[HN Gopher] Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunde...
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Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
Author : wglb
Score : 145 points
Date : 2024-10-03 02:17 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| cperciva wrote:
| _Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm
| while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating
| an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million
| AA batteries stacked end-to-end._
|
| Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with
| using obscure non-SI units?
| mhog_hn wrote:
| I agree in giving flak for using the term AA batteries in this
| context.
| ctoth wrote:
| Shots fired!
| doodlebugging wrote:
| They could've made it easier for laymen and laywomen to grok
| if they simply would've defined the volume of batteries in
| terms of how many Olympic-sized swimming pools one could fill
| with all those batteries.
| shrubble wrote:
| Subtly played!
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| Familiarity with the unit is important to gauge scale.
| madars wrote:
| But familiarity gets more remote as you need larger and
| larger (or, smaller and smaller) multipliers. It's far more
| illustrative to say "the volume of a typical gas tank" than
| "the internal volume of hundred million poppy seeds", even
| though the volumes are in the same ballpark. For example,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(voltage)
| says that high voltage substations are in 100 kV range and
| 25.5MV is "The largest man-made DC voltage - produced in a
| Van de Graaff generator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory" and
| gives me much better color than a "comparison" with 100
| million batteries. (By the way, 100 million batteries stacked
| together is a bit over the length of one marathon - how many
| readers could easily tell you that just from the description
| alone? Much better to measure many lengths in marathons than
| 10^8's of battery lengths!)
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| That's fair but the average person kinda knows how much
| (work/light/heat) a single AA battery can do/produce, but
| not what a substation can do.
| samplatt wrote:
| I would posit that no person on earth has personal
| experience of 100 million AA batteries in a single
| circuit.
| lazide wrote:
| How many have personal experience with 150 MV?
| varjag wrote:
| Approximately the same but now you at least use units
| that make sense.
| lazide wrote:
| Can you convert that to marathons per fortnight for me?
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| It's about 102 kiloTesla marathons squared per
| forthnight. Dimensions are weird.
| benjijay wrote:
| Well, now I have a goal!
| varjag wrote:
| However voltage does not tell you how much work a battery
| can produce.
| iszomer wrote:
| *Release
| varjag wrote:
| It releases energy, and energy performs work. The OP
| however wrote produce.
| lazide wrote:
| They need to write for an (average) 6th grade reading level
| - maximum. So think 4th grade most of the time.
|
| How many 4th graders have any clue what a mega volt is? How
| many do you think have personal experience with 150 mega
| volts?
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| How many have experience with AA batteries these days?
| How many with 100 million of anything, enough to get an
| idea of how much bigger that is than one of the thing?
| Probably all about the same numbers.
| calmbonsai wrote:
| True, but at least get the units right.
|
| A "stack of AA batteries" as described would be a measure of
| electrical potential (i.e. voltage), not electric field
| strength (Volts / unit-length in the applicable
| dimension(s)).
|
| It's been known for quite some time that high density static
| electric field "break-downs" generate electromagnetic
| radiation all throughout the spectrum--look at any wide-band
| antenna's reception next to any spark-gap generator. It
| doesn't take much--even the piezoelectric igniter on a grill
| wand will do it.
|
| One can also generate X-rays by rapidly unrolling Scotch
| tape. It the same phenomena on a _much_ smaller scale. What's
| "new" here are the two distinct types of gamma discharges
| indicating (likely) very different field breakdowns--not that
| these gamma rays themselves are being produced.
| amateurCoder5 wrote:
| That's as strong as 175,000 electric eels!
| amateurCoder5 wrote:
| Connected in series, obviously.
| addaon wrote:
| Not paralleel?
| eru wrote:
| You might enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywaTX-
| nLm6Y
| amelius wrote:
| Was hoping for an "Eelnado" movie.
| shrubble wrote:
| There might be quite a difference depending on whether
| connected in serieel or paralleel I suppose.
| analog31 wrote:
| The proper units for electric field would be voltage per unit
| length. Fortunately an electric eel has both a voltage and a
| length, so it could be eels per eel.
| fecal_henge wrote:
| Thus we have proved that the electric field is
| dimensionless
| pxndxx wrote:
| what about the eelectric field?
| fecal_henge wrote:
| Solid gold comment
| 867-5309 wrote:
| poorly conducted
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| I assume they wanted a way to make it sound massive when it's
| really not. Like, that's about enough to run the average
| American household for 10 years, but we have power plants that
| supply multiples of that daily.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| A voltage is not a unit of power.
| sneak wrote:
| Nobody outside of the industry knows how much a megavolt is.
