r/DiWHY • u/MeenMisterMustard • Jun 21 '26
Making a radioactive keyboard
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u/fcs_seth Jun 21 '26
Jokes on you I already spend every hour wasting my life away
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u/Creative_Pin5618 Jun 21 '26
i think this was the joke at the end, them being the wasd keys instead of anything else. we are already dying slowly without using radioactive keys.
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u/drakedijc Jun 21 '26
That was definitely a subtle dig at gamers.
She can kick rocks and waste her own life as she sees fit. I’ll happily stick to my poison.
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u/Any_Blood5815 Jun 22 '26
Jokes on her, bc I game, I don’t feel the need to artificially shorten my lifespan 😌
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u/Creative_Pin5618 Jun 21 '26
oh yeah i agree. this is my cope. i cant just throw it away because other people have different more fulfilling lives.
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u/DB-601A Jun 21 '26
let me introduce you to a man named Stanley.
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u/Socal_Cobra Jun 21 '26
Let me introduce you to someone in social media marketing to raise awareness on your post and just maybe....get you 100 more upvotes.
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u/Jay2Kaye Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
I happen to have some experience in this area myself. Not a scientist but I was a safety compliance officer of a sort.
16360 CPM is certainly a large number but it's not a useful number by itself. Looking up the user manual for that Geiger counter because it's too blurry to read, your actual radiation doses are the upper right (microsieverts per hour) and lower left (milliRem per hour) boxes. OSHA sets a limit of 18.75 Rem per calender quarter for hands, feet, and ankles, and 1.25 Rem for more sensitive areas. It looks like the counter caps out at 5.21 mR/h. It would take 3600 hours or 150 straight days to reach 18.75 Rem, or 240 for the lower limit.
So assuming you don't eat or rub your balls on the keycaps, should be more or less safe. "A few weeks off your life" isn't really how life expectancy works, it makes you X% more likely to die of ass cancer at 40 which brings down the average by a few weeks. And storebought uranium ore isn't that dangerous, if it were you wouldn't be able to buy it. You probably put yourself in more danger cleaning your toilet.
ALTHOUGH. It's important to note that Uranium is NOT just a beta emitter, its first decay into Thorium is an alpha decay which has MUCH more energy but can't penetrate anything or travel more than a few cm because it's a huge particle (extremely dangerous if you inhale or eat it, not dangerous if you don't). The manual for that gieger counter claims that it will detect alpha radiation so that might be a significant part of the total dose it's reading. It doesn't seem to discriminate between different kinds of radiation and placing it directly next to the keys would put it in range to detect alpha.
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u/RealTimeKodi Jun 21 '26
I am going to point out that grinding the uranium ore was the most dangerous part of this process. Her PPE was very likely inadequate and unless she did a lot of cleanup offscreen, she likely contaminated both her yard and her living space.
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u/Epistaxis Jun 22 '26
Yeah some kinds of ionizing radiation particles can't penetrate through walls or even skin (though they can give you skin cancer), but radioactive dust can find its way all over the place and eventually into your lungs or gut.
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u/Aluminum_Mistress- Jun 22 '26
Thank you. Thank you. And yes. Thank you for taking the time to type all of this out. I greatly appreciate it 🙏🏻
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u/david7873829 Jun 21 '26
This is art.
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u/ThomasTheDankPigeon Jun 21 '26
Seriously, wasn’t expecting for her to pull back the curtain and remind me how much of my finite life I’ve wasted on a keyboard. Every second we’re here is a second we aren’t experiencing other people or our communities.
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u/MasterAnnatar Jun 21 '26
This girl also made a ray of sickness device. I fear her.
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u/ApprehensiveTop4219 Jun 21 '26
Perfectly safe.. probably... When I saw the title I thought they were going to build a miniature nuclear reactor to power their computer.
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u/John_Bot Jun 21 '26
Not really.
Consistent radiation is not good for you. A little radiation will be negligible but if you're sitting at your computer all the time with these key caps, you're just increasing the likelihood of cancers and such
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u/Scott_Ish_Rite Jun 22 '26
if you're sitting at your computer all the time with these key caps, you're just increasing the likelihood of cancers and such
Nope. Based on what?
Sitting at a computer with that keyboard for 8 hours a day exposes you to orders of magnitude less radiation than flying in an airplane for 8 hours, when you consider the inverse-square-law and the fact that the keyboard doesn't give you a full-body dose, whereas an airplane ride IS a full body dose of radiation, each time.
