Mythbusters to Test Cockroach Radiation Myth

redwoodtree writes "An article on the site for the Tri-City Herald sums it up perfectly: 'Contrary to popular belief, not a significant amount of research goes into cockroach radiation.' To test the old saw about 'the cockroaches being the only survivors of a nuclear war' Discovery Channel's Mythbusters are going out to Hanford Site, where plutonium was manufactured for the first nuclear bomb. It's the single most polluted nuclear waste site in the U.S. The Mythbusters are going to take cockroaches and other insects and apply successively higher doses of radiation in a controlled setting."

Re:Is it a MYTH???

[wanderingknight]

Umm, until there's scientific backing to the claim, any "popular knowledge" is and remains a myth. That's the whole point of the word. From dictionary.com:

5.an unproved or false collective belief that is used to justify a social institution.

Seems mythic enough to me.

Not studied?

[Anonamused Cow-herd]

'Contrary to popular belief, not a significant amount of research goes into cockroach radiation.'

Funny, it seems that a lot of scientists have done just that. [google.com]

For a pretty decent explanation: the mysterious Dr. Karl! [abc.net.au]

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Call from PETA in ... 3, 2, 1

[R2.0]

"So what is your criteria for what you will and won't murder ?"

Objection, your Honor - Loaded Question (Or is it leading the witness?)!

The correct question is "So what is your criteria for what you will and won't kill?"

"Killing" is performing an action that causes something that is living to cease doing so.

"Murder" is a legal definition, along with "manslaughter", "homicide", etc. By it's very definition, it is impossible to "murder" a cockroach.

If you are going to troll, do it correctly.

Re:Call from PETA in ... 3, 2, 1

[Guysmiley777]

Food chain [chrisworfolk.com]

One myth busted another one started....

[pesho]

FTFA: "(Viewers) should learn that things don't glow if exposed to radiation," she said. "And they won't be radioactive after being exposed to radiation." They most certainly do! There is scintillation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillation_(physics) [wikipedia.org]and there is Cherenkov effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation [wikipedia.org] You can clearly see the glow in the attached picture to the Cherenkov radiation artcle. The radiation dose that and organism will survive strongly depends on the dna repair strategy that it uses. Rodents for example repair rapidly the actively used pieces of their genome and don't care so much for the parts that are not currently used. As a result they can survive higher doses compared to humans, but will pass more mutations to their progeny. High reproduction rate will help for a species to survive radiation exposure. Sure there will be lots of mutants in the progeny and most of them will probably not be very fit, but if you have big enough numbers this doesn't really matter.

Re:Safety?

[elrous0]

But only the EVIL ones

Re:Is it a MYTH???

[fred fleenblat]

Seriously though, Mythbusters just plain old has a policy of not testing any religious myths. Saw it mentioned in their forums.

Re:Safety?

[MichaelKaiserProScri]

Riverview High School, Sarasota, FL. (1986-1989)

Re:Safety?

[afabbro]

I'm not joking or exaggerating: there was so much leaked radioactive material on/in the ground that they expected it to concentrate through natural drainage to above critical mass.

You're not joking...but perhaps you should be. For critical mass, you're talking between 10kg of plutonium (Pu-239) to 80kg (Pu-242). That's a lot of Pu to have "leaked". Not impossible I suppose (in terms of volume, even a Pu-242 core is less than a foot in diameter), but even if there was 10kg of loose Plutonium in the ground around Hanford, getting it all together seems unlikely...it's in millions of gallons of liquid and millions of tons of earth. It's not like Pu atoms are magnetically drawn to each other - they're just heavy.

True, Hanford produced 55,000kg of plutonium during its operational life, and 10-80kg would be a small fraction. But I'm skeptical...not that Hanford isn't polluted, but that there's a danger of enough loose Pu accumulating through "drainage" to get into a critical mass/configuration.

Re:Suffer the little creatures

[fm6]

Wrong on both counts. Most parasites co-evolve with their hosts. That means that most parasite species are unique to the hosts they inhabit. (Pediculus humanus capitis, for example, lives on the human scalp and nowhere else.) It also means that parasites can't do too much damage to their hosts, because they have nowhere to go if the hosts die off.

Of course, there are parasites that jump species, and humans, having invaded almost every habitat on the planet, have encountered (and been infected by) most of them. Such species haven't co-evolved with their hosts and do indeed present a threat to them. But these are the exceptions, and it's only due to our spreading them around that they're threats to other species.

Re:Cockroaches, harmed in the making of broadcast?

[alan_dershowitz]

It is not science, it is a television program. It is constructed for entertainment purposes and they have no obligation to be fair, thorough or even competent. Their obligations are to be entertaining and to fill a time slot and to not offend sponsors or be sued.

OK, maybe they sometimes DO science, but it is bad science with laughable conclusions. They start with a vague hypothesis and little facts and state a shaky hypothesis. They then proceed to create an experiment to test the shaky hypothesis in the flashiest manner that their miniscule budget and episode lead time allows. They then continue, frequently without consultation of any actual expert in the field they are experimenting, to disprove their bad hypothesis with their failed experiment. Generally all they ever prove is that they dont know enough about the myth to ask the right questions or construct a meaningful experiment.

