Although they survived in the short term, their lifetime cancer risk increased, scientists have said.Įven if one steers clear of nuclear disasters and supernova explosions, the natural background radiation we all experience on Earth (from sources like uranium in the soil, cosmic rays and medical devices) increases our chance of developing cancer in a given year by 0.025 percent, Caracappa said. "The longer the time period over which the dose is accumulated, the higher that range would be, since the body works to repair itself over that time as well," Caracappa told Life's Little Mysteries.Īs a point of comparison, some workers at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant absorbed 0.4 to 1 Sv of radiation per hour while contending with the nuclear disaster last March. But how much radiation will strike you dead right away? According to Peter Caracappa, a nuclear engineer and radiation safety specialist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 5 and 6 Sieverts (Sv) over the course of a few minutes will shred up too many cells for your body to fix at once. Radiation poses a long-term danger because it mutates DNA, rewriting the genetic code in ways that can lead to cancerous growth of cells. Hypermetabolism has been tied to lack of sleep. Before perishing, the rodents showed symptoms of hypermetabolism, a condition in which the body's resting metabolic rate speeds up so much that it burns excessive calories even while completely still. The rats consistently died after two weeks of this misery. When the rats nodded off, the disc was suddenly rotated to keep them awake by bumping them against the wall and threatening to knock them into the water. In 1999, sleep researchers at the University of Chicago put rats on a rotating disc positioned over a pool of water, and continuously recorded the rats' brainwaves with a computer program that could recognize the onset of sleep. (Image credit: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic Jean-Etienne Poirrier)
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