The lumen sponsor really irks me, really sick of these health claim/health fad things getting tossed around so irresponsibly by creators without thinking about the very real impact it can have on people. I know you gotta eat, I know you got bills to pay, but man this is not the way.
@@15dragonslayer I work at a tech company and our product has some vaguely telecommunication-adjacent features, so I initially wondered why a Seattle-area phone company is sponsoring a video from a food channel based out of Georgia 😅
@@15dragonslayer Indeed, it makes no sense, you will breath practically the same amount of CO2 regardless if your body is using carbs or fats, Its just a scam. Very disappointing that Adam would promote such things, seems $$$ is very enticing for him.
Alpha is considered the least dangerous because it has low penetration through skin. If it gets ingested it is actually the most destructive due to the large mass and charge of the particle, compared to something like a beta particle or a gamma ray.
Yes, I remember my chemistry professor telling me this! It’s not dangerous from the outside bc it’s doesn’t have very much potential for penetration so it won’t go through your skin, but it does have pretty powerful ability to ionize stuff. So, if you get it inside you, you basically have this very destructive particle pin balling through your squishy bits for a long time bc it’s unable to get out. At least that’s how it was described to me 😂
The key point with alpha particles is that they are massive and charged so they really want to interact with everything, and thus if there's almost anything between your living tissue and the source, the particles will expend most of their energy interacting with that before they can mess with your body. Now if the alpha source can directly contact that living tissue, the interactions can be quite damaging. But at the same time, there's plenty of radioactive substances, including tiny amounts of uranium in the environment already, so the body has systems to fix that damage as long as it's not too much all at once. And that's before taking into account the fact that with a half life of 4.5 billion years, U238 does not release a lot of radiation.
Yep, alpha particles are stopped by a few cm of air, or even something like a thin piece of paper. No penetrative power at all. So they are "virtually" harmless outside the body. If an alpha emitting substance is ingested or inhaled though, it's by far the most dangerous. Gamma is the opposite...it's just very high frequency of light, extremely penetrating (goes through almost anything). But because it's so penetrating, it rarely interacts with anything and most of it will just pass through. So for gamma exposure, it makes very little difference whether the source is inside or outside you. That's why gamma emitting isotopes like Tc-99m are used in nuclear medicine. They give far less of an overall dose than alpha or beta emitters. I could go into the gray-to-sievert conversion, how each type of radiation has a factor applied to it (high energy neutrons are 20x for instance, so a 1Gy dose of high energy neutrons = 20Sv). The conversion for gamma is 1 though, so for gamma radiation, 1Gy=1Sv.
Minor correction: most cosmic background radiation of the sort that you'd see in an earth-based cloud chamber is not from the big-bang era (adam is thinking about the cosmic microwave background, which doesn't show up in a cloud chamber), but rather from random sources (exploding stars, accreting black holes, the tiniest portion of other stars' output that makes it through our own solar wind, etc) which are evenly distributed in every direction - but what one sees even more commonly is from terrestrial sources like trace radioactive elements in the air / rocks.
To further that, I believe most background radiation is terrestrial (from earth). We only get gamma radiation from outside earth as alpha and beta are absorbed in the atmosphere. Additionally we just have lots of radioactive rocks near us as opposed to high radiation events far away, which due to inverse square law won’t affect us much. 50% of background reaction is from rocks in earth
Also you won't see gamma radiation in a cloud chamber since it only rarely interacts with particles and simply won't form trails. The trails are the result of the decay of Uranium or other radioactive elements like the Radon that's in the air.
@MikoSciencia Correct - very occasionally a lucky and/or fast alpha or beta particle will get through the atmosphere to the ground, but usually even these sorts of things are instead detected when they produce a shower of other particles after running into something in the air.
I had a physics professor in college who collected uranium glass, we took measurements and did some calculations on them. We found the radiation to be hardly discernible from background most of the time. She did have one piece in particular that was much much more radioactive than others, still safe but it made the Geiger counter go absolutely crazy
@@MrZnarffyIn 1956, the U.S. proposed that any radioactivity causes harm proportional to the dose, shaping global radiation standards. However, moderate exposure may train the body's defenses, protecting against DNA damage and cancer.
Yup, usually it's fine but generally good to check because there is a handful of examples that are MUCH more radioactive and you want to be aware of the risks/levels. But given proper information there's not really much to worry about.
@@sarahwatts7152just different isotope concentration? Anyway its not so much about the end users as it was about the folks who worked in the factories and processing plants who got the exposures
I'm amazed he got to film anything, it looks like something really hard to capture. I know Adam is a professional but then, it is good to appreciate the amazing work of professionals.
I had to catch a picture of those streaks in college and even with a mildly radioactive source helping me it took FOREVER to get it. Blown away by his camera, honestly
When Adam is talking about certain ceramics being dangerous around 5:00 I believe he’s talking about Fiesta Ware! The Orange of the uranium glaze is why uranium was used as a pigment of sorts and it’s SUPER radioactive (like way way more than uranium glass), and due to the radiation of uranium being alpha radiation (simply: doesn’t penetrate skin but is harmful if ingested or inhaled) and the ease at which it chips, you really shouldn’t eat off it. It used to be my favorite piece of what my nuclear engineering department called the “goodie box” of radioactive stuff, it really makes the Geiger counter scream lol.
It's commonly called "Fiesta ware" but that's a bit of a misnomer, Fiesta was just one brand of many who used U in their glazes, and there is plenty of Fiesta ware out there with no uranium in it cause they made all sorts of colors, and in fact they still exist and are producing to this day.
That why having a little detector is helpful if you are concerned. I got one from that big online place named for a warrior woman for around $50, and it's quite good. I also got a small ☢️ sample to make sure it was properly calibrated. I have two pieces of uranium glass where it's a blend of non radioactive and radioactive colors. In this case, red and yellow, but the colors vary. Since it's not always obvious from the color which ones are 'hot,' having the detector is worth every penny.
@@HourRomanticist Adam in his nilegreen phase: "tomatoes are nightshades, peppers and potatoes too, but today I'm going to show you how to make tea with the interesting one, you know, the one with atropine"
Just a small correction: Radiation from the CMB is not detected in cloud chambers, as it is extremely low-energy. What is generally detected are charged particles, such as muons, created by cosmic rays colliding with particles in our atmosphere. This is one source of the usual "background radiation" that is mentioned in discussions about humans and annual doses of radiation. I assume the confusion here was the "cosmic" in cosmic rays, and the "background radiation" from CMB radiation, which is extremely understandable. Cosmic rays generally come from solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and distant supernovae.
If you're doing this on your kitchen countertop, the countertop itself is also a potential source. Adam's looks like engineered quartz, but granite contains significant amounts of uranium, thorium, and potassium. Potassium salts are also used in cooking, such as cream of tartar or in non-sodium salt substitutes.
