Yeah, but with all that potassium in your body, the cremation would last seconds.

Does that equal 30,000 pounds?

...of bananas?

Prefer little squares to bananas. bananas are too phallic looking for me.

/used phallic in 2 sentences today

FTFA: The US National Cancer Institute has estimated, for example, that the millions of CT scans in the US in 2007 alone will eventually cause 29,000 cancers.

I've been teaching a Rad Fundamentals course for four years now. As the information in that course has aged, I decided to check my figures this year. It seems that since 2005 the average, non-occupational radiation dose for Americans has gone from 300 to 620 mrem/year (from 3000 to 6200 microSieverts/year). Why? CT scans. A worst-case single series of chest-and-abdomen CT scans ranges into the 1500-3000 rem (15-30 milliSieverts) area.

That's 10-20x my cumulative exposure from working on a nuclear submarine for three years... in one treatment.

Sources:
Background doses (new window)
CT scans (new window)

Vash's Apprentice: Yeah, but with all that potassium in your body, the cremation would last seconds.

Awesome

I farking love bananas. Especially with peanut butter and/or honey.

WelldeadLink: What's the effect of radiation from one banana when compared to the effect of Carbon-14 decay in the body?

On the same order as a one-night stand, forever. About 15% of your annual dosage from natural sources is from radioactives in your own body, including C14.

80 Brazillian bananas will also.

Katy ate a crate of eighty
"rated Grade A" dates.
(Grade A dates are rated "Grade A"
mainly for their weights.)

Eighty dates made plates and plates
and Katy ate all eighty.
Katy met her fate that date,
and now the crate holds Katy.

--Kenn Nesbitt
(new window)

DeathLemur: Does that equal 30,000 pounds?

...of bananas?

Only in Scranton. PA.

If I'm reading the headline and the XKCD chart correctly, your mom is in big trouble.

the ruptured anus and hemorrhaging from the bananarrhea will kill you much more quickly than the radiation.

way to be six months behind

factoryconnection: FTFA: The US National Cancer Institute has estimated, for example, that the millions of CT scans in the US in 2007 alone will eventually cause 29,000 cancers.

I've been teaching a Rad Fundamentals course for four years now. As the information in that course has aged, I decided to check my figures this year. It seems that since 2005 the average, non-occupational radiation dose for Americans has gone from 300 to 620 mrem/year (from 3000 to 6200 microSieverts/year). Why? CT scans. A worst-case single series of chest-and-abdomen CT scans ranges into the 1500-3000 rem (15-30 milliSieverts) area.

That's 10-20x my cumulative exposure from working on a nuclear submarine for three years... in one treatment.

Sources:
Background doses (new window)
CT scans (new window)

Check your numbers! That's obviously mrem, not rem!

The article is wrong - the radiation from a banana *is* enough to kill you. It's just very, very unlikely to.

All you need is a stray high-energy particle hitting the right place in a DNA strand in the right type of cell. Since the radiation level in a banana is low, it is very unlikely to happen, but the possibility is always there, every time you eat a banana. (Or almost anything, for that matter.)

Most likely, someone in history died of cancer induced by the radiation in a banana. Far fewer than those who've choked on a banana or died of hyperkalemia, though.

Loren: Check your numbers! That's obviously mrem, not rem!

Whoops! Yes, in fact that line should read: "A worst-case single series of chest-and-abdomen CT scans ranges into the 1500-3000 millirem (15-30 milliSieverts) area."

Stupid me, trying and failing to make things clear by keeping units constant.

Myria: The article is wrong - the radiation from a banana *is* enough to kill you. It's just very, very unlikely to.

Very true... while it is easy to talk about the deterministic risks of radiation (and hazards in general), the fact remains that cancer can be caused by one "magic bullet" that just happens to corrupt the right cell.

I don't like teaching that part of my course, though I do have the benefit of teaching students already familiar with the hazards of non-ionizing radiation (fire-control radars, etc). They don't have the "boogeyman" view of ionizing radiation that many do.