Tag Archives: mano

“Brighter Than A Thousand Suns”: The Man Who Entered a Particle Accelerator

We have all heard of particle accelerators, if only for the “discovery” of the Higgs boson a few years ago.
And there are just two questions laymen like us ask themeselves about these machines:

1. What the heck are accelerators anyway, and how do they work?
2. What happens if I put my hand in a functioning particle accelerator?

Okay, maybe I’m the only one asking the second question.

© 2017 Robert Hradil, Monika Majer/ProStudio22.ch

Anyway, regarding question #1, CERN’s official website puts it this way:

An accelerator propels charged particles, such as protons or electrons, at high speeds, close to the speed of light. They are then smashed either onto a target or against other particles circulating in the opposite direction. By studying these collisions, physicists are able to probe the world of the infinitely small.
When the particles are sufficiently energetic, a phenomenon that defies the imagination happens: the energy of the collision is transformed into matter in the form of new particles, the most massive of which existed in the early Universe. This phenomenon is described by Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2, according to which matter is a concentrated form of energy, and the two are interchangeable.

As for the second question, from a quick search it turns out that I’m not the only fool asking it: on the internet, as soon as one claims to be working on an accelerator, he or she is overwhelmed by the requests of those who can’t wait to get hit by a bundle of protons in the hope of acquiring superpowers.

Even some physicists at CERN have tried to answer the age-old question of the hand-in-the-accelerator, in the first 4 minutes of this video.
And yet, either because they might know everything about physics but they’re not doctors, or because it is too childish and frivolous a question, these luminaries seem rather clueless and their attempts to answer can be summed up in a quite embarrassed “we don’t know”. (How come they didn’t prepare a better answer? Has no one ever asked them stupid questions before?)

Well, no harm done, because on this delicate issue the only scientist whose answer I would blindly trust is not at CERN, but in Russia.
His name is Anatoli Bugorski, and he didn’t put his hand in a particle accelerator… he stuck his whole head in one.

© Sergey Velichkin – TASS

On 13 July 1978 Bugorski was inspecting the U-70 synchrotron at the Institute of High Energy Physics in the city of Protvino.
Inaugurated in 1967, this circular accelerator with a perimeter of 1.5 km had held the world record in beam energy for five years (the “70” refers to the amount of gigaelectronvolts it can reach in its final phase); and still today it is the most powerful accelerator in all of Russia.

Inspecting such a monster is not quite like opening the hood of your car anche and checking the engine – although, for this writer, these two activities are equally esoteric. To perform maintenance that morning, Burgoski had to actually slip into the accelerator circuit. Therefore, before heading downstairs, he told the control center to turn off the beam in the next five minutes.
He arrived at the experimental room a minute or two in advance, but did not pay it too much attention because he found the door was open; furthermore, the safety signal was off, meaning that the machinery was no longer in operation. “How efficient, my good old pals, up at the station! – he must have thought – Knowing I was coming down here, they’ve already turned everything off.”

The boys in the control room.

All being nice and quiet, he decided to open the accelerator.
What he didn’t know was that the door had been left ajar by mistake; and that the light bulb inside the warning sign had just burned out.

© Sergey Velichkin – TASS

As soon as he peeked inside the corridor, his head was instantly pierced by a beam of protons of 2×3 millimeters in size, shot at a dizzying speed.
Burgoski saw a flash “brighter than a thousand suns”, as the beam entered the back of the skull and, in a fraction of a second, burned a straight line through his brain, coming out near his left nostril.
The whole thing was too fast for Burgoski to feel any pain; but not fast enough (at least, this is what I like to imagine) to prevent him from mentally cursing the security staff.

Burgoski was taken to the infirmary, and within a short time the left half of his face was swelling. The beam had pierced his middle ear, and the wound continued to slowly burn the nerves in his face. But the real problem was radiation.
In that thousandth of a second, Bugorski had been exposed to a radiation of 200,000 / 300,000 röntgen, which is 300 times greater than the lethal amount.