By analyzing the trajectory in the cloud chamber (e.g., the direction and radius of deflection), and using a magnetic or electric field along with a particle source, one can identify whether it’s radioactive radiation (such as alpha or beta particles) or other particles like electrons, muons, etc.
a small correction to the beginning is there are different types of uranium glass. there is the green stuff you have which includes some iron alongside the uranium oxide to give it that green colour. The green stuff is usually just called plain Uranium Glass, but there is yellow glass that doesnt include iron, and in turn has more uranium inside it. This is the Vaseline glass that you talked about in the beginning.
Adam, I found you because of a simple recipe, but I fell in love with your narrative style, video composition, and scientific focus. I enjoy hearing your take on a anything (the fish greenhouse was awesome!) Keep up the diversified content videos! I love this!
@@darwin6883 no its not. its for PREDIABETICS. if you have diabetes, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MEASURE YOU FRICKING SUGAR WITH A REAL DEVICE. its for people who are fat and in need of a butt - kick from an electrical device that claimes "YOU ARNT BURNING ENOUGH FAT, here take this nutrition plan and run the next two hours around the block. it CANT measure where you got that carbon in your breath out of, you can get that cheaper from your doctor and a certified nutritionist. dont forget WE ARE ON UA-cam, ADVERTISER ARE SCAMMERS
looked into it and it requires a subscription to even use the thing, and all it does is measure the carbohydrate percentage you breathe out and determines if you're burning fat or carbs (which can be either from absorbed blood glucose or from glycogen). A diabetic really isn't getting more much use from this than they would from their regular suite of insurance-paid tools and kits. And as a health tracker...it's rather frivolous and worst of all to me is the subscription, it is an unjustifiable expense in my book.
I fell for it and now own one. The subscription criticism is right, it's use is pretty limited without one. You get basic information on the free plan, but most is subscription-locked. Even with the subscription I didn't feel like it was worth it. I could reliably guess the results based on what I ate that day. Healthy and exercise? Probably fat burning. Couch and ice cream? Look at that, carbs. I stopped using it because it wasn't doing much besides calorie counting with a coat of paint on it. Maybe more useful for other people in other ways, but for the price tag I can't recommend it.
8:30 correction most background radiation comes from high energy particles in space (eg from the sun) colliding in the atmosphere and creating a radioactive event which can be detected on earth or it comes from rocks on earth. The CMBR is responsible for probably none of what you would detect in that cloud chamber
I work in the glass industry and we use uranium glass to connect different types of glass together without cracking because its coefficient of expansion is between the other two! Of course there are many other interesting properties it has as well.
@@Roockert at our place it's all just reshaping. Apparently those that used to make it from scratch either don't or very rarely. We have been using a batch that was made in the 70s lol
Not to mention, if you do this on a granite counter top, the granite will radiate about as much as the uranium glass if not more. Yeah, granite has isotopes of all kinda radioactive stuff in it, and we prepare food on it all the time. No sweat!
I hear that if you dig a basement into certain types of stone (including granite), you need to monitor that basement for any unstable off-gassing from the decay products (mostly isotopes of radon?) of those radioactive impurities breaking down, though! If it does start building up, special ventilation is needed to remove it. Like most things, it's a matter of scale and proportions.
Depending on how far away he is from shipping hubs, he might even be able to keep the remnants of blocks his meat boxes come in. (I’m far enough away it’s always already sublimated, even when it’s below freezing outside…)
He's mainly a cooking channel, and their are cooking applications for dry ice. So he is unlike the science channels that have gotten sponsorships by that one gama spectrometer(which is not a geiger counter, but can still be useful in this application). Also geiger counters aren't cheap, and you have to calibrate them to get accurate readings(not that it would be that important for the purposes of this video). Though the radiacode(thing that was in those sponsorships) being a gama spectrometer isn't really that useful for things like uranium glass that are producing, primarily, alpha particles.
I, for one, appreciate your "scholarly" approach, delivered in such a straightforward way as to make it not only educational but entertaining as well. Thank you and welcome back for (I hope) another year of excellent videos.
Most of it is made with rare earth metals that are not highly radioactive like Uranium, but Northstar did a production run of some acual uranium glass not so many years ago that still comes up on the second hand market. No one will really work with it though- not because it's dangerous but because the market has dictated that it's apparently worth $300 USD per lb!
Here early to say that uranium glass is totally fine as long as you don't eat it, and most people get a higher background dose than they ever could from uranium glass
Thank you! If you hadn't said it I would have. Radiation can be incredibly scary, but like with everything else scary, dose is everything. A few of my favorite examples: nobody is scared of bananas, brazil nuts, or basalt
I have a small shard of uranium glass I got at a gem and mineral show many years ago. I don’t make a habit of carrying it around but it looks really cool
Uranium glass is weird in the sense that it is appealing only to a certain type of people (usually male, somewhat nerdy, cat-owners, often engineers, "creatives" or people with a tech/science background). I can sort the people I know by what their view on uranium glass is... there are those who "get it"... and those who don't. I wonder why that is - and if there are other "things" like UO-glass I don't know anything about (yet)...
It's also good to note that radiation isn't the only concern. Uranium is classified as a heavy metal, and along with others like lead can be quite toxic in the body. Heavy metals tend to accumulate and cause increasing problems with continued ingestion since your body doesn't really have any way of getting rid of them. Still not a concern with uranium glass, but definitely so with the old Fiestaware uranium glazed ceramic, where acidic foods particularly would leach a LOT of uranium out.
Really liking the new theme on these videos of "Here's a thing you've probably heard you need to worry about, but with a bit more context in how bad it really is so you can better manage your apathy fatigue."
Sorry to be pedantic but that background radiation isn't left over from the CMB. The CMB doesn't really produce the kind of ionizing radiation you see in a cloud chamber. -- it's the microwave background because it's at microwave frequencies. It's just general radiation from various things in the universe either undergoing radioactive decay or via things like charged jets from a pulsar or blackhole.
9:50 i think it was applied science that did a similar test with lead glassware, which also eventually lost nearly all surface-diffusable lead, basically all that was left was enough inside to not be able to diffuse out. so just give your uranium glassware a good soak and wash before using it and it'll probably be fine.
My mom collected this stuff beginning in the early 70s. It became the family 'formal dining' dishes for 25 years after that, and I dined on it almost daily for 20 years or so growing up. When I have dinner at my dad's my stepmom still serves some dishes and drinks with uranium Depression Glass like that. I am not worried, but also glad I did not inherit it lol.
Uranium glass is still produced occassionally in the United States, usually as borosilicate rods and tubes for the art glass industry. Northstar Glass did a special production run of their uranium glass recipe ~10years ago that still pops up on the second hand market if you're willing to pay for it.
