geiger

RC helicopter airlifts engagement ring in for proposal

I feel kind of sorry for any geek looking to propose to a partner these days. The bar keeps getting set higher and higher. We've had a 4-hour video game proposal, an elaborate "Harry Potter" Quidditch proposal, and a physics paper proposal. Now a romantic guy figured out how to have the engagement ring flown in for his proposal, adding a bit of "Air Wolf" excitement to the proceedings.

As do many successful proposals, Jason's proposal to Christina began with a ruse. He lured her to Alamo Square park in San Francisco under the pretense of doing a photo shoot. He got her to talk to the camera and share her wishes for the baby they'll be having together. All was perfectly normal until a strange whirring noise came from the sky.… Read more

H.R. Giger Geiger counter is frightening and useful

An offhand Twitter comment about a "Giger counter" launched a maker into a project to build a Geiger counter done in the style of "Alien" creator H.R. Giger. It's a pun come to creepy, wonderful life.

Steve D of Mad Art Lab combined a half-scale human skeleton model, a Geiger counter kit from Adafruit, some flexible tubing, and plenty of Carbon Mist metallic paint into a disturbing-looking Geiger counter.

The Geiger counter part of the creation does actually work. It makes all the right blipping sounds and a red LED lights up on the back of the alien creation's "head."… Read more

Tawkon: The Android app that detects radiation spikes

The reality of cell phone radiation Buried deep in the pages of your cell phone manual is an often-ignored section on Specific Absorption Rate (SAR), which is the measure of the amount of radio frequency (RF) energy (radiation) absorbed by the body when using your handset. Every phone is measured and rated, and in the U.S. and Canada, the maximum allowable SAR for any handset is 1.6 watts per kilogram. For our database of current cell phone SAR ratings, be sure to check out our ongoing chart on Cell phone radiation levels.

What we don't know, though, … Read more

Japan radiation monitoring goes crowd, open source

A new open and crowdsourced initiative to deploy more geiger counters all over Japan looks to be a go. Safecast, formerly RDTN.org, recently met and exceeded its $33,000 fund-raising goal on Kickstarter, which should help Safecast send between 100 and 600 geiger counters to the catastrophe-struck country.

The data captured from the geiger counters will be fed into Safecast.org, which aggregates radiation readings from government, nonprofit, and other sources, as well as into Pachube, a global open-source network of sensors. Safecast is one of the larger crowdsourced monitoring efforts, not unlike a similar effort in the United States that predated the Japanese disaster.… Read more