Negative Ion/Anti-5g Products Are Actually RADIOACTIVE

what you're looking at is a piece of radioactive material in a device called a cloud chamber each of those little trails is a particle of radiation being emitted from the piece of material in this case that little silver piece is a chunk of emery see'em taken out of a smoke detector now here's the same chamber but this time I've loaded in a popular wellness product called a negative ion bracelet notice all the radiation coming out of it that will be the focus of today's video let's back up what's the negative ion and what's the deal with this bracelet and products like it well a negative ion is just a molecule of gas which has been ionized that is has picked up an extra electron some studies and a lot of wellness companies claim that these negative ions can do all sorts of things from improving mood to making you more healthy to making your water more wet this company calls it the vitamin you can wear and others claim that it stops electromagnetic radiation which you'll see how ironic that is in a moment veritasium made a great video about this a while ago and dug into all the studies and showed that the research is iffy at best and far as anyone can tell negative ions don't really do anything for you more than any placebo but there was something very important that he missed his video focused on one of these you've probably seen one of these before or maybe your aunt has posted about it on Facebook it's a Himalayan salt lamp and the claim is that when you turn the light on it somehow heats the salt up to release negative ions what Derek showed was that these lamps don't actually even produce negative ions so not only is the negative ion claim itself fraud so is the claim that these produce any thing is there are other negative ion products that do actually produce them but making negative ions fundamentally requires energy input with the salt lamp the explanation seemed plausible because you have to turn it on and heat up the salt even though it doesn't actually work but now riddle me this how do you make a piece of plastic bracelet continue to emit negative ions functionally forever without any power input well you fill it with radioactive material of course several months ago my friend a magrav straw that runs a company called dangerous things tipped me off to this and sent me some samples of bracelets that he had a company in China make so if you see his logo on any of these know that he got these as samples explicitly so he could test for this it's not something that he sells he'd measured the bracelets with a Geiger counter and sure enough it started beeping like crazy as the radiation from the bracelets hit the detector so since he told me about these I've been giving them the full treatment to figure out what's in them how they're made and determine if they're dangerous so let's go through all that testing beyond the samples Anil sent me I bought as many samples from as many different companies as I could and as it turns out this is so much more horrifying than if it was just bracelets on Amazon you can buy a wide variety of these products from bracelets dependence to ceramic beads that you load into a shower head and even a massager wand in China and Japan it's even worse even by face creams toothbrushes sanitary pads and even full pieces of clothing or bed sheets with the so-called negative ion powder mixed in so let start running some Diagnostics on this stuff and figure out what's in it the first test that Iran was the cloud chamber test you saw briefly at the beginning this is great because unlike a Geiger counter where all the radiation just makes the Machine click with this different kinds of radiation look different and so you can quickly narrow down what sort of material might be in there the bracelets and pendants both showed basically the same thing the big fat trails are from something called an alpha particle which is an atom of helium that is basically a chunk of nucleus emitted from a heavy radioactive atom the thinner wispy lines that tend to zigzag around or beta particles which are really just an electron which has been ejected from the radioactive material because we're seeing lots of alpha particles and also beta particles this already narrows it down a fair bit the only radioactive atoms that tend to emit alpha particles also tend to be quite large so usually something like uranium or thorium or heavier if there was a lot of beta but no alpha then we'd be looking for something higher up on the periodic table one thing this doesn't show though is gamma rays which is a type of high-energy light to some radioactive material emits as cloud chambers just aren't good at detecting them directly something I noticed at this point and confirmed later was that the bracelet seemed to be emitting more particles than the pendants did and some items didn't emit anything one quick note just because I find it funny is that alpha particles are highly positively charged since they're a helium nucleus without any electrons so these products actually release a lot more positive ions than anything else and just at a baseline some of the other claims are hilarious some companies claim that the negative ions come from letting oxygen molecules into two oxygen atoms which we looked at what happens when you do that in a previous video when we made a whole bunch of singlet oxygen which is extremely reactive and glows blood-red if you make enough of them but I digress now that I know that it's got to be something heavy I'm gonna need to switch tactics so first I sent off a sample of everything I could find on Amazon - Adam McCombs who runs a scanning electron microscope lab so that he can run some analysis on it we'll look at his results in a minute but while I waited I ran more tests of my own this is a gamma ray spectrometer as I briefly mentioned gamma rays are a type of radiation in the form of high-energy light many radioactive isotopes will emit them at very specific wavelengths