Funny you should mention eastern river valleys and glass making. In the small mill village of Suncook, NH, we have a street called Glass Street along the Suncook River. This is because when the glass factories made glass and messed up (or just had too much) and then when they finally closed down, they famously dumped tons of glass in the river there. I remember going behind the dam and unearthing fully intact bottles from the time.
Ngl just recently restarted collecting uranium glass again and finally got a cabinet set up with lights. It was neat that you decided to do this video. Certain spectrum of UV will also make other heavy metals used in dishes glow. I havent personally seen examples of it but ive seen it mentioned multiple times. The brighter it glows the "hotter" it is. Also fair warning to those who go out looking for this stuff. At some point they replicated the colour perfectly without using uranium. Take a uv light with you. There is a pitcher and 4 glass set at a local antique store. Out of 5 pieces only 2 have uranium. However under normal light you couldnt tell any of it apart.
It's very cool when your dishes glow, and I really like my (display only) uranium glass pieces, but we've found lots of other, non-toxic, glow-in-the-dark substances over the last century. It doesn't have to be radioactive to look AWESOME.
It's also concentrated at the surface. The Thought Emporium has a recent video where he takes glazed uranium dishware into a cloud chamber like this and you can absolutely see more coming off of it.
A couple of things to consider: 1. boron silicate glass doped with uranium is going to emit less neutrons than soda lime glass. 2. you touched on the leaching from the surface using water or acetic or other food acids. This will strip soluble elements from the surface eventually leaching all available soluble elements from that surface and unless you scratch or crack the surface to expose fresh unleached material, due to the nature of glass you won't leach any more.
Uranium glass and vaseline glass are two different things (US) but it's kind of a whiskey/bourbon situation. Vaseline Glass is yellow-green in color. All of the pieces you have here are uranium glass. More specifically, the console bowl you have appears to be a variety of uranium glass called Apple Green, which is an earlier use of the element than the other pieces.
A few years ago I got a Geiger counter and tested everything I could think of to see if I could get a reading. I only found one thing that was radioactive, an antique ceramic bowl that my mom gave me.
Uranium glass was used in the lighting industry for overhead lamps, electric lamps and 'crystal' prisms for it's beautiful, fluorescent yellow-green colour. In Bohemia and Silesia, many manufactories experimented with elegant crystal chandeliers made wholly or partially with vaseline glass prisms, crystal cups and bobeches. They also produced some truly beautiful, Victorian jewelry in elegant, neoclassical designs. Vaseline glass is no more harmful than the tritium keychains and pocket-lights we buy today.
As far as I know, while uranium glass is thought to be completely safe when it's not chipped, sanded or shattered, it was nasty for workers on factories that produced it, so I don't think it's possible for it to make a big return. But I've also heard about some esoteric Chinese items that used glowing glass with thorium in it and apparently they're still in production. They're not sold as general-purpose kitchenware though, instead they're marketed as devices for alternative medicine based on a pseudoscientific belief that small doses of radiation can "stimulate" the organism or, I don't know, eliminate evil spirits from the drinking water or something. The safety of theese things is questionable, especially for stuff like pendants and stickers for phones - while alpha radiation and some incidental gamma from thorium decay products won't do much if the item that emits them is rarely placed near the human body, I guess that constantly wearing something like this in close proximity to skin may make it possible for the radioactive particles to affect the skin cells leading to various problems.
Tiny correction - in the cloud chamber, the trace is left behind the particle because the rest of the environment gives the alcohol mist no surface to condense on, the bottom is too cold. When the particle appears, the mist condenses on it because it is the only surface to condense on, resulting in a droplet, which is left behind. And the line of these droplets is the trace line.
Oh hey, vaseline glass! My parents collect carnival glass (mostly pieces by Fenton Art Glass Company), and vaseline is one of the recognized colors there too; carnival glass is just iridized glassware, so companies could make vaseline glass and then add iridescence, and that resulted in vaseline carnival glass. Carnival glass is a collector's item these days and vaseline carnival glass is included in that. I think it's a well-regarded/popular color among carnival collectors, so that's cool; but it's very rare and usually expensive, so we don't have any in my family's collection. I have gotten to see pieces in other folks' collections before though! Carnival glass isn't eaten out of to preserve the iridescence and prevent the glass from breaking, so vaseline carnival glass is also effectively harmless; the iridescent coating doesn't change that fact. (Though I would be intrigued to know if it maybe reduces the amount of radioactive particles emitted into the air? Maybe if the coating is thick enough.) Very cool that you can make a cloud chamber (mostly) out of home materials, I never knew that!
My parents were big collectors of Carnival and Depression glass back in the 1970s and 80s. I have a few pieces from those collections. They're interesting, attractive pieces of glassware.
The Earle R. Caley source to my understanding does not prove the use of uranium in roman glassmaking. Is the paper at 1:56 related to that find? Couldn't find any strong evidence for the claim 🤔
Always love your science content, really appreciate getting something else that would be cool and accessible for a middle school or high school setting.
this cloud chamber is simple but its upside down, you could probably use the fish tank as a tank and just hang the alcohol sponges from hooks from the top, just put a cotton dish rag on the bottom, some dry ice, then a small toaster oven tray for the platform, it should work just as well but no real need to seal anything aside from maybe a lid on top to prevent turbulence from motion
You can find this glass used, but you need a UV LED flashlight. Hobby Lobby sells a really nice one with low visible light emission for real cheap. Some of the ebay UV small lights are junk with flaky switches and white light along with the purple. Some green glass is not Uranium so you really want the light when looking. Try antique shops, charity shops, etc. that has old glassware out. Or grammas cupboards if she is old enough to have pre 50s glassware.
I have several pieces of uranium glassware... AND a nice little sensor to make sure that it's not overly radioactive. If anyone is interested in collecting, it's a necessity. Some of the pieces are hotter than others, though most are barely above background radiation.
You think it might be potentially harmful to whoever is producing the glass? I remember a glass producer stopped a certain type of glass color due to the amounts of radiation in the glass, it was popular in glass pendant and Pipe blowing. Like 10 years ago.
I inherited a pretty sizable collection of Uranium glass and a few pieces of a orange fluorescent glass from my dad after he passed. It is pretty interesting stuff.
I have a few pieces of uranium glass. One, a large yellow bowl that I use as a candy dish, reads significantly above background on my radiation detector if I put the meter right on top of it. I would be reluctant to eat acidic food out of old dishes like these in case the food leaches chemicals out of them. This is likely a greater risk with ceramic glazes than with glass. In addition to being slightly radioactive, uranium is chemically toxic, and other toxic metals were used in the past. Though it probably isn't dangerous to eat food out of these dishes occasionally, I prefer to use them for wrapped candies or other similar items.
slight correction: at 8:26 you say that you can see the cosmic background radiation in the cloud chamber, this is incorrect as that is microwaves which will not show up in a cloud chamber as they are far too low energy. These are likely actually cosmic rays, or depending on where you are possibly some natural radiation from rocks/etc.