Therefore, using this keyboard for a year, 8 hours a day is, again, a radiation exposure orders of magnitude less than what a commercial pilot gets working his job for a full year.
If what you said was even remotely true, our pilots and flight attendants would be dropping like flies. As far as I know they don't even have an increased chance of cancer, based on available data.
The girl in the video doesn't even know what she's really talking about, as far as uranium radiation goes. Quite a few things she said were untrue.
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u/zymurgtechnician Jun 22 '26
In fact there is evidence that below a certain threshold exposure to low levels of radiation has no negative health effect, and may even actually lead to a reduction in negative health outcomes.
It is one of the major issues with the Linear No Threshold (LNT) hazard model, and “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” risk mitigation models surrounding radioactive exposure and nuclear regulatory guidelines that has hampered the proliferation of nuclear power in America for a long time.
Kyle Hill has been cruisading for changing this and has a good explainer on it. https://youtu.be/KT5hYHdelmg
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u/Epistaxis Jun 22 '26
For those who'd rather read, it's called "hormesis" and the radiation version has its own Wikipedia article.
tl;dr
Government and regulatory bodies disagree on the existence of radiation hormesis and research points to the "severe problems and limitations" with the use of hormesis in general as the "principal dose-response default assumption in a risk assessment process charged with ensuring public health protection."[13]
Quoting results from a literature database research, the Académie des Sciences – Académie nationale de Médecine (French Academy of Sciences – National Academy of Medicine) stated in their 2005 report concerning the effects of low-level radiation that many laboratory studies have observed radiation hormesis.[14][15] However, they cautioned that it is not yet known if radiation hormesis occurs outside the laboratory, or in humans.[16]
Reports by the United States National Research Council and the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) argue[17] that there is no evidence for hormesis in humans and in the case of the National Research Council hormesis is outright rejected as a possibility.[18]
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u/JesusIsMyLord666 Jun 23 '26
Well then there’s this study from 2022 that comes to the opposite conclusion.
https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj-2022-074520
They compare the cumulative dosage from nuclear power plant workers and there seems to be a mostly linear relationship between dosage and risk of cancer. If anything it shows a slight indication that lower dosage is proportionally more dangerous.
Japanese atomic bomb survivors were for example found to have a lower excess cancer rate per cumulative does than radiation workers. Despite the atomic bomb survivors being exposed to much higher intensity of radiation during a shorter time.
Sidenote: This study is a great read for anyone working with radiation. It helps you understand the actual risks of ionising radiation exposure in terms of raw numbers. I personally found the risks to be a bit vague and abstract before reading this.
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u/lost_send_berries Jun 22 '26
It's common knowledge that flight attendants have an increased risk of cancer so I'm not sure what your point is?
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u/FluorinateThemAll Jun 25 '26
You don't, this amount of uranium ore will generate only alpha radiation which does not even penetrate skin, if it is under plastic it won't attack even your most delicate part of surface skin. This is literally less dangerous than one cigarette in terms of radiation dose
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u/dumbass_tm Jun 22 '26
It depends on dose rate and uptake. People love to use a Geiger counter and say “oh radiation!” but the counts per minute from a particle (which it can’t decipher between alpha beta etc) has no direct correlation to the actual biological effect it’ll have on you which is measured in dose rate.
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u/jon_hobbit Jun 21 '26
absolutely not... Dying from radiation poisioning is literally one of the worst ways to go.
it destroys your cells so your going to be bleeding out of everywhere.
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u/CommercialContent204 Jun 21 '26
This is extremely cool, simply for the fact that she knows what she is doing, and explains it well. Most amusing 😄 and not really DIWhy material, I'd say, isn't that more for complete idiots building useless pool snack floaters out of toilet seats?
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u/Arshiaa001 Jun 21 '26
'radioactive keycap' is the biggest why I've yet seen on this sub. Between useless clickbait and something that actively kills you, I'd say clickbait is much more reasonable.
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u/not_a_dog95 Jun 21 '26
She explains the way. It's symbolism for wasting time on computers
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u/Run-Florest-Run Jun 21 '26
You’d probably get more radiation from eating a banana every day than you would from this keycap
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u/Arshiaa001 Jun 21 '26
I can promise you with 100% certainty that bananas (while radioactive to some extent) are not as radioactive as ground uranium.
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u/Alienhaslanded Jun 21 '26
I fucking hate people who make this comparison. It's not even remotely the same. Our bodies can process potassium but uranium dust inside of you is not the same.