so if we can measure the gamma rays coming out of a sample we can very quickly determine what sort of radioactive material is in it I actually built parts of this detector myself and we'll go through that build next month when we look at detecting antimatter in cosmic rays the detector basically has three pieces the first is a giant crystal of sodium iodide which has been doped with a small amount of thallium this is called a scintillator and when a gamma ray passes through it it emits a flash of blue light and the brightness of that flash is proportional to the energy of the gamma ray by measuring the intensity of these light flashes we can figure out the exact energy of the gamma ray that hit it and from there figure out what sort of radioactive material were working with the flashes are pretty dim though some only containing a few photons so a camera would be much too insensitive to be able to see this so instead I'll be using a special type of vacuum tube called a photomultiplier tube it can detect even single photons and turn them into a very large electrical pulse which we can detect with a simple circuit we're gonna go into more detail about how exactly this works in the antimatter video but the TLDR is that we feed in about a thousand volts and get little pulses not usually larger than about 50 millivolts back out when a photon hits it the crystal and tube are combined to make the actual gamma probe and then this is connected to this little box this box provides the voltage and turns the pulses that come back into a signal which a computer sound card can interpret this is the GS USB Pro made by a company called gamma spectacular which my friend Steven sussel Minh runs I absolutely love this thing as it's so easy to use and works with basically any photomultiplier tube and uses free software to take this Mills and turn them into a spectrum which we can read and interpret if you're interested in gamma spectroscopy and want to try this yourself this absolutely gets my stamp of approval and it's quite cheap compared to what something like this normally costs and since all it needs is a USB connection it works with just about any computer for those interested I've put some links to his site below and we'll be using it again in several future videos okay so with the gamma probe in hand it's time to actually measure the products and find out what's in them and that's just as simple as putting the item next to the probe and letting it collect those pulses for a couple of hours though honestly within a couple of minutes it's already super obvious what's in here here's a capture taken over to ours and you can see a bunch of very distinct Peaks off-camera i calibrated the detector so we can tell what each of the Peaks represent and I've gone ahead and labeled all the different isotopes which correspond to each of the peaks some of these will just show up regardless of what's near the detector and are just part of background radiation this one for example is from potassium-40 which isn't just about anything that has potassium in it you for example are full of potassium 40 which means that you are naturally a little bit radioactive same reason why bananas which are very high in potassium are slightly radioactive the rest of the peaks though are very characteristic of a particular radioactive element thorium while thorium itself doesn't actually release any gamma rays many of the isotopes it decays into do and that's what we're seeing on the spectrum here's the thorium decay chain and the spectrum side by side we can see the actinium thallium and lead Peaks which all correspond to an isotope in the decay chain this is basically the classic fingerprint for thorium just to compare this is a thorium mantle it's basically a special mesh bag coated in pure thorium dioxide which is used in old-timey gas lanterns when I run it on the gamma spec the spectrum I get is perfectly identical one thing to note is that a lot of the products call the negative ion powder that they're adding to the products tourmaline so here's a sample of actual tourmaline which I ran on the gamma spec as you can see not a whiff of thorium in there and it doesn't register on the Geiger counter at all let's now check back in with Adam and see if his results match mine he ran a few different tests as well as looking at the materials under both an optical and scanning electron microscope right off the bat the optical microscope already showed some very disturbing signs when you closely at the plastic of the bracelets you can see these tiny white particles keep this in mind as it'll be important in a moment he then cut a section of the bracelet and mounted it onto a special little pedestal which will be mounted into the scanning electron microscope however since the material isn't very conductive to be able to image it he had to coat it in a very thin layer of gold as scanning electron microscopy requires a conductive surface to work to do this he loaded the sample into a magnetron just like the one we built and used in a previous video using plasma and magnets that allowed him to coat the sample in a couple nanometer thick layer of gold making it conductive enough to image but preserving the fine details then the sample could be loaded into the microscope once the system was up and running he zeroed in on one of the little white particles from before and took some high-resolution images of it but then came the fun part one of the reasons I reached out to Adam was that his machine can do something called energy dispersion x-ray spectroscopy basically the way this works is that he shoots the electron beam of the microscope at a tiny point on the sample and it induces the emission of x-rays from the sample by measuring the energy of the x-rays just like how we did with gamma ray spectroscopy he can determine what elements the material is made of and from that work backwards to figure out exactly what this is so rather than relying on the material itself to passively emit stuff