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InterestingPOD

InterestingPOD

Von: Dr. Chase A. Thompson
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 Not every tale from history made the textbooks. Some were too strange. Too secret. Too… interesting. Debunking myths and digging up the facts, we don’t peddle half-baked lies, rumors, or unfounded conspiracies. And we don’t accept easy answers either. Your host is Doctor Chase: historian, author, storyteller. You bring the curiosity, and we’ll bring the intrigue. Ready for a mystery? Or an adventure? Let’s go!2025 Sozialwissenschaften Welt
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  • Anatoli Bugorski and the Splitting Headache. (Hit in the Face with a Particle Accelerator)

    Anatoli Bugorski and the Splitting Headache. (Hit in the Face with a Particle Accelerator)
    Sep 22 2025
    Episode 9: Anatoli Bugorski. Anatoli and the Splitting Headache. One more story to tell today in our mini series of scientific heroes who work in dangerous mediums and, like the last couple of episodes, today’s story is also a cautionary tale of sorts, but it’s a story of a mistake most of us won’t even have a chance to duplicate even if we wanted to. I’m looking forward to telling you about today’s subject, Anatoli Bugorski, but even MORE looking forward to the next few episodes when we dive into the primary sources - pre all of this societal polarization and vitriol - and learn in their own words what a Nazi is and what a Fascist is. What did each of those parties believe, what were their planks, and how did they behave? In a world where everybody who disagrees with you politically is a vile Nazi or Fascist, it might just be helpful to look up what each party was all about. That’s history-history, and a time period that is right in my wheelhouse, a few years before and after WW2. Sometimes science brushes so close to the edge that it leaves a scorch mark. Today’s story is about a man, unlike our other heroes of science, who escaped the flash “brighter than a thousand suns” ( Discover), even though it hit him square in the head. It’s also about how a human life can thread the needle between disaster and miracle and keep on going, to finish a PhD, show up to work, and survive. This is the tale of Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski, “a Russian retired particle physicist … known for having survived a radiation accident in 1978, when a high-energy proton beam from a particle accelerator passed through his head.” Yep, you heard me correctly. Essentially, he is the Phineas Gage of the nuclear era. And if you don’t know about Gage…look him up. Ouch! We start in Protvino, in the Russian SFSR, at the Institute for High Energy Physics. Bugorski “worked with the largest particle accelerator in the Soviet Union, the U-70 synchrotron” (..). On July 13, 1978, he walked into the kind of malfunction that turns a routine check into legend: “he was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment when the safety mechanisms failed. Bugorski was leaning over the equipment when he stuck his head in the path of the 76 Giga electron volt proton beam” (..). He didn’t really feel pain as such, at least not immediately. Instead, he saw light. Specifically, he “reportedly saw a flash ‘brighter than a thousand suns’” In that instant the beam “passed through the back of his head, the occipital and temporal lobes of his brain, the left middle ear, and out through the left-hand side of his nose” The dose in the exposed pathway: “200,000 to 300,000 roentgens Discover puts the energy another way: “2,000 grays … on the way in, and … 3,000 grays by the time it left. A dose of around 5 gray can be lethal to humans” (Discover). How do those two things cohere, considering that Bugorski didn’t die? I’ve no idea. Like Homer Simpson, I’m no nuclear scientist, and unlike Homor Simpson, I don’t even work at a nuclear power plant. Somehow, someway, Bugorski “understood the severity of what had happened, but continued working on the malfunctioning equipment, and initially opted not to tell anyone” (..). That detail feels very Soviet, very scientist, and very human: finish the job, then process the catastrophe. It reminds me of the time I was bit by a racoon…..And, you know what? Don’t expect anybody to make a podcast in the future about my raccoon incident…Bugorski’s story is a billion times better. Let’s talk about What Particle Beams Do (And Don’t Do) to Flesh There’s a reason we generally don’t put our hands in beams. When I was a kid, if I heard my mom say that once, I heard her say it a million times. As The Atlantic frames the broader thought experiment: “What would happen if you stuck your body inside a particle accelerator? The scenario seems like the start of a bad Marvel comic” (The Atlantic), according to the Atlantic, but a GOOD Marvel comic if you’re asking me. Accelerators “allow physicists to study subatomic particles by speeding them up in powerful magnetic fields and then tracing the interactions that result from collisions” (The Atlantic). But that neat chalkboard world becomes very real when “a beam of subatomic particles traveling at nearly the speed of light meets the flesh of the human body” (The Atlantic). Discover says it plainly: “protons are still very much physical objects, and when you take trillions of them and force them through something as delicate and complex as a human cell, the collisions tend to tear biological structures apart” (Discover). Radiation harms by “breaking apart chemical bonds that hold DNA and other cellular components together” (Discover). With enough energy, “cells are unable to duplicate and begin to die, leading to organ failure” (Discover). And yet, unlike fallout or ...
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    33 Min.
  • Quicksilver: The Life and Loss of Karen Wetterhahn

