On a semi-related note, I was actually radioactive for a few days once, after I got my thyroid nuked.

What was cool was that it turned out that regular 'ol camera CCDs (like the one in your cell phone) can detect alpha particles, so I naturally pressed my phone to my neck in a dark room and got this video. Those tiny white “flashes” you see are actually all alpha particles (video in a spoiler block so it doesn’t take up half the screen at least on lemmy-ui):

I verified it by taking more video with the phone away from my body – no flashes!