It is hard to take them seriously when you can see the obvious flaws on video. Take the episode where they tested if cell phones could cause a fire at a gas pump. As far as I can tell, they never even bothered to investigate if there have been any documented cases of this happening. If they did, they never said so on the air and it is not written down anywhere. Which tends to make it a little difficult to peer review. Episode where they tested if it was possible for someone to be buried alive in a coffin and live to dig themselves out. So they bury the guy in a titanium hermetically sealed coffin 12 feet underground, which is a far cry from the pine box a foot underground which was common when some of these events allegedly happened. MYTH BUSTED!

I particularly enjoyed the episode where they couldnt build a black powder engine in a few days, so haha those stupid guys in the 1600s were boobs for spending their lives trying to figure it out. I have an experiment for them. Before trying to build that, why not see if you can build a working internal combustion engine from scratch in three days? Cant do it? Internal combustion: MYTH BUSTED!

I am not trying to flame here, but its a damn TV show. It is NOT science.

Re:Why does the first post is *ALWAYS* funny?

[snowgirl]

I think it's faster to come up with something funny to say, rather than something profound.

Re:Don't forget to test twinkies as well

[Brikus]

He snorted his uncle, he didn't smoke him. Smoking his uncle would be way too fucked up, duh

Re:Safety?

[osjedi]

DrBuzzo is correct. They are using an irradiation facility at Pacific Northwest National Lab. Basically you've got a shielded room containing a shielded radiation source. Place things in the room, seal it up, and then using remote control the radiation source is exposed for the pre-determined exposure time and then re-shielded. When the room is no longer 'hot' you can go in and get your stuff out. The facility they are using is used to calibrate dosimeters and other equipment.

It's nice to see my home-town being used for such an awesome mythbusters episode. : )

This is osjedi, reporting live from Tri-Cities, WA. Home of the world's best apples, grapes, hopps, cherrys, and weapons grade plutonium.

Re:Safety?

[momerath2003]

I believe you're thinking of the bare sphere plutonium critical masses. With water as a moderator and a reflector, the actual "critical mass" will certainly be less (but, of course, it will be affected by the pond geometry and the contaminants in the pond.

Re:Safety?

[Cyberax]

Actually, it's possible. There were several criticality accidents in oil reservoirs and air filters:

For example, http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/1961USSR2.html [johnstonsarchive.net] and several other ones (I'm too lazy to search)
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radcrit.html [johnstonsarchive.net]

Re:Is it a MYTH???

[Dash Hash]

They do not limit it to just religious myths, but any "oogie-boogie" myths (in Adam's own words).

They've done a few in the past (such as the "pyramids of power" myth [or something along that name]) and on that show, Adam specifically said that he hoped that they would not have to do any more "oogie-boogie" myths. It was later explained to be anything along the lines of bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, psychics, astrology, aliens, et cetra.

Really, they limit themselves to things that are truly testable; they avoid just about anything where there is no real ability to lay claims along one line or the other without getting into otherwise supernatural beliefs.

Re:Safety?

[TeknoHog]

The blue glow comes when a particle is emited near the speed of light through air and hits the water. It momentarily exceeds the speed of light through water (allowed since it is not exceeding the speed of light in a vacuum), but has to slow down. Slowing down ditches energy which must go somwhere, a blue photon in this case.

AFAIK, the particles don't have to slow down. As you said it's not exceeding c and there's no physical law forcing it to be slowed down to the local speed of light. Cerenkov radiation is the optical/electromagnetic equivalent of a sonic boom, which is created by a plane traveling faster than the local speed of sound.

Of course, the energy in the light has to come from somewhere and the particle is slowed down eventually. However, there are many ways in which particles radiate by slowing down (e.g. synchrotron radiation from electrons in a circular particle accelerator) and the Cerenkov mechanism is a pretty special case compared to the others.

Re:Is it a MYTH???

[Rip!ey]

Umm, until there's scientific backing to the claim, any "popular knowledge" is and remains a myth.

Of course, there's nothing particularly scientific about the mythbusters. Given their propensity for "blowing shit up", one could be forgiven for thinking that they're just angling for an excuse to nuke something.

Re:Safety?

[MichaelKaiserProScri]

I had Mr. Mocherman. We didn't exactly ASK before putting the roach in. But it was his big ole boot that squished the roach. I think the experiment became verboten after we did it because I think he fully expected the roach to die and was shocked that it didn't.

His exact words were "Can't let that one breed. {squish}"

Re:Safety?

[abb3w]

Exposed roach to greater than 1000, but less than 10000 roentgens.

How much is that in megatons?

Different types of unit. From my vaguely recalled nuke classes from a decade ago, a 1 megaton nuclear blast with clear line-of-sight gives a human the smaller dose at on the order of 30 miles from ground zero, the higher dose at on the order of 10 miles. A 1000 roentgen whole-body dose is sometimes survivable with extensive medical treatment, but requires a compatible bone marrow transplant within under a week. The higher dose is uncurable, as it eventually kills the central nervous system, although the cause of death is usually from the failure of the digestive track (which might theoretically be "curable", if it didn't require a complete transplant from a compatible donor and weren't ultimately futile anyway). The best treatment at that point is probably three shots of morphine at one hour intervals, in 50, 100, and 200mg doses.