.
@@heatbaum11 Gamma "particles" are just high-energy photons (a quantum of electromagnet radiation) - by definition, they have to be massless. They do have momentum, but no mass.
Glad this topic is coming up. Too many people don't know enough about nuclear nor radiation. Hopefully this topic stays in the spot light for the next few months or years.
It's thanks to this non education that we still use coal for power today. If we didn't have the nuclear scare of the 1970-1980s we would be using clean carbon free nuclear power instead of nasty coal which funnily enough releases more radiation into the environment than a nuke plant...
@@AdamSmith-gs2dv I'd recommend the book "power to save the world" also to have any anti nuclear power people you know check it out too. It gives a great deal into the topic. I do hope that people will let go of thier fear so we can move in that direction before it is too late. But like always people fear that which they don't understand.
Why did the FCC, NIH, NIOSH, OSHA and other regulatory bodies fix an SAR specific absorption rate for cell phone radiation at a maximum of 1.6 watts of energy absorbed per kilogram of body weight? The limit was set due to the thermal effects of cell phone radiation (all RF radiation can heat human body tissue at high enough levels) - it was not set to mitigate other biological effects cell phone radiation might have such as DNA damage or cancer.
@@ursaltydog Cell phone radiation simply CANNOT have any other impacts to living cells than (at the most!) warming them up. There ARE no other biological effects than heat - physically impossible. The wavelength of radio-waves are *below* the red side of the visible spectrum and ALL ionizing waves are *above* the ultraviolet side of the visible spectrum. Therefore: Infrared light is the most dangerous of ALL radio-waves, so beware of the radiation of your toaster, not so much your mobile phone or your microwave! Visible light is is even more "dangerous" and everything above ultraviolet light is *really* dangerous, because only these waves are ionizing. UV-radiation is the mildest of all ionizing waves, which is why we should use sun blockers. tl;dr: long wavelengths (no impact up to heat) < middle wavelengths (visible light) < short wavelength (ionizing = dangerous!)
@cory Really? Forget people but it could spell ruin for birds and other such animals? If it hurts other animals, even of the aviary type and trees, it can hurt us for generations going forward. Btw, great that you mentioned crowd control. I wonder if that is what was used on U.S. citizens working in Cuba and in China when they incurred brain injuries.. Perhaps there are more people brain damaged than we think, considering the electorate.
@@hape3862 UV radiation is the mildest, yet we should use sun blockers? If it's so mild, then why the increase in skin cancers particularly in higher elevations and closer to the tropics and rising. I live in Tennessee, and the UV has been out of this world in the past few years. Enough to have cancer removed from my scalp, and I have a head of hair and wear hats. Perhaps it's not the UV-A or UV-B, but UV-C, the cosmic kind that rarely if ever touches earth's soil, but is now more prevalent. FCC: www.fcc.gov/general/specific-absorption-rate-sar-cellular-telephones NTP: www.niehs.nih.gov/health/materials/cell_phone_radiofrequency_radiation_studies_508.pdf NIH: www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/high-exposure-radiofrequency-radiation-linked-tumor-activity-male-rats
@cory "Higher microwave frequencies" is literally just infrared. You get tons of that by the sun alone. You're seriously scientifically illiterate lmao
after 2 grays you can die. Past that point, its truly a coinflip if you live or not. Anything past 10 Gray and you 100% die. You can die in 6-8 weeks if you've received a full body dose of 2 Gray. Source: I'm a bone photographer
Thanks for the update on ionizing radiation. In the early 1980s I worked for an instrumentation company that used radioactive sources to analyze lithography in borehole walls. We carried film badges to measure our exposure in milli-rems over a specified amount of time, periodically changing out old badges with fresh new ones. We were told that some geographical areas had high, natural radiological emission rates and that flying at high altitudes could result in more exposure than with our industrial exposure.
True! I discovered that my daughter had put her microwave oven in the basement and asked why, as it was very inconvenient. "The electrician told me it gave off radiation" was the answer!