To the scientists, this unfortunate graduate student had suddenly become an interesting case study.
Burgoski’s days were numbered, so he was rushed to a clinic in Moscow to be placed under observation during what were presumably the last couple of weeks of his life. Scholars came from all over just to watch him die, because no one before him had ever been the victim of such a concentrated beam of radiation, as this article in The Atlantic reminds us:

unique to Bugorski’s case, radiation was concentrated along a narrow beam through the head, rather than being broadly distributed from nuclear fallout, as was the case for many victims of the Chernobyl disaster or the bombing of Hiroshima. For Bugorski, particularly vulnerable tissues, such as bone marrow and the gastrointestinal track, might have been largely spared. But where the beam shot through Bugorski’s head, it deposited an obscene amount of radiation energy, hundreds of times greater than a lethal dose.

Yet, in spite of any prediction, Burgoski did not die.
Following the accident he completely lost hearing from his left ear (replaced by a tinnitus), suffered epileptic seizures and facial hemiparesis for the rest of his life. But apart from this damage, which was permanent but not lethal, he recovered his health completely: within 18 months he was back to work, he completed his doctorate and continued his career as a scientist and experimental coordinator.
He was forbidden from talking about his accident until the end of the 1980s, due to Russia’s secrecy policy surrounding anything even remotely connected with nuclear power. Burgoski is still alive and well at the age of 77.

Maybe his story does not exactly answer our childish question about what would happen if we stuck our hand inside an accelerator, but it can give us a rough idea.
As summarized by Professor Michael Merrifield in the aforementioned video:

Links, curiosities & mixed wonders – 8

Here we are for a new edition of LC&MW, the perfect column to dawdle and amaze yourself at the beach!
(It is also perfect for me to relax a bit while writing the new book for the BB Collection.) (Speaking of which, until Septembre 15 you can get 20% discount if you buy all 4 books in one bundle — just insert the coupon BUNDLE4 at check out. Comes with a free Bizzarro Bazar Shopper.) (Oh, I almost forgot, the above chameleon is a hand, painted by great Guido Daniele, whose job is to… well, paint hands.)
Alright, let’s begin!

  • In Mexico City, at the Templo Mayor, archeologists finally found one of the legendary Aztech “towers of skulls” that once terrorized the Spanish conquistadores. These racks (called tzompantli) were used to exhibit the remains of warriors who valliantly died in battle, or enemies and war prisoners: they were descibed in many codices and travel diearies. The newly-discovered “tower” could well be the famed Huey Tzompantli, the biggest of them all, an impressing rack that could hold up to 60.000 heads, according to calculations (just imagine the nightmarish view).
    On this new site 650 skulls have been found, but the number is bound to increase as the excavation proceeds. But there’s a mystery: the experts expected to find the remains, as we’ve said, of oung warriors. Until now, they have encountered an unexplicable high rate of women and children — something that left everyone a bit confused. Maybe we have yet to fully understand the true function of the tzompantli?
  • One more archeological mystery: in Peru, some 200km away from the more famous Nazca lines, there is this sort of candelabra carved into the mountain rock. The geoglyph is 181 meters high, can be seen from the water, and nobody knows exactly what it is.

  • During the night on August 21, 1986, in a valley in the north-west province of Cameroon, more than 1700 people and 3500 cattle animals suddenly died in their sleep. What happened?
    Nearby lake Nyos, which the locals believed was haunted by spirits, was responsible for the disaster.
    On the bottom of lake Nyos, active volcanic magma naturally forms a layer of water with a very high CO2 concentration. Recent rainfalls had facilitated the so-called “lake overturn” (or limnic eruption): the lower layer had abruptly shifted to the surface, freeing an immense, invisible carbon dioxide cloud, as big as 80 million cubic meters, which in a few minutes suffocated almost all living beings in the valley. [Discovered via Oddly Historical]

If you find yourself nearby, don’t be afraid to breathe. Today siphons bring water from the bottom to the surface of the lake, so as to free the CO2 gradually and constantly.