|
| Megavolts are actually the obscure unit, for normal people.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Most people don't even really understand "million" and
| "billion" other than as "a lot".
| nozzlegear wrote:
| They certainly understand that billion is "a lot" more than
| million.
| labster wrote:
| If all of those 100M AA batteries were laid out flat, they
| would cover over 13 football fields (70000 sq m), including the
| Chargers home stadium.
| lazide wrote:
| How heavy do you think they'd be in elephants and/or
| Volkswagen beetles (up to you to pick 70's era or newer).
| k4rli wrote:
| Square meters yet surely you mean American football here.
| Further confusion ensues.
| jfoutz wrote:
| I don't know what readers are aware of this. American
| football fields are all the same size, but soccer fields
| can vary.
|
| That little bit of trivia makes this extra funny. For me
| anyway.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > American football fields are all the same size
|
| American American football fields are all the same size.
| But American Canadian football fields are all the same,
| different, size. And American Arena football fields are
| also all the same, different, size.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Thus we arrive at a new unit: electric-football-fields
| trhway wrote:
| while the field is strong, the actual energy seems to be not
| much - a lightning bolt is few billions of Joules, i.e. about
| 1000 KW/h (100kg gasoline).
| slow_typist wrote:
| kWh
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Well, 100kg of gas along with a similar ammount of oxygen.
| Even then, burning through 100kg of gasoline in the few
| microseconds of a lighting bolt would probably be more
| powerful than any non-nuclear bomb ever dropped.
| trhway wrote:
| Lightning takes tens of microseconds, bomb - couple hundred
| microseconds, so about 10 times difference power-wise.
| hinkley wrote:
| How many libraries of Congress could you light with that power?
| consf wrote:
| The media seems to do this in an attempt to make the concept
| relatable.. maybe
| liversage wrote:
| In my neck of the woods it's called "journalist units": three
| soccer fields, five blue whales etc.
|
| Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but
| unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare
| now blocks access.
|
| Article in Danish: https://ing.dk/artikel/lynch-nu-kan-ogsaa-
| journalister-faa-s...
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The worst are the money units! Instead of writing "40
| millions dollars", they often omit the number, like "millions
| of dollars".
|
| This means they only use three values: millions, billions,
| and thousands.
|
| My best guess for why is that it's a way to not be wrong. If
| you print "40 millions", and it turns out to be 39, you've
| lied, which is considered far more bad than being vague.
| beAbU wrote:
| In a local publication I follow they always round up or
| down to make the article easier to read. Sometimes they'll
| prefix the number with an "about" or "roughly" or "nearly"
| or whatever.
|
| The actual number (if it's available as a fact) will be
| printed in the article somewhere, but headings, pull quotes
| and other call-outs will have some rounded number.
|
| For example, recent article's first paragraph:
|
| "Justice Minister Thembi Simelane took a loan of more than
| half a million rand from a company that brokered unlawful
| investments into VBS Mutual Bank by the Polokwane
| Municipality while she was mayor of the city in 2016. Pauli
| van Wyk explains what happened."
|
| Further down in the article the "half a million rand" is
| revealed to be R575,600
| throwanem wrote:
| Only a fabrication if it can't be sourced; otherwise, a
| source was wrong and you run a correction. When you don't
| have a number you're willing to point to even that far,
| that's when you leave it out entirely.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > If you print "40 millions", and it turns out to be 39,
| you've lied
|
| That's not what lying is. To tell a lie is to intentionally
| state as fact something you _know_ to be false.
|
| Being wrong isn't lying.
| lazide wrote:
| What about being so negligent in checking your facts that
| any reasonable person would _know_ they're wrong, but
| continuing forward anyway?
| not2b wrote:
| The number is being reported accurately, but with only
| one digit of significance. Rounding 39 to 40 isn't lying
| and isn't deceitful.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > My best guess for why is that it's a way to not be wrong.
|
| It's also often used to make things seem better or worse
| than they actually are. "Thousands of dollars" sounds like
| it's far more than for example $2,108.
| benterix wrote:
| > Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion
| but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and
| Cloudflare now blocks access.
|
| This is one of the main arguments I was using in discussions
| with people advocating unconditional use of HTTPS everywhere.
| Yes, in theory it's a good thing. Yes, in theory it should be
| a solved problem and you wouldn't see any broken websites
| anymore. In practice, we lost a small part of the Web.
| andai wrote:
| Yesterday I considered writing a web scraper completely
| from scratch (just sockets). Without HTTPS, this is
| trivial. Of course, you lose out on much (most?) of the
| web, but I have a feeling most small / interesting sites
| would still be accessible.
