The sources required to do these experiments are low grade and not particularly dangerous as long as you exercise the same cautions you would with a chemistry set, model paints, etc., such as not huffing or eating them.
The most dangerous thing sold on that site are the magnets:
They need a louder more obnoxious warning banner for those. The big ones can literally crush you or fire metallic objects like bullets. People used to dealing with fridge magnets have no intuition for magnetic fields like that.
They need a louder more obnoxious warning banner for those.
One need scroll past a blinking GIF, and a warning of a small child losing their hand when Dad left a giant magnet lying around and the kid went near another giant magnet, amongst other dire warnings, before you get to the "buy" button. I don't know what you suggest as an improvement, but after a point idiots are gonna idiot.
When you're selling a toy to kids, those warnings about not to remove something from its container are useless.
In high school, I was in summer biology when some slacker took up a vial of mercury and started monkeying around with it. It did not take long for the cap to come off and we had a mercury spill in the middle of the classroom. And then my classmates began trying to scoop it up with their hands and scraps of paper!
As the son of a scientist who worked in Environmental Health and Safety, I immediately recognized this as a hazard and sort of recused myself from the whole scene. It was embarrassing.
If you don't know what elemental mercury looks like, then playing with it is pretty much the obvious outcome.
Mercury is cool. Metallic, reflective, heavy, liquid, forms balls, and eats into (forms amalgams) other metals in really visually interesting ways. Sure, it'll poison you if you eat it, or if you combine it with some organic chemistry it will really quickly absorb at toxic levels, but it doesn't tell you that. It just sits there, looking really, really fun..
Not that I condone eating mercury in any way, shape, or form, but apparently some people did exactly that on a regular basis during the renaissance. The outcome was as expected. The surprising part was how long they seem to have lived eating mercury every day.
Elemental mercury really isn't as bad as people think when they hear "mercury". On its own, there's less interaction with biochemical processes. You can dip your hand in a bucket of the stuff and nothing will happen.
Once it does get bound up in an organic compound, however, everything changes. In particular, methyl and dimethylmercury are, in every way, the opposite. It readily absorbs through your skin, causes genetic mutations in cells, interferes with the immune system, and crosses the blood-brain barrier while acting as a neurotoxin.
Lest you think that is bad enough, it also happily passes through both latex and pvc gloves, and has a high enough vapor pressure that you don't ever want to open a jar of the stuff unless it is in an active fume hood. If you happen to notice that it has a sweet smell, you need to head straight to a hospital.
Should you get even as little as 0.1ml in your body, it will linger, slowly working its way around, potentially delaying symptoms for months, at which point it is too late for any treatment to be effective, and even that small of a dose will be fatal.
When I was in school, I recall another kid tried to steal a lump of sodium from the lab. It went exactly how you'd expect a child with a lump of sodium in their pocket would go.
Well, I reckon that kit was somewhat more risky than the circular disc of uranium of about 1.5 inches in diameter and about 0.25" thick we experimented with at school. The beta and gamma sources were in the form of foil about 1cm square but I don't know or can't remember what the sources were.
As a kid, I'd loved to have had one of those Gilbert kits (at least back then we had chemistry sets that actually did exciting things).
I'd anecdotally heard some reference to kits of that kind being around somewhat before my time but I'd not have been able to link the name 'Gilbert' to it if my life depended on it.
I think by the '60s things had tightened somewhat. Low level radioactive sources were still available in school labs (so were 'risky' chemicals and large amounts of Hg long since banned—also making black powder was still a core subject and we made and tested it and were expected to know its chemical equation).
But by say(?) the mid '50s those x-ray foot measuring devices in shoe shops had been banned. I recall seeing one in a shoe shop when I was a young kid that had been relegated to a corner and being very miffed that I couldn't measure my feet in it (it had some sort of viewer to look through and a diagram on the outside showing a foot skeleton versus shoe size or such and that took my fancy).
In my UK high school in the 1980s, during a lecture from a visiting nuclear engineer to our science club (BAYS), we got to handle (and directly touch) various sources including a piece of Plutonium about the size of a 2p coin, edge-framed by lucite but not sealed. The point was to show that alpha was blocked by paper but I still wonder how wise that was.
I must mention that the Cloud Chamber exhibit in the science center was definitely my favorite thing for over a decade. It was definitely eerie to see these little contrails, basically produced by subatomic "micrometeors" that were all streaking through our atmosphere. It really gave you a sense of perspective.
