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Thursday November 29, 2007
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For many of us, chemistry was the path that we took to enter technology. One of my favorite jobs was assisting research to improve Fresh Step cat litter. (How many products have to satisfy two different species? And yes, it involved scientific testing of actual cat byproducts. Take that, Mike Rowe.)
For those who fondly remember Mr. Wizard's World, consider a set of uranium-doped radioactive marbles from United Nuclear this Christmas. Or, rather than coal in someone's stocking (and I can't believe this) the site will ship them some supertoxic Polonium 210, or a more generic Cobalt-57 wafer. How this doesn't require some sort of FBI background check is beyond me; for god's sake, don't go buying this stuff on a whim. (Unfortunately, the more whimsical radioactive plates and saucers are sold out.)
And if that isn't enough, there's the 600,000-volt Van de Graaf electrostatic generator, a tuning fork set, meteorites, and a forthcoming cloud chamber kit for your at-home supercollider.
Do we need to reiterate that these are seriously serious tools? The site is full of fun warnings, such as "do not drink sodium acetate"or this little gem on the superpowerful neodymium magnets page:
"A small child recently lost his hand when his father left two # 31 supermagnets unattended. The child picked one up and when he approached the other magnet on a nearby table,
it became airborne and obliterated his small hand." Mentioned on the Ars Technica forums.
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November 30, 2007 11:55 AM
Ohh, sciencey! I think I remember reading or seeing something about how these guys were actually raided by the FBI at least once. But maybe that was some other radioactive online outlet. Some cool stuff there to be sure. But all things considered, I still wouldn't put those uranium marbles in my pocket, no matter how safe the write up says they are.