One important note about K-40 vs U-238 is that uranium will accumulate in your body, while potassium will not. Your body always regulates its levels of potassium, and whatever potassium you consume will be urinated out and replaced by the next potassium that you eat. Uranium will get included into the minerals in your bones and stay in your body forever.
While eating from a piece of uranium glass is probably safe, i suspect the industrial production of uranium glass would have been more harmful, especially without modern safety standards. Workers would’ve likely been exposed to more radioactive material and inhaled/ingested dust that hasn’t been locked up inside the glass, and were probably around it much more often than normal people that just owned a piece.
My mom has a whole set of green depression glass that she inherited from her grandmother. It's all a bit fancier than this, with like fluted decorations on every piece. My mom's always been afraid to use it with food because of the Uranium, so it just lives displayed in a china cabinet. Sometimes she'll use them as candy dishes (with wrapped candies) for holidays and stuff. I'll let her know the risk is low, but I doubt she'll change her mind, lol.
I have a Civil Defense Geiger counter is all, but with the metal window open on the probe I can sometimes detect a slight rise in count from Uranium glass items, more so with it near the thickest parts, but some areas do not seem to have detectable difference. Still pretty low level stuff as compared to the just cosmic ray clicks. WIth the metal window shut I get nothing which must indicate no Gamma.
Makes sense that it’s less dangerous if it’s encapsulated deeper in the glass compared to ceramic glazes, but I wonder if it’s more dangerous if you break it (which often accidentally happens with glassware). Or is the glass a suitable enough medium that it’s well contained even if it’s in shards?
The major health hazards of uranium do not end at radiation. Uranium is a heavy metal and it disrupts many important chemical processes within the human body. The best course to safely use uranium doped glassware is to leach out any uranium in the surface with acid first (or never use it with food).
The biggest danger is how addictive collecting radioactive glass is. Let's say you pick up uranium plate at the thrift shop for $3. Next thing you know, you're bidding on a $700 houze lamp you can't afford becaues someone else bought the $400 you thought was too expensive and now you live with a mixture of guilt and disappointment.
You could probably remove most of the available uranium in the surface of the glass by letting it leach in a acidic solution. There's a UA-camr called applied science who did this with lead glass at least
I'd probably want to save this glass exclusively for special occasions-not because of the uranium, but because of the ultraviolet light needed to get it to really shine.
worth noting that the radioactive ceramic is often this bright orange color, and does not glow under UV. What it does do, that the uranium glass doesn't is set geiger counters absolutely haywire. the counter I have measures in "counts per minute" which is relatively meaningless if you really want data about what radiation & how bad it is, but it does give a decent idea about how active a given piece is. most of my uranium glass registers anywhere from 50 to 200, maybe 300 CPM whereas the ceramic will measure 3000, 4000 easily if not higher. The ceramic is far and above way more "hot" compared to the uranium glass.
Thanks to Lumen for sponsoring! To get 20% off, go to lumen.me/ragusea and start improving your health today!
The lumen sponsor really irks me, really sick of these health claim/health fad things getting tossed around so irresponsibly by creators without thinking about the very real impact it can have on people. I know you gotta eat, I know you got bills to pay, but man this is not the way.
It's a crazy expensive monthly subscription besides having to buy the device. Reminds me of the Peloton business model, which I am also not a fan of.
@@15dragonslayer I work at a tech company and our product has some vaguely telecommunication-adjacent features, so I initially wondered why a Seattle-area phone company is sponsoring a video from a food channel based out of Georgia 😅
Please don’t use autotranslate for your video titles. It’s AI-made and gross. if you want to hire a real translator, I'm here.
@@15dragonslayer Indeed, it makes no sense, you will breath practically the same amount of CO2 regardless if your body is using carbs or fats, Its just a scam. Very disappointing that Adam would promote such things, seems $$$ is very enticing for him.
Alpha is considered the least dangerous because it has low penetration through skin. If it gets ingested it is actually the most destructive due to the large mass and charge of the particle, compared to something like a beta particle or a gamma ray.
Alpha particle (n.): Helium atom with anger management issues.
Yes, I remember my chemistry professor telling me this! It’s not dangerous from the outside bc it’s doesn’t have very much potential for penetration so it won’t go through your skin, but it does have pretty powerful ability to ionize stuff. So, if you get it inside you, you basically have this very destructive particle pin balling through your squishy bits for a long time bc it’s unable to get out. At least that’s how it was described to me 😂
Your top layers of skin are also dead, while your internal organs may be of rapidly reproducing type thereby increasing the effects of mutations
The key point with alpha particles is that they are massive and charged so they really want to interact with everything, and thus if there's almost anything between your living tissue and the source, the particles will expend most of their energy interacting with that before they can mess with your body. Now if the alpha source can directly contact that living tissue, the interactions can be quite damaging. But at the same time, there's plenty of radioactive substances, including tiny amounts of uranium in the environment already, so the body has systems to fix that damage as long as it's not too much all at once. And that's before taking into account the fact that with a half life of 4.5 billion years, U238 does not release a lot of radiation.
Yep, alpha particles are stopped by a few cm of air, or even something like a thin piece of paper. No penetrative power at all. So they are "virtually" harmless outside the body. If an alpha emitting substance is ingested or inhaled though, it's by far the most dangerous.
Gamma is the opposite...it's just very high frequency of light, extremely penetrating (goes through almost anything). But because it's so penetrating, it rarely interacts with anything and most of it will just pass through. So for gamma exposure, it makes very little difference whether the source is inside or outside you. That's why gamma emitting isotopes like Tc-99m are used in nuclear medicine. They give far less of an overall dose than alpha or beta emitters. I could go into the gray-to-sievert conversion, how each type of radiation has a factor applied to it (high energy neutrons are 20x for instance, so a 1Gy dose of high energy neutrons = 20Sv). The conversion for gamma is 1 though, so for gamma radiation, 1Gy=1Sv.
Minor correction: most cosmic background radiation of the sort that you'd see in an earth-based cloud chamber is not from the big-bang era (adam is thinking about the cosmic microwave background, which doesn't show up in a cloud chamber), but rather from random sources (exploding stars, accreting black holes, the tiniest portion of other stars' output that makes it through our own solar wind, etc) which are evenly distributed in every direction - but what one sees even more commonly is from terrestrial sources like trace radioactive elements in the air / rocks.
To further that, I believe most background radiation is terrestrial (from earth). We only get gamma radiation from outside earth as alpha and beta are absorbed in the atmosphere. Additionally we just have lots of radioactive rocks near us as opposed to high radiation events far away, which due to inverse square law won’t affect us much. 50% of background reaction is from rocks in earth
Also you won't see gamma radiation in a cloud chamber since it only rarely interacts with particles and simply won't form trails. The trails are the result of the decay of Uranium or other radioactive elements like the Radon that's in the air.