|
| I have found that, given a random sampling of web content,
| an extremely small fraction of it is interesting or useful
| to me (nor indeed is hardly any of it what I would consider
| high quality enough to use as the basis for the future
| governors of mankind!)
| sneak wrote:
| Even if you moved the entire TLS web to non-TLS, this is
| no longer trivial. The web requires Javascript to render,
| full stop. Fetching and parsing HTML alone is totally
| insufficient.
| benterix wrote:
| > The web requires Javascript to render, full stop.
|
| A small correction: _some_ parts of the _new web_ require
| JavaScript to render.
|
| That's why on many websites teh experience is better
| _without_ JS. To be more specific, several paywalled
| websites can be accessed just by turning the JS off. You
| could even say the opposite is true in these cases: JS is
| being used to _prevent_ text rendering.
| Vampiero wrote:
| A small part of the web that was either archived already,
| or wasn't interesting enough to be archived in the first
| place.
|
| I get your sentiment but at some point you have to let go.
| Many websites die every day not because of obsolescence but
| because the author eventually stops renewing the domain or
| paying their hosting provider.
|
| It's just a part of life.
| sneak wrote:
| Do you still use telnet?
| benterix wrote:
| No, it's no longer practical for any purpose. I mostly
| use openssl instead, e.g. for testing if my SMTP server
| is up and has a valid cert:
|
| openssl s_client -connect myhost.com:25 -starttls smtp
|
| Telnet stopped being useful a long time ago, is no longer
| shipped by default, and there are better tools to do
| things it was used for decades ago.
| rsynnott wrote:
| The Register also have one:
| https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-
| conver...
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Amazing, and so is the associated article: "In a recent
| piece on red-giant star Mira, we rather foolishly suggested
| that the "comet-tailed" body was travelling across the
| heavens at roughly 150,000 times the speed of the average
| sheep."
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2007/08/24/vulture_central_stan
| d...
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| There was a children's book, 'Half A Giraffe', which led to
| that phrase being used in size comparisons.
| https://old.reddit.com/r/HalfAGiraffe/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measu.
| ..
| beAbU wrote:
| How many tesla superchargers is that?
| teeray wrote:
| "Americans will use anything but the metric system"
| DCH3416 wrote:
| And there's nothing wrong with that. Pick the best unit for
| the job and move on.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Why use AA batteries? It's so hard to zap yourself with them.
| At least with a 9V battery you can lick it to get a sense of
| how much power is in them. Not that you could extrapolate that
| other than to get the sense that the electric field of the
| storm could vaporize you!
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| One form is stating hey, scientific fact that the audience may
| or may not understand. The other form uses language the
| audience understands specifically to build up their knowledge.
| Reducing their confusion also helps them enjoy the article.
|
| So, the journalist are optimizing their writing style For the
| majority of people to understand and enjoy the writing. That's
| probably the best way to write.
| jajko wrote:
| Yes, but that's only because societies basically gave up on
| trying to get better in such ways and laid back very deep in
| their 'comfort zone' for the lack of better words, laziness
| and fear of challenge may be another. You know, the place
| where ossification happens, be it in individuals or in
| millions.
|
| Sweden switched to right hand driving in 1967, I don't think
| if they postponed it till today they would still dare (not
| bashing swedes in any way, happy to be wrong here). Now _that
| 's_ a brave move, and everybody gained from it. Imagine US
| switching say to left hand side if whole world would be
| driving like that... nope.
|
| It doesn't matter if metric (of Celzius based on freakin' H2O
| states for fucks sake) system is vastly simpler, especially
| the less intelligent/educated one is (since we have 10
| fingers in our face 24/7 and we learn counting on them), ego
| is too big, thus you guys measure in washing machines,
| football fields etc. You guys even fail to realize that whole
| US population would benefit, scientists don't care they will
| use whatever suits them and they are smart enough to not be
| slowed down by units used or their conversion.
|
| Nice summary via great Nate Bargatze in this SNL sketch [1].
| Its fun to make fun of but its also sad, because it really is
| pure ego game, nothing more and those are always childish and
| immature at their core, throttling the potential for
| greatness in hard to measure ways.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| I think they should have said 150MV regardless of the
| comparison, but some sort of "intuitive" illustrations is
| useful for non-specialists. But as other commenters have
| pointed out, millions of batteries is also unintuitive because
| you're trading an intuitive voltage for a completely
| unintuitive quantity.
|
| I would have gone a different direction by making the voltages
| and quantities "almost intuitive" - say the electric field is
| as strong as hundreds of high-voltage substations (500 or so).