It was quite safe, and it would be great for something like this to have a comeback.
Now you can build your own Wilson chamber with isopropyl alcohol and some youtube instructions, but you’ll have to spend a lot of time to (legally) procure your own test sources. This is sad.
You can also buy isotopes from other online scientific supply stores, but they're more of a hassle as they cater to business and institutional customers. In the U.S. I think most (all?) of them, including United Nuclear, are resellers for Spectrum Techniques (https://www.spectrumtechniques.com/about/), which is the commercial outfit working with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to manufacturer and sell so-called exempt quantity isotopes. For most isotopes, including some really nasty ones like Polonium, Federal regulations permit unlicensed possession and sale under a certain quantity. A sample of Polonium for example (I have one on my desk right now), comes on the head of a pin.
Building or even just buying and setting up an experimentation or display rig, like a cloud chamber, is much more of a hassle than acquiring the actual isotopes. I never did get around to building a cloud chamber; that sample of Polonium has never left my desk.
> David typed up a list of sources for fourteen radioactive isotopes..Americium-241, he learned from the Boy Scout atomic-energy booklet, could be found in smoke detectors
Yes and also several ores often found at rock shops, some Fiestaware, uranium glass, add if course radium dial watches. All legal in the US in small quantities and harmless as long as you don't ingest or inhale their dust.
I usually hear them referred to as smoke detectors (U.S.). Some decades ago when I checked mine had a small metal enclosure with a pin-head amount of Americium inside.
Pretty sure though that if you live at very high elevations like Denver, Colorado, you'll get vapor trails for free. :-)
An interesting example of early cancel culture in the Radar Magazine click farm, stoking nuclear paranoia for clicks. Unfortunately, many other click farms still have stories up about this today.
It's ironic and intellectually stifling that we accept risks to our kids from biking or sports, yet demonize learning nuclear science. Even when the former regularly harms more kids and in graver ways. Is this a result of unfounded nuclear fears, or is there more to this I'm missing?
> An interesting example of early cancel culture in the Radar Magazine click farm, stoking nuclear paranoia for clicks. Unfortunately, many other click farms still have stories up about this today.
Not early at all. The phenomenon always existed. "Cancel culture" is just a new name for an ancient thing.
Eg, before "Cancel culture" as a common term we had protests against Harry Potter, and before that against D&D, and before that against rock music (Elvis was scanalous!) and before that against witchcraft.
It's as old as humanity, and if anything we've gotten a bit more polite over it in modern times in that burning people at a stake is less of a thing.
As someone had my own fights decades ago, there seems to be difference though - at least in the second half of last century people fought against things and phenomenons, but not against people behind these. This was true even in Soviet Union - as dissidence we fought against system, corruption etc, but never against people directly in a way cancel culture does.
Revisionism. There always were people who were singled out and attacked for various reasons.
The very word "boycott" comes from the last name of Charles Boycott from the 19th century, who was not boycotted politely at all. In fact people working with him, including 12 year olds got death threats, and his property was systematically destroyed.
I don't know why there's this idea of that people were more civilized once upon a time, but I can't see any evidence of that ever being the case.
He also wasn't the first by any means, but for whatever reason his last name caught on as the word for what was done to him.
That's not what I meant. I'm fully aware of things done in history including "cancelling" whole nations. Things changed in Europe democracies after WWII though. The hate between various groups of people during and immediately after war was beyond belief for many and they really didn't want to see the result of this hate again.
That's why democracies in Europe have accepted rather extremist political movements after WWII. That's why the collapse of Soviet Union was relatively peaceful and people even serving actively communist dictatorship had all their rights to live their lives in new democratic states. If you commit a crime, you will be punished, but you will have a right to live your life even if your views are very different from mine. It doesn't mean that it doesn't happen at all, but it hasn't been socially acceptable to cancel people.
I see it changing and I don't like it. I remember what happened during WWII and after that in my country.
They actually feature a picture of this kit!
The sources required to do these experiments are low grade and not particularly dangerous as long as you exercise the same cautions you would with a chemistry set, model paints, etc., such as not huffing or eating them.
The most dangerous thing sold on that site are the magnets:
https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=70...
They need a louder more obnoxious warning banner for those. The big ones can literally crush you or fire metallic objects like bullets. People used to dealing with fridge magnets have no intuition for magnetic fields like that.