@MikoScienciaaccurate and excellent name
Yep. Thanks.
@MikoSciencia Correct - very occasionally a lucky and/or fast alpha or beta particle will get through the atmosphere to the ground, but usually even these sorts of things are instead detected when they produce a shower of other particles after running into something in the air.
I had a physics professor in college who collected uranium glass, we took measurements and did some calculations on them. We found the radiation to be hardly discernible from background most of the time. She did have one piece in particular that was much much more radioactive than others, still safe but it made the Geiger counter go absolutely crazy
A buddy of mine who studied physics at uni collects uranium glass.. I've eaten ice cream on uranium glass, and didn't worry one bit.
@@MrZnarffyIn 1956, the U.S. proposed that any radioactivity causes harm proportional to the dose, shaping global radiation standards. However, moderate exposure may train the body's defenses, protecting against DNA damage and cancer.
Yup, usually it's fine but generally good to check because there is a handful of examples that are MUCH more radioactive and you want to be aware of the risks/levels. But given proper information there's not really much to worry about.
Was the piece in question bigger or thicker? Or was there just more uranium per ounce of glass?
@@sarahwatts7152just different isotope concentration? Anyway its not so much about the end users as it was about the folks who worked in the factories and processing plants who got the exposures
I.... I'm genuinely impressed how good your cloud chamber came out. Nice!
I'm amazed he got to film anything, it looks like something really hard to capture. I know Adam is a professional but then, it is good to appreciate the amazing work of professionals.
I had to catch a picture of those streaks in college and even with a mildly radioactive source helping me it took FOREVER to get it. Blown away by his camera, honestly
@@consoleking9670also, having big powerful lights for contrast helps
When Adam is talking about certain ceramics being dangerous around 5:00 I believe he’s talking about Fiesta Ware! The Orange of the uranium glaze is why uranium was used as a pigment of sorts and it’s SUPER radioactive (like way way more than uranium glass), and due to the radiation of uranium being alpha radiation (simply: doesn’t penetrate skin but is harmful if ingested or inhaled) and the ease at which it chips, you really shouldn’t eat off it. It used to be my favorite piece of what my nuclear engineering department called the “goodie box” of radioactive stuff, it really makes the Geiger counter scream lol.
It's commonly called "Fiesta ware" but that's a bit of a misnomer, Fiesta was just one brand of many who used U in their glazes, and there is plenty of Fiesta ware out there with no uranium in it cause they made all sorts of colors, and in fact they still exist and are producing to this day.
That why having a little detector is helpful if you are concerned. I got one from that big online place named for a warrior woman for around $50, and it's quite good. I also got a small ☢️ sample to make sure it was properly calibrated. I have two pieces of uranium glass where it's a blend of non radioactive and radioactive colors. In this case, red and yellow, but the colors vary. Since it's not always obvious from the color which ones are 'hot,' having the detector is worth every penny.
custom building a cloud chamber in your kitchen to prove a tangential point is nuts hahaha, really enjoyed this
Adam is in his nileblue era
"this is how I turned my cutting board into seasoning for my meat through [insert horrifyingly dangerous chemical process]"
Like Nile Green but slightly more helpful
@@HourRomanticist Adam in his nilegreen phase: "tomatoes are nightshades, peppers and potatoes too, but today I'm going to show you how to make tea with the interesting one, you know, the one with atropine"
I was thinking he was just in his thrifting era 😅
Just a small correction: Radiation from the CMB is not detected in cloud chambers, as it is extremely low-energy. What is generally detected are charged particles, such as muons, created by cosmic rays colliding with particles in our atmosphere. This is one source of the usual "background radiation" that is mentioned in discussions about humans and annual doses of radiation. I assume the confusion here was the "cosmic" in cosmic rays, and the "background radiation" from CMB radiation, which is extremely understandable. Cosmic rays generally come from solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and distant supernovae.
If you're doing this on your kitchen countertop, the countertop itself is also a potential source. Adam's looks like engineered quartz, but granite contains significant amounts of uranium, thorium, and potassium. Potassium salts are also used in cooking, such as cream of tartar or in non-sodium salt substitutes.
By analyzing the trajectory in the cloud chamber (e.g., the direction and radius of deflection), and using a magnetic or electric field along with a particle source, one can identify whether it’s radioactive radiation (such as alpha or beta particles) or other particles like electrons, muons, etc.
a small correction to the beginning is there are different types of uranium glass. there is the green stuff you have which includes some iron alongside the uranium oxide to give it that green colour. The green stuff is usually just called plain Uranium Glass, but there is yellow glass that doesnt include iron, and in turn has more uranium inside it. This is the Vaseline glass that you talked about in the beginning.
That's the glass that looks like highlighter ink, yeah?
@bartolomeothesatyr lol yeah, it's almost just as bright
@@freeviolet7199 My mom has a pair of candlesticks made of it, they're super vibrant in direct sunlight. Wild under blacklight, too.
@bartolomeothesatyr yeah I have a couple boots made of it, they are one of my favoruite things I have
That certainly makes sense since uranium oxide is yellow, but how does an iron compound shift that color towards green?
Adam, I found you because of a simple recipe, but I fell in love with your narrative style, video composition, and scientific focus. I enjoy hearing your take on a anything (the fish greenhouse was awesome!) Keep up the diversified content videos! I love this!
8:28
I think it’s Background Radiation
which Includes Cosmic Rays, not
to be Confused with CMB.
There also might be small ambient radiation depending on where you live, not to also mention smoke detectors
Yeah that's correct, the CMB is much lower energy and not ionizing.
Lumen - the expensive health gadget that will definitely totally work this time
I'm managing diabetes- might be useful supplement to blood sugar measurments.
I think it sounds interesting if just for the heck of it 😅
@@darwin6883 no its not.
its for PREDIABETICS. if you have diabetes, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MEASURE YOU FRICKING SUGAR WITH A REAL DEVICE.
its for people who are fat and in need of a butt - kick from an electrical device that claimes "YOU ARNT BURNING ENOUGH FAT, here take this nutrition plan and run the next two hours around the block. it CANT measure where you got that carbon in your breath out of,
you can get that cheaper from your doctor and a certified nutritionist.
dont forget WE ARE ON UA-cam, ADVERTISER ARE SCAMMERS
looked into it and it requires a subscription to even use the thing, and all it does is measure the carbohydrate percentage you breathe out and determines if you're burning fat or carbs (which can be either from absorbed blood glucose or from glycogen).
A diabetic really isn't getting more much use from this than they would from their regular suite of insurance-paid tools and kits. And as a health tracker...it's rather frivolous and worst of all to me is the subscription, it is an unjustifiable expense in my book.