This video is so helpful. I've been reading about the history of nuclear weapons lately and it's been so confusing to see all these different units, and the Wikipedia explanations being to esoteric for me to understand
Great video! I would just like to point out that it is still standard practice in medicine to calculate radio-imaging doses in units of Curie or Bq so it is just as important to understand as the Grey in a nuclear pharmacy practice
It might be a bit in depth, but would have liked to see you talk about deterministic and stochastic effects with regards to medical radiation exposure. Especially as you touch upon potential risks and how it can cause cancer.
Superb video! 🙂 when I was researching for my book ‘The Chernobyl Zone Survival Guide’ trying to get my head around the different units was a nightmare. I settled on Sieverts since it was the easiest for a lay reader (and a lay writer 😜) to understand. This video would have been very useful last year when I was writing it 😜
When I do contractor work for Excelon (maintenence/construction), all our paper work, briefings, and our electronic dosimeters use rem units. So when you say they are outdated, that's news to me ;)
Alpha is a bit tricky. The radiation itself is not really that dangerous on the outside because the alpha particle doesnt travel more than a few inches in air and practically nowhere in more dense matter. The danger with alpha particles is contact, via inhalation or ingestion, with the radionuclide, which would then release the particle and it will almost certainly get absorbed by you body, stripping electrons from the first thing it hits.
Your lifetime risk of dying of cancer is already like 1 in 5, though. It's one of the usual suspects when it comes to people dying. Adding 1 in 2000 to that, does it really make that much of a difference?
V21Jays damn. I actually knew that. I learned it when there was a big scare about processed meats and people were saying it increases your risk of cancer by X%... same thing, it increases your “base” risk by a minute %, meaning a negligible increase.
@@AA-fn9xz Ya, base risk for cancer is actually 40% these days (cause we live longer). Generally, the excess risk from diagnostics is far less than developing cancer under the radar, particularly for aggressive cancers like pancreatic and such.
I know it's not a formal scientific measure, but I was rather hoping to hear about banana equivalent dose. It's too amusing to talk about radiation in terms of bananas, at least in my opinion.
Finally, I have a clear understanding of radiation measuring units. Now if I can just keep the Troy ounce vs the Avoirdupois ounce straight. Or a gold karat vs a diamond carat. And when my British friends tell me how many Stone they weigh. Plus while we're at it, astronomy may as well confuse us with astronomical units vs parsec vs light years.
Is it correct to refer to gamma radiation as a particle like he did at 3:40? I'm sure if we're going into the itty bitty of quantum physics it's gamma photons, which are particle-waves and whatnot, but to my understanding when talking about radioactive decay isn't it better to differentiate particle byproducts (such as alpha and beta particles) from wave byproducts (like gamma or x-ray radiation)?
While studying medical imaging physics in my engineering program, we pretty much only used mSv and rad. Gray, even though it's technically the SI unit, wasn't used as much since most calculations were done on smaller scales. It made more sense to just have it in rad than to possibly misplace a decimal
As a radiation oncologist, I approve of this message ;) haha great episode! Also @scishow, if you want any kind of interview, or whatever I'd love to be involved
And what about the type of radiation that does the most harm but wasn't even mentioned? The ultraviolet which kills through skin cancer, one of those things no one wants to hear about for some odd reason.
50 mSv/yr is also the dose rate for many high background radiation areas. Other high altitude locations, like Denver, expose people to about 10 mSv. Low dose radiation is complicated to understand the exact health effects as we assume a linear nature while not actually observing it at extremely low doses, like the ones discussed largely in this video. The best evidence we have for harm really keys in at about 100mSv/yr.
Growing up in the 80s, we were taught about rems and rads. The new measures confuse the hell out of me and I keep having to use conversion calculators.
Thanks for the video! This topic is incredibly complex, and you kind of went through a lot of information pretty quickly. But I think you should remember the paradigm of "Linear, No Threshold" which correlates to radiation-linked cancer risk, and implies that starting from zero the greater the amount of radiation absorbed equals a directly proportionately greater risk of developing cancer. This is an outdated concept which is in part responsible for the environmental disaster that is 'public disapproval of nuclear energy plants.' The concept of "hormesis" asserts that a small dose of delivered radiation (higher than the average background radiation) can actually result in various health benefits. Hormesis has more scientific backing than Linear, No Threshold and it would be great if a scientific promulgator such as SciShow were privy to this insight! Thanks for reading, you guys rock!
