spicy pancake

paranoid linux sadgirl with imposter syndrome

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • ah the undies walk of shame. I started keeping extra large lab coats in the controlled area after that to use as emergency bathrobes but fortunately never needed one after that

    the story about the 3 guys is fucking heartbreaking. I hope to hell I can get into a union at my next position. Not that it would have reversed the death sentence, but fuck’s sake a little dignity would have been in order


  • Ok that is a rough time. Every time I got contaminated I was always insanely glad it was only a 2 hour half life (and that each time, I managed to remove it by ditching clothes/shoes or washing my skin so I wouldn’t be trapped in the lab).

    We also had some very small amounts of long-lived isotopes that would end up in our waste stream and have to be found by playing hot/cold with the pancake. Oh and most of the contaminated items were needles and broken glass. I was so fuckin scared of accidentally stabbing myself with a LLRM sharp 😭

    Oh also I broke a pancake tube by letting it get stabbed and Ludlum took like 3 months to get it back to us and the other Model 3 was shitty uuuuuuuugh


  • this explains a lot, lol. especially the “your hand is hot enough to worry about but sure go ahead get on a crowded train”

    As Long As Radiation AintNearMe lol

    drains always bothered the hell out of me because we were told to wash our hands in the regular sink if we got them contaminated. granted, 99% of our shit had a 2 hour half life, but still… I asked our RSO if we had a portal monitor around the building’s sewer outtake and he was like “lol no. also don’t do anything where we’d need one.”



  • Some atoms don’t like being the way they are (mood tbh), and we call them unstable. Some unstable atoms spit out something called a positron in order to become the atom they want to be.

    A positron is an anti-electron, and when it collides with an electron (easy since those are everywhere) they annihilate each other, turning into a bunch of energy in the process, in the form of gamma radiation. The gamma radiation from annihilation is special because it always comes out as two rays going in the opposite direction from each other.

    That means, if you can detect when those two rays hit a ring that encircles the point of annihilation, you can use math to figure out where that point is in the ring. That’s because you know the speed of the rays and the difference in the times that both rays struck the ring.

    The aforementioned ring is a PET scanner’s detector array. (The machine at the bottom of this meme is a PET scanner.) So if you put a living thing in the PET scanner that has eaten or been injected with something that is undergoing positron emission, you can tell where in their body the position emission is happening.

    This is useful because you can use chemistry to attach something that emits positions to something that a body will move to specific locations based on what it is. For example, if you want to find cancer cells: they absorb way more glucose than normal cells. So you can attach unstable fluorines to glucose molecules and inject them into a cancer patient to find the cancer.

    Wherever you see way more positron emission happening than normal, that’s where the glucose is going. So if we know cancer cells are absorbing glucose at an abnormal rate, now we know where in the body the cancer is.

    (That’s more or less how I explained my previous job to my 4-year old niece, but with more drawings and smaller words.)


  • That liquid must have had a hell of an ability to be absorbed into skin if she wasn’t able to remove the contamination by just washing her hand.

    The fact that they let her leave the controlled area makes me think the activity was low enough that holding her hand away from her was probably overkill. If you’re contaminated enough that it’s a risk to your organs, most radiation safety officers aren’t going to let you leave the controlled area lol

    At the radiopharm manufactory I used to work at, we had a guy accidentally inject his finger with the QC sample. Fortunately it was low enough activity that he was able to leave by the end of his shift. It was really stupid that the QC sample syringe was capped with a needle instead of a blunt syringe cap, but changing the manufacturing protocol to allow capping with a new type of device would have required FDA oversight.

    The first thing I always did during my QC testing was remove the needle and yeet it directly in the rad sharps waste container, cuz fuuuuck that.










  • spicy pancake@lemmy.ziptoScience Memes@mander.xyzgeological contingency plan
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    19 days ago

    how to assassinate a…

    chemist: just keep challenging them to make more and more unstable and/or toxic compounds. if they’ve made it past FOOF gas, up the ante by saying “ok now do a 1-pot synth”

    microbiologist: accidentally a little pathogenic virulence factors into their E. coli supply and poke some holes in the laminar hood HEPA. (don’t do this if you share a bathroom with them)

    particle physicist: take a couple screws out of one of the hundreds of ladders around the facility

    theoretical physicist: remove a manhole cover in one of their usual walking paths, Looney Tunes style

    biochemist: sabotage all their grant proposals and they’ll take care of their own assassination

    computer scientist: fucking don’t they’re an endangered species now

    entomologist: literally indestructible don’t even bother trying. these motherfuckers raise botfly larvae in their own limbs for shits and giggles. i fear no man. but entomologists… they scare me

    mathematician: use a gun