  • Ok — what the heck is a swimsuit ad (by Italian firm Tezenis) doing on Bizzarro Bazar?
    Look again. That neck, folks.
    Photoshopping going wrong? Maybe, but I like to think that this pretty girl is actually the successor of great Martin Joe Laurello, star of the freakshow with Ringlin Bros, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, Barnum & Bailey and other travelling shows.
    Here you can see him in action, together with fellow performer Bendyman.

  • The latest issue of Godfrey’s Almanack (an installation by the creator of the wonderful Thinker’s Garden) is devoted to the sea, to ancient navigation, to sea monsters. And it is delightful.
  • Say what you wish about Catherine The Great, but she surely had a certain taste for furniture.
  • Meanwhile in Kenya there’s a lawyer who (for the second time!) is trying to sue Israel and us Italians for killing Jesus Christ. That should teach us a lesson. You can murder, plunder and destroy undisturbed for centuries, but never mess with somebody who has connections at the top.
    P.S. An advise for Greek friends: you may be next, start hiding all traces of hemlock.
  • On this website (click on the first picture) you can take a 360° tour through the crytpt of Saint Casimir, Krakow, among open caskets and exposed mummies.

  • The above pic shows one of the casts of Pompeii victims, and it has recently gone viral after a user speculated ironically that the man might have died in the midst of an act of onanism. You can figure out the rest: users making trivial jokes, others deploring the lack of respect for the dead… Now, now, children.
  • If you’re on vacation in Souht East Asia, and you’re thinking about purchasing a bottle of snake wine… well, think again. The practice is quite cruel to begin with, and secondly, there have been reports of snakes waking up after spending months in alcohol, and sending whoever opened the bottle to the hospital or to the grave.

  • From July 21 to 24 I will be at the University of Winchester for the conference organised by Death & The Maiden, a beautiful blog exploring the relationship between women and death, to which I had the pleasure of contributing once or twice. The event looks awesome: panels aside, there will be seminars and workshops (from shroud embroidery to Victorian hairwork techniques), guided tours to local cemeteries, concerts, art performances and film screenings.
    I am bringing my talk Saints, Mothers & Aphrodites, which I hope I will be able to take on tour throughout Italy in autumn.

That’s all for now, see you next time!

Uomini aragosta

L’ectrodattilia è una malformazione genetica che risulta nell’assenza o nello sviluppo incompleto delle dita: il numero di dita può essere inferiore alla norma, oppure alcune dita risultano “saldate” assieme. La forma forse più appariscente di ectrodattilia è quella che comporta la cosiddetta schisi mediana, vale a dire che la mano è aperta in due fino al polso, per un arresto dello sviluppo in fase embrionale. Questo tipo di malformazione può interessare sia le mani che i piedi, e oggi vi si può porre rimedio tramite chirurgia plastica entro il primo anno d’età.

Questo tratto genetico è trasmissibile e, sembrerebbe, dominante. Uno dei primi accenni all’ectrodattilia risale addirittura al 1685, quando in un remoto paesino scozzese, Wigtown, due donne vennero giustiziate per dissenso religioso. Si racconta che, nonostante le richieste di pietà e le dichiarazioni di innocenza, il boia le annegò crudelmente nel fiume Bladnoch. Una delle due donne, mentre annegava, chiese ai granchi del fiume di maledire il boia, che poco tempo dopo diede alla luce un bambino “con mani da granchio”. Il tratto somatico venne trasmesso di generazione in generazione per 300 anni.

Ma l’ectrodattilia fece anche la fortuna di quanti, affetti da questa malattia, decisero di sfruttarla per assicurarsi una vita decorosa. Pare che il primo uomo ad adottare il soprannome di lobster boy (“ragazzo aragosta”) sia stato Fred Wilson, bisecato alle mani e ai piedi, nato nel 1866 a Somerville, Massachussetts. Purtroppo poche informazioni ci rimangono di lui, tranne alcune foto sbiadite.

Ma la vera e propria star, l’uomo aragosta per antonomasia, sarebbe nato soltanto molti anni dopo, nel 1937 a Pittsburgh. Si chiamava Grady Stiles Jr., e proveniva da una famiglia che aveva una lunga tradizione di ectrodattilia. William Stiles era stato il primo, nel 1805, a nascere con le mani e i piedi divisi, seguito da Jacob Stiles, Elisha Stiles e Grady Stiles Sr. Quest’ultimo era già artista in un sideshow quando sua moglie diede alla luce il piccolo Grady Jr., così decise di includere il figlioletto nel suo spettacolo già da una tenera età.