Well... Non-ionizing radiation can be harmful too, if the power is high enough. Even with sunscreen, sun rays, infrared lamps, and radiation from furnaces can cause skin burns. Microwaves can be dangerous if the door's safety interlock fails.
Something people should remember chemicals (depending on the type) can last forever while radiation will eventually cease. A harmful chemical can be harmful for eternity while radiation always has a limited lifespan. (Not saying all chemicals are harmful or that they cant be altered to become safer but that there are things more dangerous then radiation)
1 sievert = 100 Rem 1 Gray = 100 Rad I only ever learned Rem/Rad in the Navy, and also Curie. Never once did they use sievert, gray, bec, and we only briefly covered roentgen, as that was never really used. Pretty old school curriculum, but I wouldn't say it is outdated, as it is still regularly used. It just isn't as mainstream. They accomplish the same thing, they're just a factor of 100 smaller. Also, alpha particles do have the potential to cause the most biological damage, but because they're so big and ionize with so much, their travel distance is really short, so they're not a threat to humans unless ingested. Top layers of your dead skin soak all of their damage. This is why smokers receive a lot of radiation from the alpha decay of Po-210.
Doing industrial radiography we use mR for dose rate, rem for dose, and have to record both Curries and GBq on our transport documents. I agree not outdated.
Correction! At 2:32, the label should say 1 cm^3 not 1 cm^2!
bah, cubic or square we dont care !
@@mho... it kind of does though...
You should insert a pop-up comment in the video directly that appears at 2:32 ;)
If radiation is a flow of particles and wave, then square area should be more meaningful such as the unit of pressure. If by acumulation the a volume is more significant because if treated such as poison the more concentrated the worst.
SciShow oh, I was on y’all like Becquerels on a banana.
I'm pretty sure the only radiation unit I need to know about is the BED (Banana equivalent dose
).
Don't forget the LMAO. Lifetime Median Adjusted Overdose.
Thank you for this. More people need to know about the Banana Equivalent Dose. It helps give context to how much radiation you're getting. Because the 50 bananas worth of radiation from a dental x-ray doesn't sound too bad. The 200,000 bananas that an average nuclear plant worker should get is easier to conceptualize. Like that's a lot of bananas in a year.
Not great for scientific calculations. Great tool for communicating to lay people, however.
yeah imagine the amount of calories they're getting obadiah that could make them obese
@@ObadiahtheSlim power plant workers dont experience that much radiation. We've progressed well beyond that point. Nuclear power plants are amazing. You can swim in the water containing fuel rods and still not get enough radiation to damage you.
Can we still call it rads though, it's the cool thing to say.
You mean it's rad Dude ?
@@christelheadington1136 Excactly what I was thinking thank you.
Fallout is lame if I gotta worry about grays
@@MarkyMark1221 Grey is the most beautiful colour. (Hope you get the reference :P)
Well the confusion leads to hysteria and bad policy decisions, so no :D
And one Grey is the amount of curiosity required to send you across an ocean to answer a seemingly insignificant historical question.
Brandon Stoppel Does that guy still make videos?
@@mxnjones He just uploaded today
david burrus> And he gave up. He seemed invested then he just kind of ehhhd the end.
He didn't give up, he followed the trail as far as he could. The only thing left was to go home or to book a hotel until after the weekend when the museum opened again just so that he can hit another dead-end.
Brandon Stoppel> …to answer a seemingly insignificant historical question.
Theoretically, he could have dug up some information that could throw the whole thing into question and allow New Jersey to make a claim on Staten Island which would hardly be insignificant.
Why dont i understand this? Could someone please elaborate?
Transmitting signal with ionizing radiation would be a dumb thing to do anyway. It's going to run into something, ionize it, and then your signal is lost.
that depends.
you see unlike alpha particles, electrons and positrons, which only have a range of a few metres in air, gamma photons are actually very unlikely to interact with anything, in fact gamma radiation can actually travel through materials other electromagnetic waves couldn't.
@@windhelmguard5295 then again, they are pretty hard to modulate an actual signal onto them. Also, to have higher energy radiation, you need to put more energy into it.
For everyday use, it's highly impractical
Lol can you imagine
@@moag2000 How in the world could you modulate an ionizing source to send a signal? The best I could think of is a shutter in front of a hot object; that or turn on and off an xray fast enough.
