5 ms·

> Over 11 000 radiation detection portal monitors are installed at airports, harbours and other ports of entry, including thousands of trained personnel equippe

> Over 11 000 radiation detection portal monitors are installed at airports, harbours and other ports of entry, including thousands of trained personnel equipped with radiation detectors, all of which can detect the smallest radioactive particles. I didn’t realize this. Injecting small, safe radioactive material into rhino horns seems like an incredibly good hack: turn all that nuclear monitoring equipment into poached animal artifact detectors.

tomp 2y ago
The statement is false, unfortunately. There's definite a positive (non-zero) threshold below which it doesn't trigger. Bananas are radioactive, and while a single banana doesn't trigger the alarms, a lot of bananas might! from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose > Although the amount in a single banana is small in environmental and medical terms, the radioactivity from a truckload of bananas is capable of causing a false alarm when passed through a Radiation Portal Monitor used to detect possible smuggling of nuclear material at U.S. ports.
- netsharc 2y ago
  HN headline in 3 years: airport sniffer dogs being trained to smell for bananas. Because that's what the horn-smugglers will be carrying in attempts to deflect why the airport scanner is detecting radiation in their luggage.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    It's the potassium in the bananas, so potassium rich salt will also do this. Presumably many other common items are also sufficiently potassium rich.
    - fullspectrumdev 2y ago
      If you leave a scintillating detector such as a Radiacode or similar on a bag of potassium chloride water softener salt for a while you can actually detect a very slight amount of radioactivity and generate a spectrum :)
- gus_massa 2y ago
  Bananas are not so radioactive, my guess is that they are using a stronger radioactive source. Perhaps hide the horn inside a truck full of bananas? I guess the horn will be still more radioactive. Also, each radioactive source produce radioactivity with different energy, so you can use specialized equipment to identify the source. (We used one in the lab in an undergraduate couse of Physics. It's not very big, like the size of a shoe.)
- Havoc 2y ago
  What bananas emit is basically background radiation and not at all comparable to radio isotopes. If it was you wouldn’t see bananas at the supermarket Besides - they worked on this for three years. They likely thought this through beyond banana comparisons…
omgJustTest 2y ago
Classic case of a societal problem that technology tries to paper over, and does a poor job doing so. Rhino horns are used for their keratin and "traditional" medicine ingredients. Radiation portal monitors will not detect all quantities and there are simple techniques for masking these detections with sheilding, or via nuisance alarms if they are detected. [1] Shark fin extraction, for shark fin soup, has a similar cultural problem. Influential people in the communities that consume these products, ie Yao Ming, could make a lot more progress by simply having public campaigns against it. [2] [1] Source: me, I am a radation detecion PhD who works on similar kinds of problems, with similarly or more capable systems. [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJG7RaLX-DM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJG7RaLX-DM
- manarth 2y ago
  > Rhino horns are used for their "traditional" medicine ingredients The level of radiation is non-toxic to rhinos in their horns, but extremely toxic if ingested as a "traditional" medicine. The "product" is ruined.
  - omgJustTest 2y ago
    Not fully ruined... since the injections are typically not loose contamination, for fear that it migrates into the rhino via capillary action or irradiates the rhino more than people are comfortable with. Smugglers would likely be able to use simple, cheap detectors to remove these. Potentially they don't remove the pils, simply grind the horn + source into medicine... the amount of radiation will not cause acute effects to the person who ingests it and will likely just cause some "unexplainable" tumor or system failure later in life or after a prolonged consumption.
    - shiandow 2y ago
      Honestly I'm a bit confused, the descriptions seem contradictory or require an extraordinary level of fine tuning. If you just insert a capsule of radioactive material, it's easy to make it (extremely) poisonous, easily detectable and harmless to the rhino. But I don't see a way to do all three at once. If you just wanted to kill the consumers a small amount of an alpha emitter would work quite well, but would be hard to detect and carry a small amount of risk to the rhino if it breaks confinement. Conversely you could use a strong gamma emitter to make it easily detectable but I don't see a way to do so that would harm the consumers but not the rhino. Best you can do is some level or radioactivity that we're fine with in animals but not in humans because we're hypocrites.
giarc 2y ago
Probably is by the time they are found, the rhino is dead. They might catch the last guy holding the bag, but I suspect it's passed through a few different groups by the time it reaches the airport. So the poachers just go on poaching as they already got paid.
- wanderingstan 2y ago
  Yes, for the first few. But the idea of the test is that this could be done in a wider scale. If a significant portion of horns are being confiscated (via radiation sensors) then there’s fewer horns being sold and less money available for all those middleman groups. Over time the market goes away. Perhaps similar to how the market for stolen iPhones dried up once people could remotely brick their stole phone. There’s just less money to be made so thieves move on to more lucrative targets.