like in gamma ray spectroscopy this basically forces any element present to do so and all elements will do this at very specific energies here's the spectrum he took of the particle there's a few different things that stand out first the giant peak here is from silicon which we expect since the bracelet is clearly made of some sort of silicon polymer next we see a small peak from gold which he coated the sample with but then we see the one we were looking for which is a thorium peak thorium actually has a few Peaks it releases the x-rays that and all of them are present confirming that this is real and that large oxygen peak in the fact that the particles are white means that this probably pure thorium dioxide when I first found out there was thorium in here I had wondered what exactly the company was using as their thorium source if you look up negative ion powder on Google there are three distinct things that you'll see a white powder a beige powder and a black powder in my mind knowing now that this is definitely thorium in all the different samples makes me think that the different odors are either ground-up thoria night monocyte or pure thorium dioxide the former to being the main minerals that thorium is found in and are black and beige respectively while pure thorium dioxide is white okay now the million-dollar question we're totally sure what's in the products but are they actually dangerous well right off the bat because the particles are distributed throughout the plastic as you wear the bracelet you're slowly abrading the surface and releasing tiny particles of thorium into your environment which you can end up breathing or ingesting imagine sleeping with these things on you're basically gonna have it sitting at most level but let's pretend for a second that it wasn't shedding radioactive material onto you all the time just from a radiation point of view how dangerous is it well I've got two different Geiger counters which will give us a dose rate so we can judge that danger the white one can only really detect beta and gamma while the silver one has a special tube in it that allows it to detect all three types of radiation including alpha when I measure the bracelets with the white detector I get a dose rate of approximately 0.6 to 1.1 microsieverts per hour which if I forget to turn off the alarm is already enough to have the detector yelling at me but that said four short exposures this would actually be a totally safe amount to handle if it wasn't shedding particulate this is a fairly safe amount of radiation if you're just handling it for a short time the danger of radiation isn't instantaneous exposure but total exposure over time as long as you're below a certain threshold per year your chances of developing cancer remain low however when I measure with the second counter which can also detect alpha I get a dose of about 5.6 microsieverts per hour that's about equivalent to a dental x-ray every 2 hours again this is actually safe over short periods but consider that this product is meant to be worn 24/7 year-round so if we scale that dose to a year-long equivalent that works out to 49 millisieverts per year for context a full body count scan is about 10 millisieverts and the lowest annual dose linked to cancer is about a hundred millisieverts per year and both amyl and adam's measurements with their geiger counters gave very similar results in the range of 1 to 5 micro sieverts depending on what sort of probe they were using but before we write this off as oh well then these are safe because it's under that threshold consider a few things first these are often sold as three packs of two brain slits and a necklace worn together this absolutely puts you above 100 millisievert hold however it's worse than that dose rate is calculated as a full-body dose exposure but this isn't a full-body dose it's a piece of material you've strapped to one spot on your body and let it be exposed for a year and for things like the clothing the dose rate can be much higher than the bracelets as you need way more thorium powder to make a whole garment radioactive so not only will you be shedding more thorium powder you're getting a much higher and now full-body dose aren't these negative ion underwear snazzy nothing like a little bit of testicular cancer to improve your health further this is just the dose that you get from bracelets or the other items alone even in cases where the dose is low enough to not put you over the threshold if you need a cat scan or other medical scan or even if you just fly in a lot of planes all of a sudden your yearly dose can be over the threshold and you're exposing yourself to significant unnecessary risk think of radiation dose as a sort of yearly budget if you're burning three quarters or more of that budget wearing a stupid bracelet it's not that hard to push yourself over the limit and be exposed to risk especially when the dose per bracelet is so inconsistent that if you happen to just get an extra hot sample you're already over budget also there's a misconception with alpha particles that they're so bad at going through things that they won't make it through skin and can just be ignored a couple of problems with this first they don't need to go all the way through your skin they only need to penetrate a few layers to hit the dividing cells and cause havoc but even then they're still occasionally quite capable of making it all the way through skin and into the tissue below in just about every image of radiation types alpha are always shown as being stopped by paper but the reality is they go through a piece of paper quite easily don't take my word for it I'm gonna cover one of the bracelets in various materials and let's see what actually stops the different particle types first up some paper this is just standard a4 paper and you can see that many of the alpha particles make it right through without issue counts are a little bit lower but not really by much so all of those images that show alpha being