@@BlackWolf42- Changing the rate of decay and measuring the changing amounts of energy given off could work, but it would be rather imprecise, since the rate of decay is not constant or regular.
Personally I'm a fan of the Banana Equivalent Dose. It's just so whimsical
People are worried about the radiation dose from fish near Fukushima, even though its just like double a bananas worth of radiation by mass.
Scientists should use it when they need to tell someone that this place isn’t radioactive enough to be dangerous. “Oh it’s just like standing in a room full of bananas” is a lot more reassuring than fancy science lingo. As Chernobyl famously pointed out, the seemingly insignificant 3.6 Roentgens from the cheap meters are equivalent to 300 chest X rays and the physicists took iodine pills when they measured 8 milliroentgens in their office.
I received a total of 25 Greys spread out over five weeks when I was being treated for cancer. Since the radiation was directed at my abdomen, I got a small amount of "radiation sickness", nausea and diarrhea, along with light radiation burns. When someone says, "Don't eat that food - it's been irradiated!", my response is, "So have I!" ;-)
Hello, after receiving this 25greys ,are you ok, I hope so and take care of your self
I don’t need to know about different radiation units I need WATER IN MY REACTOR!
Yeah, it’s always a pain when there’s a meltdown for not having enough cooling.
All you need to know is it’s the equivalent of a chest X-ray, and I’m late for a checkup so...
But, "remember you can never have too much water in a nuclear reactor." An old SNL skit where, leaving out all the punctuation gives you a somewhat ambiguous statement.
He's delusional, take him to the infirmiary.
So in a nutshell:
The raw energy given off by something: eV (electronvolts)
The number of nuclear decays happening per second: Becquerels
The number of nuclear decays happening in 1 gram of radium-226: Curie
The amount of electrical energy being produced through ionisation of air: Roentgen
How much radiation is being absorbed by your body (energy per kg of mass): Gray (old version - rad)
How much radiation is being absorbed by your body (accounting for radiation type) Sievert (old version - rem)
Have I got that right? This episode was pretty confusing.
Basically, yea, you're pretty much bang on the money. :)
@@existenceisillusion6528 Good point. I had to look for other sources to try and get my head around roentgen and Curies, for example.
Your delusional =P
Now which one is used in Chernobyl. The USSR used 'roentgen' which there are multiple completely different units, and some dosimeters show 100 roentgen = 1 uSv (or some other power of 10), so is it really the cubic centemetre of air like he said in the video, or is it rem/rad that was referred to as roentgen
I usually set my geiger counter to cpm and microseiverts
"its only 3.6 roentgen go back to work comrades"
Casey what is this a reference to?
@@naturegirl1999 Chernobyl
@@naturegirl1999 Chernobyl
Not great, not terrible.
Thank you
Good video! One small note though, Rad and Rem are the standard units of measure for ionizing radiation in the US. Gray and Sieverts are considered international units of measure like other SI units.
That's what I was wondering...
Wow, all the different type of measurement really makes this difficult. Thanks for this episode, I did enjoy. Wish you had given more examples of everyday exposures.
Agreed. Some tangible examples would have really helped.
This was the best explanation of all of the various labels used in describing radioactive energy that I have ever seen.
No field has more units than Radiology... It's downright silly but this video is hands down the best quick explanation I've seen yet.
Scichannel: “You only need to know about Grays and Sieverts”
USA Nuclear Plants: “Don’t tell me what do! WE ARE USING RAD AND REM!!!”
alarcon99 the US navy uses rad and rem too
@@matthewd109 ya, it is annoying, use real units America!
I learned using Rad and Rem too. (T~T) Now my brain has trouble thinking in Gray and Sievert.
Not just US plants. All the plants work together, so they all use Rads and Rems
''37 000 000 000 Becquerels. I'm told it's the equivalent of a chest x-ray.''
That’s actually not right, though (and yes, I saw the quotation marks). The becquerel measures decays per second, and there are no decays in X-rays by definition because if it’s the result of a nuclear decay, it’s called gamma rays (yep, actually the difference between X and gamma rays is not the energy, but the source). X-rays are made by accelerating/decelerating electrons in a vacuum tube.