I fell for it and now own one. The subscription criticism is right, it's use is pretty limited without one. You get basic information on the free plan, but most is subscription-locked. Even with the subscription I didn't feel like it was worth it. I could reliably guess the results based on what I ate that day. Healthy and exercise? Probably fat burning. Couch and ice cream? Look at that, carbs. I stopped using it because it wasn't doing much besides calorie counting with a coat of paint on it. Maybe more useful for other people in other ways, but for the price tag I can't recommend it.
-Holds up a juicer~
"We're not talking about a lot of juice coming off this glass"
Wait...
I caught that too lol
HAHAHA definitely saw what he did there
8:30 correction most background radiation comes from high energy particles in space (eg from the sun) colliding in the atmosphere and creating a radioactive event which can be detected on earth or it comes from rocks on earth. The CMBR is responsible for probably none of what you would detect in that cloud chamber
Agreed as microwave it’s not radioactive
I grew up in Wheeling, WV. So rare to hear it mentioned these days. Thanks!
Take me home, country roads!
You’re famous
wyoving
Billy Joel: Billy the Kid - In a town known as Wheeling WV, rode a boy with a six-gun in his hand ...
No longer a food channel, 100% science channel now.
God I love Science
Cooking is just a fancy word for applied chemistry, always has been a science channel
I work in the glass industry and we use uranium glass to connect different types of glass together without cracking because its coefficient of expansion is between the other two! Of course there are many other interesting properties it has as well.
Is it my anium or uranium
O thats a pretty fun fact. Do you then also make new uranium glass to use or is it mostly reshaping?
@@Roockert at our place it's all just reshaping. Apparently those that used to make it from scratch either don't or very rarely. We have been using a batch that was made in the 70s lol
Not to mention, if you do this on a granite counter top, the granite will radiate about as much as the uranium glass if not more.
Yeah, granite has isotopes of all kinda radioactive stuff in it, and we prepare food on it all the time. No sweat!
I hear that if you dig a basement into certain types of stone (including granite), you need to monitor that basement for any unstable off-gassing from the decay products (mostly isotopes of radon?) of those radioactive impurities breaking down, though! If it does start building up, special ventilation is needed to remove it. Like most things, it's a matter of scale and proportions.
Bro really gonna tell us he doesn't own a geiger counter, but has dry ice laying around.
You can get dry ice at some grocery stores. Geiger counters much less so.
Dry ice is for sale at most supermarkets
Depending on how far away he is from shipping hubs, he might even be able to keep the remnants of blocks his meat boxes come in. (I’m far enough away it’s always already sublimated, even when it’s below freezing outside…)
Dry ice has cooking applications. Geiger counters; less so.
He's mainly a cooking channel, and their are cooking applications for dry ice. So he is unlike the science channels that have gotten sponsorships by that one gama spectrometer(which is not a geiger counter, but can still be useful in this application). Also geiger counters aren't cheap, and you have to calibrate them to get accurate readings(not that it would be that important for the purposes of this video). Though the radiacode(thing that was in those sponsorships) being a gama spectrometer isn't really that useful for things like uranium glass that are producing, primarily, alpha particles.
I, for one, appreciate your "scholarly" approach, delivered in such a straightforward way as to make it not only educational but entertaining as well. Thank you and welcome back for (I hope) another year of excellent videos.
Uranium/uv reactive glass is super popular in the stoner glass art community. Stoners love pipes that glow with a UV light
Most of it is made with rare earth metals that are not highly radioactive like Uranium, but Northstar did a production run of some acual uranium glass not so many years ago that still comes up on the second hand market. No one will really work with it though- not because it's dangerous but because the market has dictated that it's apparently worth $300 USD per lb!
Here early to say that uranium glass is totally fine as long as you don't eat it, and most people get a higher background dose than they ever could from uranium glass
Do you have any proof other than just saying so?
@@socksman669 Literally the entire video?
"As long as you don't eat it"
Ah yes, the RADIATION will kill you.
Thank you! If you hadn't said it I would have. Radiation can be incredibly scary, but like with everything else scary, dose is everything. A few of my favorite examples: nobody is scared of bananas, brazil nuts, or basalt
Regular glass is also totally fine as long as you don't eat it
I have a small shard of uranium glass I got at a gem and mineral show many years ago. I don’t make a habit of carrying it around but it looks really cool
3:33 Who else thought that Adam was trying to sell us a vape
The glass won't give you cancer, but this might
So if you eat food out of the uranium glass with your black plastic flat ware does that mitigate the risk?
Good one 😂
I have a small collection of uranium glass. Not to eat off of, but just to admire. It's always a fun conversation piece.
Uranium glass is weird in the sense that it is appealing only to a certain type of people (usually male, somewhat nerdy, cat-owners, often engineers, "creatives" or people with a tech/science background). I can sort the people I know by what their view on uranium glass is... there are those who "get it"... and those who don't. I wonder why that is - and if there are other "things" like UO-glass I don't know anything about (yet)...
@ I know more women who collect uranium glass than men. My mom, aunt, and friend Jocelyn are the ones who got me into it.
@@f.d.6667I would buy it if it had even more radioactivity, as moderate levels of radioactivity are very beneficial for health.
@@f.d.6667dude its just some glowy lookin glass its not that deep lol
@@f.d.6667 chill dont describe my entire personality just from my glass collection lol its way to accurate.
It's also good to note that radiation isn't the only concern. Uranium is classified as a heavy metal, and along with others like lead can be quite toxic in the body. Heavy metals tend to accumulate and cause increasing problems with continued ingestion since your body doesn't really have any way of getting rid of them. Still not a concern with uranium glass, but definitely so with the old Fiestaware uranium glazed ceramic, where acidic foods particularly would leach a LOT of uranium out.
Really liking the new theme on these videos of "Here's a thing you've probably heard you need to worry about, but with a bit more context in how bad it really is so you can better manage your apathy fatigue."
Sorry to be pedantic but that background radiation isn't left over from the CMB. The CMB doesn't really produce the kind of ionizing radiation you see in a cloud chamber. -- it's the microwave background because it's at microwave frequencies.
It's just general radiation from various things in the universe either undergoing radioactive decay or via things like charged jets from a pulsar or blackhole.
9:50 i think it was applied science that did a similar test with lead glassware, which also eventually lost nearly all surface-diffusable lead, basically all that was left was enough inside to not be able to diffuse out. so just give your uranium glassware a good soak and wash before using it and it'll probably be fine.
I got some of this type of glassware on ebay and really love it, it's so cool to have plates that glow
My mom collected this stuff beginning in the early 70s. It became the family 'formal dining' dishes for 25 years after that, and I dined on it almost daily for 20 years or so growing up. When I have dinner at my dad's my stepmom still serves some dishes and drinks with uranium Depression Glass like that. I am not worried, but also glad I did not inherit it lol.
Uranium glass is still produced occassionally in the United States, usually as borosilicate rods and tubes for the art glass industry. Northstar Glass did a special production run of their uranium glass recipe ~10years ago that still pops up on the second hand market if you're willing to pay for it.