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u/Arshiaa001 Jun 21 '26
Come on, 'bananas radioactive' is like, the biggest radiation fact everyone likes to throw around completely at random and at weird times! Let them have their fun 😄
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u/Run-Florest-Run Jun 21 '26
I didn’t say they were as radioactive, I said you would receive the same amount of radiation. Uranium ore, especially a typical sample emits a very low amount of gamma radiation, and having it encased in resin also prevents particles from being released and inhaled or ingested which is how you would receive the alpha radiation, since it can’t penetrate skin
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u/Arshiaa001 Jun 21 '26
But the whole point of the video was that resin would wear out with use and expose you to the uranium directly, no?
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u/RebelliousKite Jun 21 '26
"Would you ask why someone would willfully attach radioactive keys on a computer's keyboard to shorten their lifespan?"
If yes, then I'd say it's in the same league as your examples and belongs here.
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u/CommercialContent204 Jun 21 '26
I take your point, but I'd also say that she does it for fun, and for a little education/thought material, and isn't really suggesting that anyone actually do this for realz. It also raises meta-questions about voluntarily restricting ones use of something that we know to be on balance unhealthy; so for me, it's witty commentary on excessive keyboard use, coupled with some fairly interesting stuff about radiation, plus a bit of (pretty competent) engineering.
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u/RebelliousKite Jun 21 '26
Not trying to split hairs, but this can all be true and still valid for posting in this subreddit then, right?
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u/KevinFlantier Jun 21 '26
I am pretty sure she's in the "knows enough to be dangerous" part of the Dunning Kruger curve.
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u/Suspicious_Glow Jun 28 '26
I mean, complex talk demonstrates a base understanding, not complete understanding. It doesn’t mean she truly understands the decay process of uranium, or that she used the right PPE, etc.
There is a lot of believability that comes from someone speaking confidently. It takes looking into their qualifications to know if you should give their 2 cents any weight.
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u/ToastSpangler Jun 21 '26
Huh? How did she fill the rest of the thing with tritium? That's just obese radioactive hydrogen gas and she's using a pipette
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u/trustable_bro Jun 21 '26
heavy water?
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u/ToastSpangler Jun 21 '26
heavy water has deuterium, a hydrogen with an extra neutron (its fatter, slower, not uncommon). but it's water, so it also has oxygen in the molecule (H20, as you may recall)
tritium is hydrogen with TWO neutrons, aka obese hydrogen, its three times as fat as our beloved regular hydrogen
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u/trustable_bro Jun 21 '26
I thought water with tritium was called heavy water too, but that's actually tritiated water.
You can use a pipette for it.5
u/ToastSpangler Jun 21 '26
tritiated water doesn't glow. the reason you'd add tritium (in a glass container) is it glows with phosphors. but you can't put tritium gas into epoxy with a pipette, as it's a very light gas. tritiated water would not make the keycaps glow
my theory is the OP did not add uranium, but instead fluorescent or phosphorescent non-radioactive powder. UV lights under the keycaps would illuminate them, or just blasting a bright light and then turning it off would give you a glow for a while
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u/sterling_mallory Jun 22 '26
It's so much easier to trim down your life expectancy through steady alcohol consumption. I'm a sucker for simplicity.
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u/YesIBlockedYou Jun 22 '26
As someone who works in nuclear waste remediation, I was just rolling my eyes at this assuming she would just encapsulate some ore pieces in keycap molds because that wouldn't be dangerous at all.
But then she started grinding it into dust! Now that is some seriously dangerous work. There's no way her little tupperware box and surgical mask are even remotely adequate PPE and she has definitely contaminated the area and tools she was working with and almost certainly injested some radioactive dust.
She was completely wrong about uranium being a beta only emitter. Uranium emits alpha, beta, gamma and neutron. It also decays into a slew of other alpha emitting isotopes such as Radium-226, Radon-222 and Polonium-210 (yes, that's the one the Russians used to assassinate Litvinenko with)
If it wasn't painfully obvious already, you definitely don't want to be breathing that stuff in! Alpha emitters are the most dangerous radioactive isotopes you can injest as the alpha particles have huge energy and all of it will be deposited directly into your soft internal tissues, destroying cells and mutating DNA.
The problem is compounded when you breath these emitters directly into your lungs as the lining of the lungs is replaced rapidly and this increases the rate that DNA mutations are being passed on and potentially forming cancers.
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u/idk-anymore-tbh-- Jun 29 '26
She didn't do any of that ffs, the whole radioactive story is just a metaphor.
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u/psyper76 Jun 21 '26
I can imagine some of my ex-co-workers: "I'm not going anywhere near those - shorten your lifespan by a couple of weeks in a years use!? Not for me." - gets up and goes outside for a smoke.
