Posted on 04/22/2015 7:10:13 AM PDT by BenLurkin
For the past couple of years, a young woman known only as “Bionerd23” has been making strange, dangerous videos in and around one of the most infamous nuclear zones on Earth—the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
Nothing is too radioactive or risky for her. She has shown herself getting injected with the radionuclide technetium, eating radioactive apples from a tree in Chernobyl, being chased by a possibly rabid fox, and picking up fragments of the nuclear plant’s reactor fuel with her bare hands. When a freakishly large catfish appears on camera, she calmly explains that it’s probably not a mutant—“They are just that way because nobody catches them,” she says in a video, watching a six-foot-long catfish, eerily like a shark, swim around a murky pool of water.
In a few non-Chernobyl-related videos, she pours liquid mercury over her bare hands, comparing the feat to smoking a single cigarette: not dangerous in limited doses, she claims. Her most popular videos are driven by a need to explain why things commonly seen as dangerous are in fact not, hence her typical lack of protective gear. It’s so odd to see her protecting herself, in fact, that she will begin some videos with an explanation about why she felt the need to don something as basic as a pair of gloves.
What is her secret? “Push away your fears and everything you've heard, and embrace the Zone,” she writes Atlas Obscura in an email.
(Excerpt) Read more at atlasobscura.com ...
You might get a kick out of this.
Too bad Jim’s already hooked up, she sounds like his type.
er, didn’t anyone tell her the devastating cancer doesn’t occur overnight.
Nor did they tell her about the scientist at the Manhattan project who touched plutonium for some reason to save others in the room and he died a horrific death.
IS this Darwinism at work?
She should try Fukushima sushi.
I have watched these videos a while back. They are excellent.
I remember as a boy in the 50s playing with mercury all the time. You could buy it in some places. In my hands, fingers, etc..... 55-60 years later I write this.
Idiot. Ignoring the danger of radiation poisoning doesn’t make it go away.
If we embrace reality, does that mean that they will stop making Mad Max movies.
My dad played with mercury too. He’s still sane as far as I can tell.
Think I’ll pass on the apples.
I realize that some material sheds radioactivity faster than others and are safer but I think the woman is a fool. She won’t develop cancer overnight but extended repeated exposure will probably end badly.
I’m 50 years old and could probably live out the rest of my natural lifespan there but I’m not going to have children or live forever.
She’s cute. Nuttier than a fruitcake. But cute,
When I was a kid (60s-70s) everyone had chemistry sets and we played with liquid mercury all the time. Yes it's poisonous as are many chemicals, but fear and hype over everything science related is way over blown these days.
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Freakishly large catfish? I’ve seen bigger.
She’ll figure it out when she starts shedding the lining of her intestines 20 or 30 years from now.
Massive doses of radiation will kill you- the scientist who touched it to save others was a hero and yes died horribly because of it.
But massive doses of anything will kill you- even water
There are even some studied that suggest mild doses or radiation are beneficial. I have even read about ‘radiation tourism’ where people go into old mines to get a dose of radiation on-purpose.
This article shows an example of a report who knows nothing about the topic, and if it is not also YOUR area of expertise it can sound like she knows what she is talking about. There is a name for this phenomenon, something about a ‘bias’ toward thinking people on the news are educated in everything.
But a catfish gene mutation would not grow it into giant catfish, it would just kill it. It was already genetically designed to be able to grow that big- a 6 foot catfish is NOT freakish. It is the equivalent of a very talk 6 foot human, nothing freakish about that (I hope not, I am 6’4)
Genetic mutations take generations to be seen. Big catfish are just big catfish.
It’s probably a low risk situation now.
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