Life, The Universe, and Everything

[Doug Coulter]

There are a few special compounds that chelate boron and you don't need much - they are cancer-tropic as hell - a happy accident (a little hard to find them but I have the research papers and know people). Micrograms do it. You inject this, but not into the vascular system. If you have metastasized cancer, so far, that's it for you most times.

Slow neutrons in the amount needed are "mostly harmless" at .025 eV. At least far less so than 9 megavolt betas they wanted to hit me with. When they react with boron, which has a cross section like a big magnet (why it's used in detectors) - you get gain to a couple megavolts right at the cancer cell...That's the point, this is far more selective and used a lot less applied energy than any other rad method. It only takes one molecule per cell with this stuff.

[Donovan Ready]

Awesome. I'd love to know which boron compounds, if you don't mind sharing..

[Doug Coulter]

This wikipedia page started me down the rabbit hole. I have some papers on a share someplace here, I'll search again - I'd printed them out to freak out my doctor last year (and now they listen to me better). I'd found 3-4 papers of the original work.
I don't remember it being especially hard to chase them down. Things people don't think are worthwhile for unrelated reasons tend not to be too secret unless by mistake or obscurity.

There hasn't been as much done on this as one might like as neutrons are hard to get for most medical workers (expenses they can't defer - or as yet get paid to give patients since only a couple places have the right spot for it)...Those kind of researchers tend not to be reactor-tropic at any rate, and there's less money in cures than palliative care - check big pharma's priorities.

Wiki talks about epi-thermal neutrons as for tumors "within", you want the patient's body to moderate them the rest of the way (the boron cross section is 1/v so slower is better). In the case of surface stuff like I had, you can just do thermal ones and be fine. So one of the issues they mention is gone in my case already.
I'd stay away from Gd compounds myself...speaking of toxic...

The point is that in the 10 millions/second neutron production range - which is now easy here - you can block the X rays other than capture gammas in things (which can be far enough away that the air does that for you) - and do nearly zero damage to the human *except* for cells with a boron atom in them at the time. From what I found, even borax or boric acid tend to be tumor-tropic, but these organics are gettable from the big houses too as reagents.
Anything tumor-tropic will work if you can hang a 10B on it. There's been a lot of progress on the tumor-tropic front since most of this work was done FWIW.

The cost to build a fusor like mine - even the straight DC version - is less than a week's rent at that magic spot in the neutron beam of a research fission reactor.
Could be a fairly big deal, actually. The fission one is a LOT harder to get epi thermals out of if those are what you want (without cooking the patient with gammas).
They are easier to get pure thermals out of as they usually use a really long graphite column to moderate, shielded outside with lead. But for the graphite column to be long enough to stop the gammas down its length...you get pure thermals (which might be ok), but not so many as they tend to scatter out the sides of the passage, which usually is 16 or 20 feet long. With the fusor you can be inside a foot...

A point source (or nearly) is a lot better as 1/r2 is going for you there better and less exposure to the rest of you.

[Donovan Ready]

Fascinating, thanks. It sounds like you may have a money-maker in the medical "industry" with fusors...

[Doug Coulter]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4376436/
is another highly cited paper that doesn't appear to be behind a paywall.

Dunno if I ever make a dime, might save my own life if it seems good and necessary.
In this case it's that no one seems to have put 2 and 2 together...Even CarlW and his mentor at the place working on BNCT.
The localization and point source nature are big deals here in terms of collateral damage.
But those things take a LONG time to get into practice or make money. Me, I'm happy to share if anyone wants to
do the (other) work.

[Doug Coulter]

This has the best explanation of how it might actually take 720 degrees of rotation to really be back where you started I've ever seen - it was always a little mysterious in physics, that one. And hey, it's Feynman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDZaM-Bi-kI


The fun is around 33:15 in to this.

No one in physics ever mentioned attachment to a shoulder...it almost makes string theory start to make sense.

[Doug Coulter]

Just ordered an Analog Discovery 2 which is kind of a do-all FPGA based scope, wave gen, VNA, logic analyzer, data aq deal. So they say, we'll see when it gets here
It should replace the miniVNA pro, which while it helped, has some serious limits - it's only good around 50 ohms more or less, and glitches in its built-in attenuator fried a rare Tadiran 50w broadband amp I wanted to use to sweep some stuff ( I'm lucky only a few hundred dolars in fets.) The miniVNA didn't have a way to insert an amp in the chain without cutting tracks and other shennanigans as well. This thing looks more do-it-all for this use case.

Not that the miniVNA was useless...viewtopic.php?f=25&p=6442#p6442

[Doug Coulter]

Top Flattener

Plate choke for 1.5-2 MHz

The Digilent Analog Discovery2 arrived and I'm feeling it out now. It might be almost as good as they say it is. The unit itself seems good, the grabber clips that came in the bundle are the worst I've ever touched...makes pretty pix and installed in linux without a hitch. I'm going to try the arm version on a pi, so as to have a low-consequence driver near the EMI of the fusor....
The BNC expander in the pro bundle is nice, and it's a deal with 2 scope probes for very little money. I may look for some better clips out there (these need to have a male pin to work with diglent's flying leads...)