Yes comrade
Me: oh I only need to understand just 2?
Scishow: well yes, but no.
Okay, you got me a bit #triggered here. As a former nuclear engineer (ELT) in the US Navy, I can tell you that rad and rem are not outdated. The civilian world might not use them as much anymore, but the nuclear Navy does. When you take into account all the submarines, aircraft carriers, shipyards, prototypes, and various other shore based facilities that support the nuclear Navy, there's still a lot of people that use rad/rem on the regular.. Saying it's outdated is like saying a book is outdated because everyone uses e-readers or audiobooks.. It's not the newest form, but it's still used a lot.
Aside from that, video still good. Spot on on what radiation is and all that, making it interesting and informational, which is what we really need.
Civilian world still uses rem, at least in generation.
Yeah, but that’s the US’s autistic clinging to outdated units
Rads arent outdated!
But the Fallout engine is ahem *Todd* ahem
"It just works"™
Except it doesn't Todd.
Awesome. Thanks. I worked in the nuclear industry and nuclear navy, and this summary is great.
maninspired same, rad rem and ci were the basis for everything
3:40 "Gamma particles are the lightest..." I mean, I guess that technically a massless particle is lighter than a matter particle.
They aren't massless...
@@heatbaum11 Gamma "particles" are just high-energy photons (a quantum of electromagnet radiation) - by definition, they have to be massless. They do have momentum, but no mass.
@@heatbaum11 Already corrected bellow, just wanted to echo that, yes, photos are massless :D
Glad this topic is coming up. Too many people don't know enough about nuclear nor radiation. Hopefully this topic stays in the spot light for the next few months or years.
It's thanks to this non education that we still use coal for power today. If we didn't have the nuclear scare of the 1970-1980s we would be using clean carbon free nuclear power instead of nasty coal which funnily enough releases more radiation into the environment than a nuke plant...
@@AdamSmith-gs2dv I'd recommend the book "power to save the world" also to have any anti nuclear power people you know check it out too. It gives a great deal into the topic. I do hope that people will let go of thier fear so we can move in that direction before it is too late. But like always people fear that which they don't understand.
Not great, not terrible.
Not terrible... but No one leaves. We cut the phone lines.
I've seen worse.
George Deng came here for this comment🤣
Eyyyy, Chernobyl fan I see xD
Comrade Deng is delusional, take him to the infirmary.
2:32 that ought to read 1 *cm^3* not 1 cm^2!
Your right. 1 cm^2 would be squared not cubes
Great job guys. People need this. Take the mystery out of radiation and people won’t be so fearful of something that isn’t.
“Phones don’t have enough radiation to damage cells”
Karens gonna pretend they didn’t hear that
Why did the FCC, NIH, NIOSH, OSHA and other regulatory bodies fix an SAR specific absorption rate for cell phone radiation at a maximum of 1.6 watts of energy absorbed per kilogram of body weight? The limit was set due to the thermal effects of cell phone radiation (all RF radiation can heat human body tissue at high enough levels) - it was not set to mitigate other biological effects cell phone radiation might have such as DNA damage or cancer.
@@ursaltydog Cell phone radiation simply CANNOT have any other impacts to living cells than (at the most!) warming them up. There ARE no other biological effects than heat - physically impossible. The wavelength of radio-waves are *below* the red side of the visible spectrum and ALL ionizing waves are *above* the ultraviolet side of the visible spectrum. Therefore: Infrared light is the most dangerous of ALL radio-waves, so beware of the radiation of your toaster, not so much your mobile phone or your microwave! Visible light is is even more "dangerous" and everything above ultraviolet light is *really* dangerous, because only these waves are ionizing. UV-radiation is the mildest of all ionizing waves, which is why we should use sun blockers.
tl;dr: long wavelengths (no impact up to heat) < middle wavelengths (visible light) < short wavelength (ionizing = dangerous!)
@cory Really? Forget people but it could spell ruin for birds and other such animals? If it hurts other animals, even of the aviary type and trees, it can hurt us for generations going forward. Btw, great that you mentioned crowd control. I wonder if that is what was used on U.S. citizens working in Cuba and in China when they incurred brain injuries.. Perhaps there are more people brain damaged than we think, considering the electorate.