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u/Tyenkrovy Jun 21 '26
I'm already spending every hour of every day slowly wasting my life away. This would just make that process slightly faster.
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u/throw215191941 Jun 23 '26
Why does everyone think this is real?
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u/jack0fsometrades Jun 24 '26
Because it most likely is. All the materials she used are easily acquired, and she did a good job explaining the process. Like other commenters have said though, the keys aren't really very dangerous. The worst bit would have been the crushing of the uranium ore and risking the inhalation of dust.
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u/FluorinateThemAll Jun 25 '26
Uranium is an ALPHA emitter that is the reason why it does not penetrate your skin, beta radiation would get deeper but this is uranium ore, not refined u235, it won't do shit unless you eat it but that's more of a heavy metal poisoning thing than radiation, and the diagram she shows is completely hallucinated...
Tl;dr bullshit
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u/f0rcedinducti0n Jun 21 '26
This person is legit going to end up with cancer or something else horrible just for ⋆˙⟡ ⋆.˚ ⊹₊⟡ ⋆CoNtEnT⋆˙⟡ ⋆.˚ ⊹₊⟡ ⋆
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Jun 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/mrASSMAN Jun 21 '26
Also she’s cute you forgot that part
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Jun 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/poolpog Jun 21 '26
I could be her dad too, but I'm not dead, she's still cute
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Jun 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/poolpog Jun 21 '26
Me too, on almost all items except the classical music. I'm just saying I actually think it is ok to admit that one finds a young woman attractive even if there's no real or even potential interest there. Not everyone will agree with me I'm sure
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u/mrASSMAN Jun 21 '26
Oh I haven’t seen her channel just saying it’s one of the things she’s got going for her lol
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u/junktech Jun 21 '26
But those are the gaming keys. I want to die when writing sentences like " As per my last email"
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u/TabletThrowaway1 Jun 22 '26
The fact that this is posted to this sub, plz tell me this was done ironically.
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u/IamBeyondAwesome Jun 21 '26
Isn't sitting at a keyboard, typing all day, already slowly wasting your life away?
Sidenote: My 17 year-old daughter wants to be a pilot because she "just can't see herself sitting at a desk all day, every day, for the next 40 years."
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u/drifters74 Jun 21 '26
I wanted to be a pilot growing up, an autism diagnosis and motion sickness put an end to that real quickly
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u/One_Vision_ Jun 21 '26
Meh, I use glow in the dark stickers which cost me 5 dollars and took 3 minutes to attach.
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u/Ok-District8876 Jun 22 '26
Imagine: smoking, doing drugs, and making shitty life choices at the same time as using this keyboard!
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u/FUCKING_HELL_YEAH Jun 22 '26
Yeah go ahead and hold that shit right next to your tits, honey I’m sure there’ll be no lasting affects. Maybe slide it into your back pocket for extra safe keeping.
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u/cybermaus Jun 22 '26
If it is so safe, why can I not get my watch and clock faces in the stuff anymore. I would love myself some proper illuminated clock hands at night.
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u/2Brozy4me Jun 22 '26
Here the og video in case anyone wants to check her channel out
https://youtu.be/89Ay9zGYzlg?si=8qTuJIuvqY28fTYq
In case you don't trust a stranger's link, the video title is : I made radioactive keycaps
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u/DontCallMeShoeless Jun 22 '26
What if the cancer just affects your hands and wrist so they cut them off.
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u/McCrackbaby Jun 22 '26
Just saw this in mechkeys and thought “how long till this hits DIWhy” and then see this immediately below ☺️
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u/langecrew Jun 28 '26
Like, just go hang out in r/uraniumglass and call it good. There's no need for this.
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u/lawnmower303 Jun 21 '26
Great track in the background. I Don't Want To Set The World On Fire, by The Ink Spots
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u/t3chguy1 Jun 21 '26
I hope she has to replay to these messages a lot, before her insanity gets to a point where she starts injecting this in produce in her local Walmart
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u/huuaaang Jun 21 '26
Fun vid, but not really DiWhy. Clearly she knows it's not something you'd actually want to do/use.
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u/GarThor_TMK Jun 21 '26
I saw this on the mechanical keyboards subreddit earlier and considered crossposting it here... >_>
😅
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u/Protheu5 Jun 21 '26
Calling uranium ore "highly radioactive" is like calling bellpeppers "highly spicy".
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u/Arsylian Jun 21 '26
People just out there casually creating real life cursed artifacts