I can see why teachers like this for beginning EE students. It's pretty easy to get going, it does a lot of what one might need to start getting a feel for how things work. It might not be the best scope or logic analyzer or waveform generator, or bench power supply out there, but given it does all those and more for this price...I usually consider Digilent overpriced and under-delivered (their microchip arduino clones were nice - if you write your own drivers and do all the work, and didn't mind paying triple for the privilege of having to do it all yourself) - but with also-high priced NI on the team, hmmm...this ain't bad.

More on that later on. I don't know enough to praise or complain too much yet. It gives roughly the same answers as the miniVNAPro on the fusor simulation circuit. The big deal here is that it's a lot more programmable, and I can easily insert things like big RF amps in the chain, use my own probes (like that super HV one I build, or a faraday probe) and so on, this is a ton more flexible, and with the starting frequency range mentioned in the choke pic above, this thing is not working hard at all.

[Doug Coulter]

This is good to watch before going out to do it yourself. Having been unofficially trained by "real loggers" I spot the mistake in almost all of these...and one of the bigger ones is letting thing get out of hand in the first place - some of those trees should have gone down 10 years earlier, in those urban settings. Ladders? Really? And on the same side of the trunk you're cutting something as heavy as a truck?
The twist and stump jump is only around 60% predictable - sometimes you even go for that on purpose to get the tree to be down where you want after it twists, maybe by temporarily hanging on another tree. But...as you see here, it can really do some amazingly bad things too. Always have that escape route handy, and if a super fast fall isn't required to reduce hangup in other trees, let it go slow - just pop and crack and eventually go down - while you use the escape route which in general should be orthogonal to the expected direction of fall...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BLsYRfgHWI

I'm on the third tree of my "one tree per day" regime right now. Yes, I know it's an insanely stupid time of year to be doing this, but I didn't have enough health earlier, and I dare not wait any later if I want cheap heat this year (and I need that). What's really crazy is that most of the trees I'm cutting are black walnut - worth a zillion bucks to a woodworker - and for what it's worth - toxic to the woodcutter if there's a lot of juglone present, as there is now - they're just at peak nut-making phase.

But they're also costing me over an hour a day of sun on the panels, and I'd like to be running the air conditioning a bit more...it'll matter a lot more in winter, but hey - I'm getting kind of a two-fer here.
I'll probably make some video short and put it up...but really, that needs another cameraman. When you're good at this, even at 64 with COPD and hypertension, you move so fast through the
bole and laps there is no way even a go-pro on the head could capture the real-time operations optimization you do here - it actually does take full use of the brain, even for a smart experienced guy.
Those who think country boys are slow haven't seen this action, I'd bet. Go through a whole tree in one AM session and never hit the ground with the chain, while also cleanly disposing of the laps, I dare ya.

And remember, you can't always make them fall just where you want - usually you can, but since no tree is totally round, much less uniform in strength across the cross section (some are rotten and part hollow and you can't know till you're really in there and it's late in the game) - but you can get close. This has been a bit of chess here, as these were close together and yes, close to my infrastructure, and felling them in the wrong order alone would have been a hangup and damage causing disaster....

Having worn out my old cheapo electric chainsaw (Remington, was $80 at Lowes) which was good even though cheap - it's main issue was too much torque and stretching new chains past adjustment range long before you'd sharpened them to death - I got a new Worx one, their larger version, and it totally rocks. I've used the > $500 saws the loggers have handbag flame wars over, and this annihilates them on every level. I do note that the 2kw Chinesium (HF) gennie won't run it, won't even get the chain to full speed in air. But the Japanese one (Honda, inverter type) - no problem.
However, this is close enough to my shop that...
I'm doing this all with solar power! And let me tell you, the line cord is the only limit, this thing is a total beast, gets through even hardwood so fast you have to watch your toes. We'll see about chain stretching. I'd drilled some extra holes in the old bar to accommodate that in the old one.

Before people object to using a generator - remember you're doing this to get the wood, not to clear a trail for latte hikers. This means you're using some other power tool, like my hydrostatic tractor with a cart and 3 point hitch to move stuff around - wood's heavy. So putting a nice light quiet gennie on there to run all day on less than a gallon of gas and never need more than one pull in the morning, well, those of you who've used "real" chainsaws will understand how worth it that is. Obviously you wouldn't use a huge gennie, just one that's big enough. The inverter type sold for tailgating seem to work really well. And they're super quiet. This is a safety thing, as you can now hear that first popping and cracking so you know when to run! Safety equipment like hearing protectors doesn't always make you safer!!!

This is the one I'm using. I also note that it's a heck of a lot lighter than any other saw at this power level...and I'm getting old and weak, so I really prefer that.
https://www.amazon.com/Worx-WG304-1-Cha ... saw+15+amp

[Doug Coulter]

Ok. here it is, not that great a vid but maybe will do as a review on Amazon for that saw. It's uploading as I type, maybe by the time you get here it'll be viewable.
https://youtu.be/JnAX_ZXN_fI