I love that you showed how to make a cloud chamber! Great work dude
Funny you should mention eastern river valleys and glass making. In the small mill village of Suncook, NH, we have a street called Glass Street along the Suncook River. This is because when the glass factories made glass and messed up (or just had too much) and then when they finally closed down, they famously dumped tons of glass in the river there. I remember going behind the dam and unearthing fully intact bottles from the time.
Ngl just recently restarted collecting uranium glass again and finally got a cabinet set up with lights. It was neat that you decided to do this video. Certain spectrum of UV will also make other heavy metals used in dishes glow. I havent personally seen examples of it but ive seen it mentioned multiple times. The brighter it glows the "hotter" it is. Also fair warning to those who go out looking for this stuff. At some point they replicated the colour perfectly without using uranium. Take a uv light with you. There is a pitcher and 4 glass set at a local antique store. Out of 5 pieces only 2 have uranium. However under normal light you couldnt tell any of it apart.
It's very cool when your dishes glow, and I really like my (display only) uranium glass pieces, but we've found lots of other, non-toxic, glow-in-the-dark substances over the last century. It doesn't have to be radioactive to look AWESOME.
Glaze = a layer of glass. Properly-applied glaze won't chip or flake, but if it's really thin and it's on low-quality clay or something, it might.
Yes it will chip after a while.
It's also concentrated at the surface. The Thought Emporium has a recent video where he takes glazed uranium dishware into a cloud chamber like this and you can absolutely see more coming off of it.
A couple of things to consider:
1. boron silicate glass doped with uranium is going to emit less neutrons than soda lime glass.
2. you touched on the leaching from the surface using water or acetic or other food acids. This will strip soluble elements from the surface eventually leaching all available soluble elements from that surface and unless you scratch or crack the surface to expose fresh unleached material, due to the nature of glass you won't leach any more.
Uranium glass and vaseline glass are two different things (US) but it's kind of a whiskey/bourbon situation. Vaseline Glass is yellow-green in color. All of the pieces you have here are uranium glass. More specifically, the console bowl you have appears to be a variety of uranium glass called Apple Green, which is an earlier use of the element than the other pieces.
A few years ago I got a Geiger counter and tested everything I could think of to see if I could get a reading. I only found one thing that was radioactive, an antique ceramic bowl that my mom gave me.
Uranium glass was used in the lighting industry for overhead lamps, electric lamps and 'crystal' prisms for it's beautiful, fluorescent yellow-green colour. In Bohemia and Silesia, many manufactories experimented with elegant crystal chandeliers made wholly or partially with vaseline glass prisms, crystal cups and bobeches. They also produced some truly beautiful, Victorian jewelry in elegant, neoclassical designs. Vaseline glass is no more harmful than the tritium keychains and pocket-lights we buy today.
When Adam explained how to build a cloud chamber, I could have sworn I was watching one of those insane re-edits of his recipes.
As far as I know, while uranium glass is thought to be completely safe when it's not chipped, sanded or shattered, it was nasty for workers on factories that produced it, so I don't think it's possible for it to make a big return. But I've also heard about some esoteric Chinese items that used glowing glass with thorium in it and apparently they're still in production. They're not sold as general-purpose kitchenware though, instead they're marketed as devices for alternative medicine based on a pseudoscientific belief that small doses of radiation can "stimulate" the organism or, I don't know, eliminate evil spirits from the drinking water or something. The safety of theese things is questionable, especially for stuff like pendants and stickers for phones - while alpha radiation and some incidental gamma from thorium decay products won't do much if the item that emits them is rarely placed near the human body, I guess that constantly wearing something like this in close proximity to skin may make it possible for the radioactive particles to affect the skin cells leading to various problems.
Tiny correction - in the cloud chamber, the trace is left behind the particle because the rest of the environment gives the alcohol mist no surface to condense on, the bottom is too cold. When the particle appears, the mist condenses on it because it is the only surface to condense on, resulting in a droplet, which is left behind. And the line of these droplets is the trace line.
Oh hey, vaseline glass! My parents collect carnival glass (mostly pieces by Fenton Art Glass Company), and vaseline is one of the recognized colors there too; carnival glass is just iridized glassware, so companies could make vaseline glass and then add iridescence, and that resulted in vaseline carnival glass. Carnival glass is a collector's item these days and vaseline carnival glass is included in that. I think it's a well-regarded/popular color among carnival collectors, so that's cool; but it's very rare and usually expensive, so we don't have any in my family's collection. I have gotten to see pieces in other folks' collections before though! Carnival glass isn't eaten out of to preserve the iridescence and prevent the glass from breaking, so vaseline carnival glass is also effectively harmless; the iridescent coating doesn't change that fact. (Though I would be intrigued to know if it maybe reduces the amount of radioactive particles emitted into the air? Maybe if the coating is thick enough.)
Very cool that you can make a cloud chamber (mostly) out of home materials, I never knew that!
My parents were big collectors of Carnival and Depression glass back in the 1970s and 80s. I have a few pieces from those collections. They're interesting, attractive pieces of glassware.
Yeah, Fenton is my brother’s favorite. He brags about it all the time. I love it, it’s really cool looking.
Definitely did NOT expect Adam to talk about radioactive Uranium, but I'm here for it.
Same!!! Got to have your fresh dose of radioactivity!!
I mean, this is definitely in his wheelhouse
As opposed to non-radioactive uranium?
The Earle R. Caley source to my understanding does not prove the use of uranium in roman glassmaking. Is the paper at 1:56 related to that find? Couldn't find any strong evidence for the claim 🤔
Always love your science content, really appreciate getting something else that would be cool and accessible for a middle school or high school setting.
You can also form a vapor chamber above your hot tea if there's a layer of steam that's sitting above it in your cup.
I have a decent collection of uranium glass going, love the stuff
I believe it’s already come back. Quite a few people are making it and collecting it is certainly very popular.
this cloud chamber is simple but its upside down, you could probably use the fish tank as a tank and just hang the alcohol sponges from hooks from the top, just put a cotton dish rag on the bottom, some dry ice, then a small toaster oven tray for the platform, it should work just as well but no real need to seal anything aside from maybe a lid on top to prevent turbulence from motion
Jesus Christ, the bots, man. Dead Internet theory becoming a reality.
That sounds like lifeform talk...
@enjoyerofcontent It is, and I absolutely am a person. Trust me on this 😉
Maybe its cuz im looking through this after a couple of days and its been filtered but i haven't seen any suspicious bot looking comments so far
@Roockert it was very evident on the day of the vid's release
You can find this glass used, but you need a UV LED flashlight. Hobby Lobby sells a really nice one with low visible light emission for real cheap. Some of the ebay UV small lights are junk with flaky switches and white light along with the purple. Some green glass is not Uranium so you really want the light when looking. Try antique shops, charity shops, etc. that has old glassware out. Or grammas cupboards if she is old enough to have pre 50s glassware.