stopped by paper are just straight up wrong so strike one now let's make it a little bit more difficult how about a plastic bag plastic is a little bit thicker and denser and so should give the particles more trouble as I expected lower counts this time but still particles getting through and finally I wrapped the bracelet in chicken skin this time there are hardly any alpha making it all the way through though some still do but you can see that the beta particles are making it through with ease and of course the gamma rays are going right through they can punch through an inch of lead a little bit of skin isn't gonna stop them but here's the issue since alpha particles clearly make it through paper they obviously have some penetrating power which means that while many would be stopped by the outer dead layers of skin they only need to make it about a tenth of a millimeter to hit the dividing skin cells which would go on to form skin cancer and keep in mind the epidermis and a piece of paper are basically the same thickness so if it's going through paper as if it's not even there it's going all the way through epidermis into the dividing layers alpha particles are highly charged so strapping an emitter to one spot on your body like this for an extended period of time could legitimately cause problems and damage DNA eventually leading to cancer remember that massager wand which let's be honest is probably a sex toy I asked Adam to see how easy it was to open which he did in a special fume hood for safety and sure enough the back plug was just pressed fit in place and inside was a pile of thorium oxide powder if a kid found that and cracked it open they'd literally just be playing with radioactive dust or mommy's special pen which neither of those are really great options and even if they don't I'm pretty sure that rubbing a radioactive stick on your genitals is probably a bad idea also one of the intended uses for it is to dip the thing in water to make your water more wet which the insanity of that sentence aside the chances of water getting in and making radioactive thorium mud is pretty high or rather some thorium leaking out since there's essentially nothing even close to a gasket in there so to reiterate if you're just gonna handle this stuff for a few minutes that's totally fine they won't hurt you just be sure to wash your hands after to remove any particles and you know don't lick them but the real danger happens when the products are used as intended because these are relatively safe source of thorium just about the only use I can think of these is as a calibration source for a gamma spectrometer but at no point should anyone actually be wearing these this is basically the modern equivalent of the radium products of old that people claimed would reduce when really it's just slowly giving you cancer what I find really funny is the products that are labeled as negative ion emitting that don't when a mille first got his samples and then told the company about it most of the company quit when they found out we got a new sample from them and lo and behold they no longer emit radiation because they've stopped adding the powder to them but they're still labeled as negative ion bands so now rather than fraud and cancer it's just fraud a few of the other products came up empty as well these titanium bracelets for example don't show even a whiff of radiation so you're essentially just paying for a bracelet with some colored dots painted onto it and thankfully these shower beads also came up empty and are evidently just some sort of ceramic so you aren't washing yourself in thorium particles but I wasn't able to get my hands on many of the Chinese products like the face creams and clothing to test but if you ever see them in a picture next to a negative-ion meter and are actually setting it off know that they are almost definitely full of thorium now you may be wondering what I'd like to see happen now that you see how horrific this is well thing number one I really hope that various media outlets pick this up so it forces Amazon's hand so they stopped selling this garbage thing number two I hope that various nuclear commissions will step in and regulate this so that all these Chinese companies are forced to stop selling this in Canada in the US the issue is that there's so much variability between samples that many of these would sneak under the radar as the dose rate is below the legal threshold but the fact that these are releasing radioactive particulate because of how they're made should really change how they are classified as it makes them very unsafe and let's be clear here if Amazon could sell drugs guns and human organs they probably would their moral compass is non-existent so the only thing I can think that would really make them pull a product is enough backlash and pressure from people demanding that they stop so if you find this upsetting send it to your local media outlet and write to Amazon to let them know that this [ __ ] needs to stop if someone gets hurt it'll literally be their fault for knowingly selling something which is needlessly dangerous frankly I'm just surprised that goop doesn't sell these but that's where I leave it for now my Amazon search history is now basically permanently ruined from all the weird stuff I had to buy for this video but I hope it'll be worth it and was educational for all of you these videos are supported by my amazing patrons channel members and supporters on Kofi and I can't thank you all enough for your support if you'd like to help keep the flow of science videos like this one coming I've put some links below if you enjoyed be sure to hit that like button and subscribe if you haven't already be sure to head over my other social media platforms to see these projects long before they end up in videos I've been posting about this project as I ran these tests for the past few months on both Instagram and Twitter so definitely check those out that's all for now and I'll see you next time

