The problem with regular Geiger counters is that the sensitive ones saturate and you risk missing being in a high radiation environment. The models built for civil protection are not sensitive enough for daily use.
Luckily scintillation counters, like the one from the article seems to be, became really cheap in the past few years. I have a RadiaCode and it is a device one could only dream of a decade ago.
>The device can be used by industrial and medical radiation users, regulatory authorities, the nuclear energy industry, first responders and military users
It cannot be used by TSA employees. They are not allowed to even wear dosimeters.
Tangentially related: If you haven’t already, I‘d suggest to look at Radon. It‘s the #2 reason for lung cancer, and is very easy to measure and mitigate (automatic ventilation). Many countries have Radon hazard maps.
I wound up grabbing a couple of AirThings sensors to see what my indoor air quality looks like. Those things can be a bit pricey, but they are easy to interface with locally and integrate into Home Assistant, providing you with measures for a few different properties. I found that the radon levels in my basement rarely breach 2 pCi/L, but can breach as high as 4 pCi/L very infrequently (i.e. once a year.) Not sure if there is really any point in being concerned about it, but it's interesting information nonetheless.
Let's just hope they are lying. Where do you even get radon gas? The most stable isotope has a half life of just 3.8 days. Unless they mean they built on a place with unfortunate geology or have a large stockpile of radium around.
Some countries have places with higher than normal natural background radiation, and thermal springs whose waters emit radon, and caves with some radon in their air.
And people travel there, to bathe and bask in it, and feel refreshed afterwards.
I note the comment by mppm and accept that exact risk levels and associations are problematic while also noting medical students can and have demonstrated increased cancer and tumours in lab animals when exposed to radon.
I once measured broad area environmental levels of background radiation as part of geophysical exploration, I'm not in the medical field (although I did some post grad epidemiology work as part of a mathematics degree).
Medical papers of interest on radon include:
Indoor radon was declared a human carcinogen in 1987 by the WHO and in 1988 by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
From what I can tell, they didn't. The theoretical basis for it is the Linear No-Threshold Model, which is, bluntly put, garbage. The empirical evidence seems to come mostly from so-called case-control studies, which are, bluntly put, garbage.
You conduct a case-control study as follows: 1) Select some number of lung cancer patients and a control group without lung cancer. 2) Try to establish why the cancer patients got cancer and the non-cancer group didn't, by retroactively estimating their smoking habits, radon exposure (from radon maps or retroactive measurements of places they lived at), as well as other factors. 3) Use statistics to try to disentangle suspected radon cases from smoking (90%) and other stuff. 4) Pretend that all this is not totally biased, sampling or otherwise.
Kinda neat that they were able to marry all those different scintillators together in one package, but their paper makes it sound like you're still going to want an He3 tube along if you really care about finding neutrons.
UV-C radiation is so rare in our lives and even in specific work environments that unless you have a very special need for it, you don't need to detect it. As far as I know, it's mostly just germicidal lamps and arc lamps that generate enough UV-C to be of any real concern, and in that case the operator knows about it.
Like UV light, alpha radiation is easily shielded by most kinds of material. Even after skimming the linked publication, it does not seem clear to me how the alpha radiation (and UV) would reach the devices sensor.
Probably something behind "... and measure alpha and beta radiation from contaminated surfaces".
"Shielding" is a relatively crude term. Alpha radiation is "shielded" by a sheet of paper in the sense that the attenuation is so high, and the attenuation length is so short when compared to the thickness of that paper, that less than 1/1000th of the original particles arrive on the other side of the paper.
However, this means that there are still very few but not zero alpha particles arriving on the other side. Plus, the energy of those alpha particles doesn't just go away, it will be either transformed into highly energetic photons (in the hard UV to gamma range) or it will ionize the attenuating medium, leading to photons from line emissions (infrared to visible to UV) or other ionization-related effects (e.g. an ionisation current in semiconductor diodes). All those things can be detected, and you can calibrate your detector for the relative sizes of those effects you are seeing when compared to the incident alpha rays.
Readit News
Luckily scintillation counters, like the one from the article seems to be, became really cheap in the past few years. I have a RadiaCode and it is a device one could only dream of a decade ago.
It cannot be used by TSA employees. They are not allowed to even wear dosimeters.
Edit: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/hhe/reports/pdfs/2003-0206-3067.pd...
And people travel there, to bathe and bask in it, and feel refreshed afterwards.
It's called 'Hormesis'.
I once measured broad area environmental levels of background radiation as part of geophysical exploration, I'm not in the medical field (although I did some post grad epidemiology work as part of a mathematics degree).
Medical papers of interest on radon include:
* WHO Handbook on Indoor Radon: A Public Health Perspective (2009) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23762967/* Radon and Lung Cancer: Current Trends and Future Perspectives (2022) - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9264880/
^^ Broad overview handbooks and trends
-------------------
Example studies
* Radon in homes and risk of lung cancer: collaborative analysis of individual data from 13 European case-control studies (2005) - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC546066/
* A 10-year follow-up study of yearly indoor radon measurements in homes, review of other studies and implications on lung cancer risk estimates (2021) - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...
You conduct a case-control study as follows: 1) Select some number of lung cancer patients and a control group without lung cancer. 2) Try to establish why the cancer patients got cancer and the non-cancer group didn't, by retroactively estimating their smoking habits, radon exposure (from radon maps or retroactive measurements of places they lived at), as well as other factors. 3) Use statistics to try to disentangle suspected radon cases from smoking (90%) and other stuff. 4) Pretend that all this is not totally biased, sampling or otherwise.
Is das folgende Geraet sicher? https://www.doctor-san.eu/luftreinigung-desinfektion/uvc-des...
https://www.doctor-san.eu/luftreinigung-desinfektion/uvc-des...
https://www.amazon.de/Doctor-San-Sanierungstechnik-Desinfekt...
Probably something behind "... and measure alpha and beta radiation from contaminated surfaces".
However, this means that there are still very few but not zero alpha particles arriving on the other side. Plus, the energy of those alpha particles doesn't just go away, it will be either transformed into highly energetic photons (in the hard UV to gamma range) or it will ionize the attenuating medium, leading to photons from line emissions (infrared to visible to UV) or other ionization-related effects (e.g. an ionisation current in semiconductor diodes). All those things can be detected, and you can calibrate your detector for the relative sizes of those effects you are seeing when compared to the incident alpha rays.