@@hape3862 UV radiation is the mildest, yet we should use sun blockers? If it's so mild, then why the increase in skin cancers particularly in higher elevations and closer to the tropics and rising. I live in Tennessee, and the UV has been out of this world in the past few years. Enough to have cancer removed from my scalp, and I have a head of hair and wear hats. Perhaps it's not the UV-A or UV-B, but UV-C, the cosmic kind that rarely if ever touches earth's soil, but is now more prevalent.
FCC: www.fcc.gov/general/specific-absorption-rate-sar-cellular-telephones
NTP: www.niehs.nih.gov/health/materials/cell_phone_radiofrequency_radiation_studies_508.pdf
NIH: www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/high-exposure-radiofrequency-radiation-linked-tumor-activity-male-rats
@cory "Higher microwave frequencies" is literally just infrared. You get tons of that by the sun alone. You're seriously scientifically illiterate lmao
The general population has needed this video for a loooong time. Now you should do a video about what is considered a chemical.
So, that means that according to Fallout, 10 grays means death.
According to Fallout, you probably had to buy another DLC to be able to post that comment ;) (I'm joking!)
3.5-4.5 Gy is the LD50/30 range. Half of all people receiving an acute dose of gamma radiation in that range will die within 30 days.
@@franciscoxavier7398 that would be an EA move.
@@SimuLord ohh, thanks for that. lol
after 2 grays you can die. Past that point, its truly a coinflip if you live or not. Anything past 10 Gray and you 100% die. You can die in 6-8 weeks if you've received a full body dose of 2 Gray. Source: I'm a bone photographer
This is EXACTLY the answer I've been trying to figure out for a long time! Thank you!
Thanks for the update on ionizing radiation. In the early 1980s I worked for an instrumentation company that used radioactive sources to analyze lithography in borehole walls. We carried film badges to measure our exposure in milli-rems over a specified amount of time, periodically changing out old badges with fresh new ones.
We were told that some geographical areas had high, natural radiological emission rates and that flying at high altitudes could result in more exposure than with our industrial exposure.
OMG...he blinked toward the end...Thanks, this actually helped clear up quite a bit.
This is the one video every person on Earth needs to watch.
As an X-ray technician, I'm glad this video was made. Too many people incorrectly think microwaves and cellphones emit ionizing radiation.
True! I discovered that my daughter had put her microwave oven in the basement and asked why, as it was very inconvenient. "The electrician told me it gave off radiation" was the answer!
I still prefer using bananas as a unit of radiation.
If you want to be really strict, Roentgens for Ionisation chamber measurements, counts per minute/second for GM tube/Geiger measurements.
Excellent description. Thank you.
Straight to the point! Clears up a lot!
Amazing presentation
Excellent guide
This is a great post. I’m going to use this next time someone at the town hall is screaming that cell towers will kill the town with cancer.
This video is so helpful. I've been reading about the history of nuclear weapons lately and it's been so confusing to see all these different units, and the Wikipedia explanations being to esoteric for me to understand
The host, Michael Aranda, is radiating positive energy. 😊
Great video! I would just like to point out that it is still standard practice in medicine to calculate radio-imaging doses in units of Curie or Bq so it is just as important to understand as the Grey in a nuclear pharmacy practice
It might be a bit in depth, but would have liked to see you talk about deterministic and stochastic effects with regards to medical radiation exposure. Especially as you touch upon potential risks and how it can cause cancer.
Super explanation
Everyone should know all things about these types of waves…not just these types but the types that are being studied in all types
We only need to know 3.6 reogton is equivalent to 1 xray.
It’s not 3.6, it’s 15,000
Imagine you grew additional arms. That would be so rad!
I think my old radio-biology teacher would be satisfied with this, so you're getting my seal of approval
The measuring cups in the thumbnail are genius.
The only one that matters is not 3.6 roentgen, but 15000. Spicy
I’ve seen worse
Not great, not terrible
This is the video my mom wanted. Thank you!
(I just need to translate it now 😂)
Superb video! 🙂 when I was researching for my book ‘The Chernobyl Zone Survival Guide’ trying to get my head around the different units was a nightmare. I settled on Sieverts since it was the easiest for a lay reader (and a lay writer 😜) to understand. This video would have been very useful last year when I was writing it 😜
Awesome. thanks!!