I have several pieces of uranium glassware... AND a nice little sensor to make sure that it's not overly radioactive. If anyone is interested in collecting, it's a necessity. Some of the pieces are hotter than others, though most are barely above background radiation.
Excellent video, as usual top notch paper references and vulgarisation and entertainment balance 👍
You think it might be potentially harmful to whoever is producing the glass? I remember a glass producer stopped a certain type of glass color due to the amounts of radiation in the glass, it was popular in glass pendant and Pipe blowing. Like 10 years ago.
Many antique stores will have special displays of items like these.
I inherited a pretty sizable collection of Uranium glass and a few pieces of a orange fluorescent glass from my dad after he passed. It is pretty interesting stuff.
I have a sizable collection of uranium glass, ranging from new items to ones well over a century old. I love it and will keep collecting more.
Don't throw away your ceramics. Sell them, plenty of us atomic age collectors about.
My brother has a curio cabinet full of this stuff.
In WV we only have room for one song and that song isn't even about the state.
I have a few pieces of uranium glass. One, a large yellow bowl that I use as a candy dish, reads significantly above background on my radiation detector if I put the meter right on top of it. I would be reluctant to eat acidic food out of old dishes like these in case the food leaches chemicals out of them. This is likely a greater risk with ceramic glazes than with glass. In addition to being slightly radioactive, uranium is chemically toxic, and other toxic metals were used in the past. Though it probably isn't dangerous to eat food out of these dishes occasionally, I prefer to use them for wrapped candies or other similar items.
slight correction: at 8:26 you say that you can see the cosmic background radiation in the cloud chamber, this is incorrect as that is microwaves which will not show up in a cloud chamber as they are far too low energy. These are likely actually cosmic rays, or depending on where you are possibly some natural radiation from rocks/etc.
One important note about K-40 vs U-238 is that uranium will accumulate in your body, while potassium will not. Your body always regulates its levels of potassium, and whatever potassium you consume will be urinated out and replaced by the next potassium that you eat. Uranium will get included into the minerals in your bones and stay in your body forever.
While eating from a piece of uranium glass is probably safe, i suspect the industrial production of uranium glass would have been more harmful, especially without modern safety standards. Workers would’ve likely been exposed to more radioactive material and inhaled/ingested dust that hasn’t been locked up inside the glass, and were probably around it much more often than normal people that just owned a piece.
That is why glass vitrification of nuclear waste is a hazardous process.
@@TomJones-tx7pbMany radiation biologists now believe that moderate radioactivity could be beneficial for humans.
My mom has a whole set of green depression glass that she inherited from her grandmother. It's all a bit fancier than this, with like fluted decorations on every piece. My mom's always been afraid to use it with food because of the Uranium, so it just lives displayed in a china cabinet. Sometimes she'll use them as candy dishes (with wrapped candies) for holidays and stuff. I'll let her know the risk is low, but I doubt she'll change her mind, lol.
I love that Adam now makes science/video easy videos
My favorite Adam is "I learned this so now you have to".
My second favorite is Ionized Helium Adam.
You and Thought Emporium upload videos about old radioactive tableware on the same day. Crazy!
Yes i've been wanting uranium glass for the past 8 years now 😢
Some relieved vintage photography equipment enthusiasts will be relieved…
I have a Civil Defense Geiger counter is all, but with the metal window open on the probe I can sometimes detect a slight rise in count from Uranium glass items, more so with it near the thickest parts, but some areas do not seem to have detectable difference. Still pretty low level stuff as compared to the just cosmic ray clicks. WIth the metal window shut I get nothing which must indicate no Gamma.
Makes sense that it’s less dangerous if it’s encapsulated deeper in the glass compared to ceramic glazes, but I wonder if it’s more dangerous if you break it (which often accidentally happens with glassware). Or is the glass a suitable enough medium that it’s well contained even if it’s in shards?
I notice you’ve been doing fewer of these food / science / food science /journalistic pieces and I miss them!
I just purchased my 1st set its a teacup and saucer
Really interesting video (as per usual)! Thanks for the effort you put into it (also as per usual)!
I would love to own a set like this
Estate sales
I think you probably just choose your own topics, but would be interested to see your thoughts on the history of “Forever Chemicals”. Happy New Year!
I'm pretty sure he covered PFAS already in an earlier video
I think you should probably just search through his previous videos 🫠
I have a small collection of uranium glass. Always a conversation starter.😊
The major health hazards of uranium do not end at radiation. Uranium is a heavy metal and it disrupts many important chemical processes within the human body. The best course to safely use uranium doped glassware is to leach out any uranium in the surface with acid first (or never use it with food).
Good video Adam! Can you please make another video showing us how your fish and crabs are doing?
I would love a complete set platters and all. Adam how are the fish doing?
i appreciate the visual science here, how to cook that did a similar demo. you explained it really well, well made and easy to replicate :)
Also having a real "oh this is someone talking outside of their area of expertise " vibe from this
The biggest danger is how addictive collecting radioactive glass is. Let's say you pick up uranium plate at the thrift shop for $3. Next thing you know, you're bidding on a $700 houze lamp you can't afford becaues someone else bought the $400 you thought was too expensive and now you live with a mixture of guilt and disappointment.
Happy New Year! 🥂
Funny I thought I had seen a video from you about those glasses once. Maybe I moved to the other side of the Mandela effect again. 😁
Love the ending here
love it when thrift stores have the uranium glass display
I want ALLLLLLLLLL of your Uranium Absinthe Glasses!!!!
I have the same juicer
You could probably remove most of the available uranium in the surface of the glass by letting it leach in a acidic solution. There's a UA-camr called applied science who did this with lead glass at least
What a lovely timing with the Thought Emporium dudes - two radiation cookware videos in one month!
When Frigidaire started selling refrigerators for the home, they gave new buyers a Uranium Glass juicer and pitcher set.
Working at a factory where than sanded this glass must have been awesome... inhaling/swallowing all that uranium glass particles.
They are probably replaceable chinese or bangla kids. Nothing if value will be lost
I'd probably want to save this glass exclusively for special occasions-not because of the uranium, but because of the ultraviolet light needed to get it to really shine.
worth noting that the radioactive ceramic is often this bright orange color, and does not glow under UV. What it does do, that the uranium glass doesn't is set geiger counters absolutely haywire. the counter I have measures in "counts per minute" which is relatively meaningless if you really want data about what radiation & how bad it is, but it does give a decent idea about how active a given piece is. most of my uranium glass registers anywhere from 50 to 200, maybe 300 CPM whereas the ceramic will measure 3000, 4000 easily if not higher. The ceramic is far and above way more "hot" compared to the uranium glass.
Great vid as always! Hope you have a wonderful year Adam :)