| Laypeople don't have an intuition on substations' _physics_ but
| they do have an intuition on the _economics_ (tons of homes and
| businesses depend on that thing) and therefore at least some
| appreciation for how powerful that voltage is. Likewise we can
| 't visualize hundreds of anything, but we can (sort of)
| visualize a 20x20 rectangle and appreciate how many 400 is. So
| I think 400 HV substations is at least vaguely graspable.
| garrettgarcia wrote:
| Andrew Hall has hypothesized that plasma flow has a large part to
| play in thunderstorm formation and tornados. These surprising
| gamma rays mentioned in the article would seem to support Hall's
| hypothesis.
|
| Hall's theories are well outside of the mainstream and I don't
| know his credentials, if any, and cannot speak to his
| hypothesis's veracity. I'm not a scientist. Would any actual
| scientists care to comment?
|
| Here is a video where he explains his theory:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU706V0bltc
| dylan604 wrote:
| From the linked video, "while their search for green tinted
| lights continue..."
|
| Such a non-chalantly delivered diss. I found the lowering of
| ground strike lightning during the tornado interesting.
| nelox wrote:
| Stole Bruce Banner's thunder
| riffraff wrote:
| the tropical part obviously explains Street Fighter II's Blanka
| resemblance to the Hulk.
| consf wrote:
| The sheer amount of energy trapped in our skies. It sounds
| philosophically
| dschuetz wrote:
| So the fictional radiation storms in Fallout 4 are kinda spot on.
| houseplant wrote:
| the phenomenon of "red sprites", massive discharges of
| electricity upwards into the ionosphere that counter every single
| lightning strike, are only now being observed and photographed.
|
| these energy ejections are SO powerful, they temporarily cause
| miniature aurora displays for a split second, by ionizing the
| same layer of the atmosphere where they appear. it's amazing to
| see photos of it.
| bguebert wrote:
| Here's an article with some pictures in case anyone else was
| curious about red sprites like I was.
|
| https://earthsky.org/earth/definition-what-are-lightning-spr...
| dylan604 wrote:
| that shot with them aligned with Milky Way is spectacular
| bguebert wrote:
| yeah, its pretty cool how most of these photos they were
| trying to take a picture of something else and the red
| sprites just happened to be in the right place because of a
| storm front moving in.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The wikipedia page actually has some incredible images as
| well, including several from space that show their scale and
| position in the atmosphere (high up)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning)
| garrettgarcia wrote:
| Sprites and similar phenomena have been reported for many years
| by pilots and others, but scientists didn't believe them until
| recently because it didn't fit their flawed models. It's
| similar how scientists didn't believe centuries of stories
| about rogue waves from mariners until one was recorded with a
| buoy in 1995.
|
| Pecos Hank, the best storm chaser on Youtube, has recorded
| beautiful video of sprites:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGPQ5kzJ9Tg
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I wonder if this is in any way responsible for the increased
| biodiversity there - maybe a slightly higher mutation rate?
| davidw wrote:
| Interesting thought, but you'd have to extract the effect from
| all the environmental factors like abundant water, a warm
| climate, soils, etc...
| superbiome wrote:
| Makes sense. Isn't this one method that new crops are made, by
| radiating seeds and seeing what new diversity arises.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Atomic gardens!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| The genetic diversity of rainforests is largely an illusion
| and/or evo biologists looking for taxpayer funded safari
| expeditions.
|
| Most of the biodiversity in rainforests is in megafauna and
| insects, largely because the megaflora are fumigating the shit
| out of the soil.
|
| If you want a very high degree of biodiversity the place to
| look is temperate deserts, where the microbial diversity is
| extremely high -- probably because of intense competition for
| scarce resources plus boom/bust growth cycles driven by
| intermittent water and even a high degree of phased ecosystem
| overlay.
|
| Of course that observation could also be evobiologists who like
| to go on taxpayer funded hiking junkets
|
| Fierer, Jackson 2006 if you want a citation
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _Most of the biodiversity in rainforests is in megafauna
| and insects_
|
| > _If you want a very high degree of biodiversity the place
| to look is temperate deserts, where the microbial diversity
| is extremely high_
|
| This sounds a bit like that "you have more bacteria in your
| gut than you have cells in your body" fun fact. Which may be
| true in terms of individually countable cells, but in terms
| of _weight_ it 's another story.
|
| In the same sense comparing the genetic diversity of
| megafauna and insects in one region to those of the bacteria
| in another is a bit disingenuous imo, because that's
| comparing two different ecosystem "categories".