tomp 2y ago

The statement is false, unfortunately. There's definite a positive (non-zero) threshold below which it doesn't trigger. Bananas are radioactive, and while a single banana doesn't trigger the alarms, a lot of bananas might! from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose > Although the amount in a single banana is small in environmental and medical terms, the radioactivity from a truckload of bananas is capable of causing a false alarm when passed through a Radiation Portal Monitor used to detect possible smuggling of nuclear material at U.S. ports.

netsharc 2y ago
HN headline in 3 years: airport sniffer dogs being trained to smell for bananas. Because that's what the horn-smugglers will be carrying in attempts to deflect why the airport scanner is detecting radiation in their luggage.
- ben_w 2y ago
  It's the potassium in the bananas, so potassium rich salt will also do this. Presumably many other common items are also sufficiently potassium rich.
  - fullspectrumdev 2y ago
    If you leave a scintillating detector such as a Radiacode or similar on a bag of potassium chloride water softener salt for a while you can actually detect a very slight amount of radioactivity and generate a spectrum :)
gus_massa 2y ago
Bananas are not so radioactive, my guess is that they are using a stronger radioactive source. Perhaps hide the horn inside a truck full of bananas? I guess the horn will be still more radioactive. Also, each radioactive source produce radioactivity with different energy, so you can use specialized equipment to identify the source. (We used one in the lab in an undergraduate couse of Physics. It's not very big, like the size of a shoe.)
Havoc 2y ago
What bananas emit is basically background radiation and not at all comparable to radio isotopes. If it was you wouldn’t see bananas at the supermarket Besides - they worked on this for three years. They likely thought this through beyond banana comparisons…

omgJustTest 2y ago

Classic case of a societal problem that technology tries to paper over, and does a poor job doing so. Rhino horns are used for their keratin and "traditional" medicine ingredients. Radiation portal monitors will not detect all quantities and there are simple techniques for masking these detections with sheilding, or via nuisance alarms if they are detected. [1] Shark fin extraction, for shark fin soup, has a similar cultural problem. Influential people in the communities that consume these products, ie Yao Ming, could make a lot more progress by simply having public campaigns against it. [2] [1] Source: me, I am a radation detecion PhD who works on similar kinds of problems, with similarly or more capable systems. [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJG7RaLX-DM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJG7RaLX-DM

manarth 2y ago
> Rhino horns are used for their "traditional" medicine ingredients The level of radiation is non-toxic to rhinos in their horns, but extremely toxic if ingested as a "traditional" medicine. The "product" is ruined.
- omgJustTest 2y ago
  Not fully ruined... since the injections are typically not loose contamination, for fear that it migrates into the rhino via capillary action or irradiates the rhino more than people are comfortable with. Smugglers would likely be able to use simple, cheap detectors to remove these. Potentially they don't remove the pils, simply grind the horn + source into medicine... the amount of radiation will not cause acute effects to the person who ingests it and will likely just cause some "unexplainable" tumor or system failure later in life or after a prolonged consumption.
  - shiandow 2y ago
    Honestly I'm a bit confused, the descriptions seem contradictory or require an extraordinary level of fine tuning. If you just insert a capsule of radioactive material, it's easy to make it (extremely) poisonous, easily detectable and harmless to the rhino. But I don't see a way to do all three at once. If you just wanted to kill the consumers a small amount of an alpha emitter would work quite well, but would be hard to detect and carry a small amount of risk to the rhino if it breaks confinement. Conversely you could use a strong gamma emitter to make it easily detectable but I don't see a way to do so that would harm the consumers but not the rhino. Best you can do is some level or radioactivity that we're fine with in animals but not in humans because we're hypocrites.

giarc 2y ago

Probably is by the time they are found, the rhino is dead. They might catch the last guy holding the bag, but I suspect it's passed through a few different groups by the time it reaches the airport. So the poachers just go on poaching as they already got paid.

wanderingstan 2y ago
Yes, for the first few. But the idea of the test is that this could be done in a wider scale. If a significant portion of horns are being confiscated (via radiation sensors) then there’s fewer horns being sold and less money available for all those middleman groups. Over time the market goes away. Perhaps similar to how the market for stolen iPhones dried up once people could remotely brick their stole phone. There’s just less money to be made so thieves move on to more lucrative targets.