    Quicksilver: The Life and Loss of Karen Wetterhahn
    Sep 21 2025
    Quicksilver: The Life and Loss of Karen Wetterhahn Hello friends, and welcome to episode #8. Today we have another riveting but tragic story for you. If you haven’t listened to episode 7 yet, it isn’t absolutely necessary, but it would do you well to hear the stories of early nuclear pioneers like Louis Sloten, Cecil Kelly, and Harry Daghlian, and the dangers that ended their lives. I think this is going to be an intriguing episode, with a fascinating scientist that most won’t be familiar with. Today is not so much in my wheelhouse - Nuclear history, toxic chemical history, safety history, and high velocity subatomic history. I’m not a scientist, and I didn’t stay recently at a Holiday Inn, but I am certainly a science hobbyist, and keep up with science news daily, and the fact that the last few topics are out of my milieu, so to speak, means I’ve had to research them more thoroughly, fact-check my assumptions, look up terms, and generally do the due-dilligance to get things right. I may miss something here or there, but I am trying hard to get it right. Just let me know where I whiff, and I can tell the DJ to fix it in the mix. You know the podcast things. Sharing the show, telling people about it, posting about it, and leaving Apple Podcast reviews all help…a lot. I appreciate those of you who do that. Thank you! Some stories make you hold your breath. Some make you check your gloves. Today we’ll do both, and hopefully, when we do - we’ll be all the better for it. We begin with the story of Dr. Karen Elizabeth Wetterhahn, chemist, teacher, builder of programs, and teacher of people, and of one “tiny glistening drop” that rewrote laboratory safety across the world . It’s a story I want to tell with reverence and a little warmth, because we are talking about a person who balanced world-class science with backyard pool parties and baby rabbits. We’re also going to talk frankly about a super-toxic compound, because Karen would have insisted that we learn everything we can. And I know what you might think when you hear the word Karen, but let’s be fair. Karen Wetterhahn was anything but, and the Karens I’ve known have all been lovely. Don’t judge people by their name - they had no say in it. Karen Wetterhahn was born October 16, 1948, in Plattsburgh, New York. She grew into a scholar of the highest order. “She earned her bachelor's degree from St. Lawrence University in 1970 and her doctorate from Columbia University in 1975,” and joined Dartmouth in 1976, publishing “more than 85 research papers” (Wikipedia). Dartmouth later remembered her as “the founding director of Dartmouth’s Toxic Metals Superfund Research Program,” an “expert in the mechanisms of metal toxicity,” and a scholar with “expertise in biochemistry and molecular toxicology” (Dartmouth Tribute). She rose to become Dartmouth’s Albert Bradley Third Century Professor in the Sciences (Dartmouth Tribute) and in 1990 helped establish the Women in Science Project, which “helped to raise the share of women science majors from 13 to 25 percent” … and has become a national model for recruiting more ladies into STEM careers. She didn’t just research metals; she organized people. She “played an integral role in the administration of the sciences at Dartmouth,” serving as Dean of Graduate Studies, Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Sciences, and Acting Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (Dartmouth Tribute). She “trained 14 postdoctoral research associates, 20 graduate students and over 50 undergraduate research students” (Dartmouth Tribute). And she did this while building programs that actively welcomed women into the lab. She was “co-founder of Dartmouth’s Women in Science Project … and was active in the Women in Cancer Research group” (Dartmouth Tribute). Now bring in the home front—because Karen’s life was never just pipettes and publications. Neighbors remembered that “we never knew she was a world-famous scientist,” because, in Lyme, New Hampshire, “she was just Char and Leon’s mom” (The Tennessean/AP). She loved “rock music—heavy metal was her favorite,” she “tended her garden,” and she hosted some great neighborhood pool parties. (The Tennessean/AP). This is the paradox and the beauty: the same person who would lecture in Norway and Hawaii would also her drag family to the golf course and cheer at Ashley’s hockey game (The Tennessean/AP). A life in balance. On a summer day in 1996, the story turns. Karen was “studying the way mercury ions interact with DNA repair proteins” and also investigating cadmium (Wikipedia). She was using an incredibly dangerous substance that we really don’t mess with much anymore called dimethylmercury—Hg(CH₃)₂ She did what a careful chemist does. She wore “safety glasses and latex gloves,” worked “in a fume cupboard,” handled “very small quantities behind the ...
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    34 Min.
  • The Nefarious Demon Core and the Physicists it Killed in the Pursuit of Nuclear Dominance. (Dangers in the workplace #1)

    The Nefarious Demon Core and the Physicists it Killed in the Pursuit of Nuclear Dominance. (Dangers in the workplace #1)
    Sep 15 2025
    55 Min.
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