|
| IIUC, bacteria tend to leak genetic material between each
| other. Genes get swapped around a lot, and if some combos
| don't work out, well, there are uncountably other bacterial
| cells around. Meanwhile, megafauna and insects have much
| smaller populations that only swap genes through sexual
| reproduction, which recombines genes a lot more slowly. It's
| not a fair comparison.
| westurner wrote:
| Does this help to explain the genetic diversity of the tropical
| latitudes; is the genetic mutation rate higher in the presence of
| gamma radiation?
|
| So many of our plants and flowers (here in North America)
| originate from rainforests and tropical latitudes, but survive at
| current temps for northern latitudes.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| No, insignificant
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| No, insignificant Is diverse because there is more biomass
| westurner wrote:
| /? is the genetic mutation rate higher in the presence of
| gamma radiation: https://www.google.com/search?q=is%20the%20g
| enetic%20mutatio... :
|
| - "Frequency and Spectrum of Mutations Induced by Gamma Rays
| Revealed by Phenotype Screening and Whole-Genome Re-
| Sequencing in Arabidopsis thaliana" (2022)
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8775868/ :
|
| > _Gamma rays have been widely used as a physical agent for
| mutation creation in plants, and their mutagenic effect has
| attracted extensive attention. However, few studies are
| available on the comprehensive mutation profile at both the
| large-scale phenotype mutation screening and whole-genome
| mutation scanning._
|
| - "Bedrock radioactivity influences the rate and spectrum of
| mutation" (2020) https://elifesciences.org/articles/56830
|
| - "Comparison of mutation spectra induced by gamma-rays and
| carbon ion beams" (2024)
| https://academic.oup.com/jrr/article/65/4/491/7701037 :
|
| > _These results suggest that carbon ion beams produce
| complex DNA damage, and gamma-rays are prone to single
| oxidative base damage, such as 8-oxoguanine. Carbon ion beams
| can also introduce oxidative base damage, and the damage
| species is 5-hydroxycytosine. This was consistent with our
| previous results of DNA damage caused by heavy ion beams. We
| confirmed the causal DNA damage by mass spectrometry for
| these mutations._
| westurner wrote:
| If you dropped a thing through a storm to the water, would it
| charge the thing, from gamma radiation?
|
| TIL carbon nano yarn absorbs electricity, probably from storm
| clouds too.
|
| What are the volt and charge observations for lightning from
| large tropical thunderstorms?
|
| (And why is it dangerous to attract arc discharge toward a local
| attractor? And what sort of supercapacitors and anodes can handle
| charge from a lightning bolt? Lightning!)
|
| Tardigrades can handle Gamma radiation.
|
| "Researchers create new type of composite material for shielding
| against neutron and gamma radiation" (2024)
| https://phys.org/news/2024-05-composite-material-shielding-n... :
|
| "Sm2O3 micron plates/B4C/HDPE composites containing high specific
| surface area fillers for neutron and gamma-ray complex radiation
| shielding"
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02663...
| vanderZwan wrote:
| This somehow reminds me of the fact that you can produce
| (surprisingly high-quality) x-rays by unrolling scotch tape in a
| vacuum chamber[0][1]. I wonder if it turns out to be related in
| any way. Thunderstorms aren't a vacuum of course, but I dunno,
| maybe all that frozen hail being thrown around can bumping into
| each other still involves a similar underlying mechanism
| somewhere.
|
| [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07378
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o66AYhEIsU&
| abc_lisper wrote:
| It was suprising to me when I heard it. How could we not know
| it would happen before hand? Doubt explanation of it needs new
| laws of physics, item is common place and yet we were all
| caught off-guard. Wonder who different other planets even in
| our own solar system are, even if we know all the laws of
| physics and chemistry that guide those reactions; never mind
| planets in other solar systems
| Andys wrote:
| When objects collide or are separated, aren't we really just
| witnessing tiny chemical reactions, all involving the
| absorption and/or release of energy?
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I think that's a reasonable question, but no, I wouldn't say
| that that is the case. A chemical reactions is by definition
| the kind that involves changing the chemical composition of
| the molecules involved (yes, that's a bit handwavy, I'm not a
| chemist).
|
| The process that causes tape to produce to x-rays when peeled
| in a vacuum in this example does involve a change of energy
| states, but not in a way that we'd consider a change in
| chemical composition.
| hn72774 wrote:
| I have studied radio comms at a hobby level and learned that the
| voltage of a close lightning strike isn't the main danger to
| equipment, it's also the strong surge of EMI that can overwhelm
| and fry things, and induce currents where they shouldn't be.
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