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A sea of sparks: Seeing radioactivity

https://maurycyz.com/projects/spinthariscope/
28•maurycyz•1h ago

Comments

dvh•49m ago
I tried the same with bananas. Got nothing.
kergonath•42m ago
Potassium-40 is not an alpha emitter.
fecal_henge•38m ago
Maybe he used banana as the scintillator.
DetroitThrow•38m ago
That's unrelated. He's been diligently substituting bananas in many experiments to mostly disappointment.
thadt•23m ago
Bananas are like XML that way. If you're not getting the results you want, you're just not using enough of them.
lukasschwab•25m ago
You won't make one at home, but cloud chambers[^1] reveal individual alpha particle tracks.

There's one in the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris — blew my mind!

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_chamber

Edit: turns out people make these at home all the time. Sick!

lukan•19m ago
Well, google for "DIY cloud chamber" did result in quite some entries. Apart from youtube channels, with the first entry a guide from CERN:

https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/how-make-your-own-cl...

alnwlsn•16m ago
This can be done at home with a little effort. Less effort if you can get dry ice easily.

https://hackaday.com/2019/01/13/see-the-radioactive-world-wi...

Yenrabbit•13m ago
You can easily make them at home (source, I did last weekend!). - Dry ice (mine came from something shipped cold) - Dark piece of metal (I used a 3D printer hot bed) on top of dry ice to get cold - IPA vapour (I poured some on a shop towel) - Some transparent container to house it all - I found a glass display cube on the side of the road, fish tanks or Tupperware also work. - Torch or something to provide side lighting Very cool to see evidence of the particles zooming around us, can highly recommend.
r2_pilot•9m ago
If you haven't experienced a spinthariscope, I can highly recommend it. I bought one as a Christmas present for a buddy and we both enjoy its demonstration of radioactivity.
cbm-vic-20•1m ago
Don't miss a chance to see the Cherenkov radiation effect at your local research reactor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation

Move GitHub Private Repos to Google Drive in Minutes

https://tonym.us/move-github-repos-to-google-drive.html
1•speckx•1m ago•0 comments

I Built a Plugin Because Anthropic Won't Stop Shipping

https://feld.com/archives/2026/03/i-built-a-plugin-because-anthropic-wont-stop-shipping/
1•mooreds•1m ago•0 comments

Antienshittification

https://www.ystrickler.com/antienshittification/
1•ystrickler•1m ago•0 comments

Token Salary

https://aifoc.us/the-token-salary/
1•kinlan•3m ago•0 comments

Founder and CEO, Datris.ai

https://datris.ai
1•tfearn•4m ago•0 comments

PoliTax Split: PDF splitting benchmark from presidential tax returns

https://www.extend.ai/resources/document-splitting-benchmark
1•kbyatnal•5m ago•0 comments

Scientists have found an alarming environmental impact of data centers

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/30/climate/data-centers-are-having-an-underrported
1•campuscodi•6m ago•0 comments

The Long Chain of Wi-Fi Dysfunction Gets Longer

https://wirednot.wordpress.com/2026/03/27/the-long-chain-of-wi-fi-dysfunction-gets-longer/
1•obscurette•8m ago•0 comments

We Hid a Free Trip to Switzerland in Our Privacy Policy. Someone Found It

https://www.cape.co/blog/easter-egg-in-privacy-policy
2•bwoah•9m ago•0 comments

Multi-Model Intelligence in Researcher

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft365copilotblog/introducing-multi-model-intellig...
1•taubek•9m ago•0 comments

The Fall of the Shah

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n12/malise-ruthven/the-fall-of-the-shah
1•alkyon•11m ago•0 comments

Chatbots as Anti-Social Media

https://paulkedrosky.com/chart-of-the-weekend-chatbots-as-anti-social-media/
1•kristianp•11m ago•0 comments

See How Hollywood's Job Market Is Collapsing

2•JumpCrisscross•12m ago•0 comments

The Cost of Scrolling: A scale visualization of social media usage

https://azariak.github.io/CostOfScrolling/
2•InvestingEasy•14m ago•0 comments

You're right, no one can tell if C++ is AI generated

https://mropert.github.io/2026/03/30/ai_garbage_cpp/
1•ingve•16m ago•0 comments

America Downs Cheap Drones with Million-Dollar Missiles. A Fix Is in the Works

https://www.wsj.com/world/america-downs-cheap-drones-with-million-dollar-missiles-a-fix-is-in-the...
1•JumpCrisscross•16m ago•0 comments

Qwen 3.6 Plus Preview Available for Free for a Limited Time

https://twitter.com/OpenRouter/status/2038701599175196715
1•mirzap•17m ago•0 comments

Rust 1.94.1

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/03/26/1.94.1-release/
1•kazu11max17•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a simpler way to follow research papers–AI summaries and emails

https://openscience.ink
2•samfeldman•18m ago•0 comments

ARC-AGI-3: A New Challenge for Frontier Agentic Intelligence

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24621
1•doener•20m ago•0 comments

Are you team MCP or team CLI?

1•sharath39•21m ago•2 comments

Novel environments, no precedents or plagiarism possible. Humans 100%, AI <1%

https://xcancel.com/heygurisingh/status/2038266503993372774
2•doener•22m ago•1 comments

Show HN: NewsMarvin – AI news from 71 sources, classified by Claude Haiku

https://newsmarvin.com/
1•mzuniga51•23m ago•0 comments

Broadly stable atmospheric CO2 and CH4 levels over the past 3M years

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10032-y
1•CGMthrowaway•24m ago•0 comments

Wikipedia, AI, maps, and education tools running on your own hardware

https://github.com/Crosstalk-Solutions/project-nomad
1•brianhama•24m ago•0 comments

Create Context Graph: Scaffold AI agents with context graph memory in seconds

https://create-context-graph.vercel.app/
1•johnymontana•24m ago•0 comments

Mass Migration Is War by Other Means [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdCjImpSfy0
1•joe_mamba•25m ago•0 comments

Car Seats as Contraception

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/731812
1•CGMthrowaway•26m ago•0 comments

How Working in America Became So Joyless

https://www.wsj.com/business/how-working-in-america-became-so-joyless-a1976fd2
2•jimt1234•27m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Memoir – persistent memory for AI coding tools via MCP

https://memoir.sh
1•camgitt•30m ago•0 comments