Thanks for this video! Finally a good explanation on radiation
When I do contractor work for Excelon (maintenence/construction), all our paper work, briefings, and our electronic dosimeters use rem units. So when you say they are outdated, that's news to me ;)
Ya, mostly overseas is it way more common, so it is the international unit of choice, but meerica
@@BeCurieUs 'murica*
@@ewthmatth :D
Alpha is a bit tricky. The radiation itself is not really that dangerous on the outside because the alpha particle doesnt travel more than a few inches in air and practically nowhere in more dense matter. The danger with alpha particles is contact, via inhalation or ingestion, with the radionuclide, which would then release the particle and it will almost certainly get absorbed by you body, stripping electrons from the first thing it hits.
1/2000?
Man that’s still kinda scary.
@@dragonknight512 It's a 0.05% increase, you forgot to multiply by 100 to get the percentage.
Fenridium oops your right. @5:14 I thought he said “percent” the first time I watched it, he actually said “respectively” XD. My b.
Your lifetime risk of dying of cancer is already like 1 in 5, though. It's one of the usual suspects when it comes to people dying. Adding 1 in 2000 to that, does it really make that much of a difference?
This vid was absolutely fantastic! This has been confusing to me, even after a physics focus back in college! 😂 Thanks!
Thank you, this was very helpful.
You make me feel old. When I was a reactor operator in the navy, we used REM.
Do you guys have a video on the difference between radiation and radioactive contamination?
This video is totally rad!
this is actually super helpful thank you scishow
That abdomen CT scan seems seriously dangerous. 1 in 2000 is no joke...
It raises it *by* 1 in 2000, whereas your baseline risk of dying from cancer is already something like 25% IIRC. An extra 1/2000 is pretty negligible.
Yeah, that get me concerned... captain?!?!
V21Jays damn. I actually knew that. I learned it when there was a big scare about processed meats and people were saying it increases your risk of cancer by X%... same thing, it increases your “base” risk by a minute %, meaning a negligible increase.
@@AA-fn9xz Ya, base risk for cancer is actually 40% these days (cause we live longer). Generally, the excess risk from diagnostics is far less than developing cancer under the radar, particularly for aggressive cancers like pancreatic and such.
This is an incredibly useful video; thank you!
Thanks! Well done!!
When I saw the Seivert units I kept hearing "Show me that smile again..." playing in my head.
Oh! We're learning this in Physics - nice timing
But does this video pass the Becquerel Test?
(That's where two emitted particles interact with each other without talking about a man.)
"Mom, can I stay home from school today? I got the sieverts."
I know it's not a formal scientific measure, but I was rather hoping to hear about banana equivalent dose. It's too amusing to talk about radiation in terms of bananas, at least in my opinion.
that confused me tho cuz bananas don't admit ionising radiation
Finally, I have a clear understanding of radiation measuring units. Now if I can just keep the Troy ounce vs the Avoirdupois ounce straight. Or a gold karat vs a diamond carat. And when my British friends tell me how many Stone they weigh. Plus while we're at it, astronomy may as well confuse us with astronomical units vs parsec vs light years.
This very good, now I need spanish subtitles for show it to my radiology protection class.
Is it correct to refer to gamma radiation as a particle like he did at 3:40? I'm sure if we're going into the itty bitty of quantum physics it's gamma photons, which are particle-waves and whatnot, but to my understanding when talking about radioactive decay isn't it better to differentiate particle byproducts (such as alpha and beta particles) from wave byproducts (like gamma or x-ray radiation)?
There's really no difference, like you said. It's just the preferred jargon most of the time.
sometimes it is a useful distinction, other times, not. Just depends on the context!
Gamma rays are light and fast is an understatement. Gamma rays are massless and travel at the speed of light.
While studying medical imaging physics in my engineering program, we pretty much only used mSv and rad. Gray, even though it's technically the SI unit, wasn't used as much since most calculations were done on smaller scales. It made more sense to just have it in rad than to possibly misplace a decimal
Röntgen is also the german word for x-ray
Well, he did discover them!