La malformazione di Grady Stiles Jr. era piuttosto drammatica: il ragazzo non poteva camminare, quindi cominciò ad utilizzare mani e ginocchia per deambulare, sviluppando così un’incredibile forza negli arti superiori. Crebbe comunque sano, si sposò due volte ed ebbe quattro figli, due dei quali (Cathy e Grady III) affetti da ectrodattilia. Il successo era enorme, soprattutto quando tutti e tre si esibivano come la “famiglia aragosta”.

Così il tempo passava, e i suoi spettacoli erano tra i più celebri d’America. Ma dentro le mura domestiche, non tutto brillava come sul palcoscenico. Grady era violento e dedito all’acol, e usava la sua incredibile forza per picchiare continuamente moglie e figli. Nel 1978 avvenne l’irreparabile. La notte prima del matrimonio della sua figlia più vecchia, Donna, con un uomo che lui non approvava, Grady uccise con una fucilata lo sposo.

Il processo fu un evento mediatico. Grady ammise pubblicamente l’assassinio, e non si mostrò granché pentito. Utilizzò la sua disabilità a proprio favore, e fece bene: la giuria reputò che non vi fossero strutture carcerarie adeguate per garantire l’assistenza per una malformazione di simile gravità, e decise di condannarlo a 15 anni di libertà vigilata. Tornato a casa, per la famiglia l’incubo ricominciò. Esultante e reso “invincibile” dalla prova giudiziaria superata, Grady Stiles scatenò la sua furia senza più freni. “Ho già ucciso, e l’ho fatta franca; posso farlo di nuovo”, era divenuta la sua minaccia preferita. Così, un giorno di novembre del 1993, la famiglia decise che ne aveva avuto abbastanza. Assoldò un sicario che sparò tre colpi di pistola in testa all’uomo aragosta, mentre stava guardando la televisione.

La mandante dell’omicidio, la moglie Maria, al momento della condanna a 12 anni di carcere dichiarò di sentirsi sollevata, perché la sua famiglia ora era al sicuro. “Grady ci avrebbe uccisi tutti”.

La figlia Cathy è oggi sposata, e ha una figlia con ectrodattilia di nome Misty. Assieme al fratello Grady III e alla figlia si esibiscono ancora saltuariamente. Cathy ha intrapreso la carriera di attrice ed è apparsa in Big Fish di Tim Burton, in Sisters di Brian DePalma e in un episodio della splendida serie HBO, Carnivale.

Anche Grady III è sposato, ma sua figlia Sara non è affetta da ectrodattilia.

La sindrome dell’ “uomo aragosta” è molto rara, e colpisce approssimativamente un bambino su 90.000. Eppure, fra i Vadoma dello Zimbabwe, questa malattia genetica colpisce 1 bambino su 4.

Considerati una leggenda fino agli anni ’50, i Vadoma sono l’esempio perfetto di una mutazione genetica perpetratasi a causa del totale isolamento in cui vivono, e del divieto di sposare qualcuno al di fuori della tribù. Ma, vista l’altissima incidenza, fra queste persone la malformazione non è vista come qualcosa di strano o meraviglioso: è semplicemente una caratteristica come un’altra, come da noi possono essere i capelli rossi o biondi.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI4vAxruSus]

Nuovo record

La piccola Lei Yadi Min, che ha poco più di un anno, è nata con 12 dita delle mani e 14 dita dei piedi. Vive con la madre e la sorella nel sobborgo di South Okkalarpa a Yangon (ex Rangoon), in Myanmar (ex Birmania).

Questa bellissima bambina entrerà nel Guinnes dei primati 2012 proprio grazie a questa sua particolarità fisica. Attulmente il record è detenuto da due bimbi indiani di 5 e 15 anni di età, con 12 dita delle mani e 13 dita dei piedi.