Channel: The Thought Emporium

Views: 1,017,310

Keywords: negative ion, wellness, q ray, pendent, pendant, bracelet, nuclear, radioactive, thorium, gamma ray, alpha particle, beta particle, cloud chamber, gamma spectroscopy, SEM, scanning electron, geiger, geiger counter, education, science, debunking, radiation

Id: C7TwBUxxIC0

Length: 20min 26sec (1226 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/shawster]

I’m surprised thorium is cheap enough that they’d use it.

I mean, it’s not like anyone wants a radioactive bracelet or anyone who believes in this stuff is actually testing what is in the bracelet... why bother putting it in? I don’t see the logic from the supplier...

[u/camus_absurd]

After seeing the kind of mental gymnastics that the people who wear these things go through, I wouldn't be shocked to hear them try to argue that the radiation is somehow a good thing.

[u/nebruin]

Cancer is all natural, therefore good for you.... right?

[u/DrSenpai_PHD]

Just thought i'd share some Amazon reviews for these "negative ion" bracelets:

I have four of these.. I feel it helps with sleep, sinuses, headaches and balance. I wear one all of the time unless I plan on being around water. They are packaged nice for gift giving - 82 people found this helpful

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I have had 3 or 4 negative Ion bracelets before. This by far is the best. It works well (I am a golfer) . I am 68 yrs old...it is also attractive. The only thing I do not like is that I have to take it off before showering. - 78 people found this helpful

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Husband loves it. It actually works. His mood 75 percent improvement. Highly recommended - 69 people found this helpful

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A week nearly gone. Still so calm. Not needed my inhaler. My aches due to injuries are so much better. Can fall assleep so fast now. If i wake in the night i just drift straight back to sleep. Am sleeping 7 hrs. A n8ght now. Only take bracelet off to shower.or swim. If its a placebo effect as some say. "Bring it on". Works for me. - 23 people found this helpful

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I have worn Q-Ray balance bracelets since 1997. They wear out because of the demands of my body. But they always work great! I used to get the deluxe version for about $55 and they worked for me for about 3 - 4 months before burning out. But they were worth the cost. This time I decided to buy the lower cost Q-Ray bracelet because the version I like was about $100. But as soon as I put it on, it started to work. And within 12 hours my pain was gone. Many of my friends have ordered Q-ray and also are delighted. Spend the extra money if you want relief!

I'm hoping these are fake reviews. Otherwise I just feel bad for these people.

[u/diethylaminedreams]

Mmmm thorium infused apparel.

[u/KillerBeeTX]

My wife is going to hate this video....

[u/[deleted]]

That was a great video. These products should be banned

[u/Mutley1357]

"If your interested in gamma spectroscopy...." that must be the smallest niche hobby out there :P

[u/butsuon]

If any of these companies are in the U.S., this would definitely qualify for false advertising by naming the product tourmaline.