The banana is the only measurement you need to know; it scales everything
"Just remember the grey unit: it's got 3 other units in it"
Roentgen measurement is not great, not terrible.
As a radiation oncologist, I approve of this message ;) haha great episode! Also @scishow, if you want any kind of interview, or whatever I'd love to be involved
And what about the type of radiation that does the most harm but wasn't even mentioned? The ultraviolet which kills through skin cancer, one of those things no one wants to hear about for some odd reason.
@@bhatkat Kenneth, stop making so much sense breh. Let the people die how thay want to die.
50 mSv/yr is also the dose rate for many high background radiation areas. Other high altitude locations, like Denver, expose people to about 10 mSv. Low dose radiation is complicated to understand the exact health effects as we assume a linear nature while not actually observing it at extremely low doses, like the ones discussed largely in this video. The best evidence we have for harm really keys in at about 100mSv/yr.
Fun fact: the Soviet roentgen and the "standard" roentgen are slightly different. The Soviet one is often called the REV (roentgen equivalent value).
So, sievert is to gray as wind chill or humidex is to temperature?
Great show!
Growing up in the 80s, we were taught about rems and rads. The new measures confuse the hell out of me and I keep having to use conversion calculators.
Make sure to stock up on Rad-X before you start adventuring. 😉👍
I prefer to gather rads then get rid of them via RadAway
great video!
Thanks for the video! This topic is incredibly complex, and you kind of went through a lot of information pretty quickly.
But I think you should remember the paradigm of "Linear, No Threshold" which correlates to radiation-linked cancer risk, and implies that starting from zero the greater the amount of radiation absorbed equals a directly proportionately greater risk of developing cancer. This is an outdated concept which is in part responsible for the environmental disaster that is 'public disapproval of nuclear energy plants.' The concept of "hormesis" asserts that a small dose of delivered radiation (higher than the average background radiation) can actually result in various health benefits. Hormesis has more scientific backing than Linear, No Threshold and it would be great if a scientific promulgator such as SciShow were privy to this insight! Thanks for reading, you guys rock!
why didnt you mention Ultra violet light when talking about ionizing radiation?
Can you do Anomalies next? I would love to hear the differences between a Springboard and a Whirligig's properties.
Well... Non-ionizing radiation can be harmful too, if the power is high enough. Even with sunscreen, sun rays, infrared lamps, and radiation from furnaces can cause skin burns. Microwaves can be dangerous if the door's safety interlock fails.
The only measurment you need comrade is your tounge. When you taste metal, chug some vodka, then run
Just started my graduate degree in medical physics, what interesting timing!
And most radiation is harmless compared to smoking.
Unless you're smoking enriched uranium....
Something people should remember chemicals (depending on the type) can last forever while radiation will eventually cease. A harmful chemical can be harmful for eternity while radiation always has a limited lifespan. (Not saying all chemicals are harmful or that they cant be altered to become safer but that there are things more dangerous then radiation)
@@speedy01247 your comment was a useless filler.
@@alexandercanella4479 lmao cool it einstein
@@tanyekai4337 I cant tell which one of my comments that is directed towards and I love that.
1 sievert = 100 Rem
1 Gray = 100 Rad
I only ever learned Rem/Rad in the Navy, and also Curie. Never once did they use sievert, gray, bec, and we only briefly covered roentgen, as that was never really used. Pretty old school curriculum, but I wouldn't say it is outdated, as it is still regularly used. It just isn't as mainstream. They accomplish the same thing, they're just a factor of 100 smaller.
Also, alpha particles do have the potential to cause the most biological damage, but because they're so big and ionize with so much, their travel distance is really short, so they're not a threat to humans unless ingested. Top layers of your dead skin soak all of their damage. This is why smokers receive a lot of radiation from the alpha decay of Po-210.
Doing industrial radiography we use mR for dose rate, rem for dose, and have to record both Curries and GBq on our transport documents. I agree not outdated.
I like gray, its easily converted and most importantly sounds far more sinister. Wonder how many Grays i absorb watching a CGP Grey video
3.6
Went on a tour in Chernobyl a couple years ago. The Geiger counters we had displayed measurements in microsieverts/hour.
We use Rems at my job, and it’s the first place I ever heard the unit.