For people working at home due to COVID-19, sealing the house to make it more energy efficient may bring with it the risk from elevated radon.
War stories
Compaisons can be made between the medical response to the Boston Bombings and Cyclone Tracey. In both, triage and staff support and initiatives significantly helped, though other differences were enormous.
Medical response from the Boston bombing
Todays communiocations tools like Twitter and Google Maps bring an immediacy to world events that tends to keep ahead of most news feeds. The fall of Tripoli is a historic event that has been bought alive with Twitter.
Tripoli
I developed an interest in ultraviolet when I was given the role of University Radiation Officer at the University of Queensland. A previous URO, Dr Don Robertson (1914-2006) was part of the Department of Physics and looked after the (unmarked) sandstone Radon Lab on the Great Court at the university. The […]
Robertson Berger Ultraviolet meter
Safety and Health coerns opften collide. In the end the focus is on safety despite overwhelming evidence that health is a bigger issue.
When Safety is not Health
Potassium permanganate (KMnO4) used to be bought at a chemist’s shop as purple crystals. Way back, when Adam was a boy, it was included in snake bite kits
Potassium Permanganate
The toxicity of crystalline silica is well established and the toxicity of glass fibres is fairly well know. However the toxicity of amorphous glass dust is less investigated. I was given a copy of Karl Kruszelnicki’s book “Science is Golden” for Christmas. The chapter ”A Glass Act” discusses the myth […]
Amorphous glass toxicity
Rum Jungle in the Northern Territory of Australia was a fairly wild place in the 1950’s with a number of uranium mines and a lot of people who only wanted to be known by their first names. The legend is that the workers from the mine would sometimes demonstrate how […]
Atomic Cocktails
It was 1973 and I was finishing off my undergraduate degree. A change from electrical engineering to physics had meant I had one subject to go and I took a job at the nearby Chrysler car factory
Industrial dermatitis
Another holiday job gave me insights into heat stress. I was in high school and my holiday job was helping an electrician install fire alarms in a new school. My job was to get into