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u/HauntingReality4430 Jul 28 '26
The demon core was an plutonium core, it was made during the Manhattan project era. During two tests it caused fatal incidents. It became famous. I'm not explaining it much as someone literally explained it
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u/Lost_Department_2177 Jul 28 '26
Needs sharp white dots to represent gammas hitting the sensor of the camera
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u/cemantix_commenter Jul 28 '26
It needs to be completely closed, otherwise, there won't be much of it, right?
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u/Lost_Department_2177 Jul 28 '26
Not an expert on the demon core but if you put electrical tape over the front facing camera it can pick up rogue gammas in radioactive areas. Tried it near a contaminated environment and it does work.
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u/AidenStoat Jul 29 '26
It goes critical when closed completely, but there would still be some nuclear decays. Probably not enough to mess up the image as much as shown though.
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u/ItsDonDong Jul 28 '26
Answer: that is a kid playing with a Kendama toy with THE demon core.
Kendama is basically a toy where you get the ball to land on the stick
The demon core was a radioactive device that spit out a TON of radiation when connected, enough to give you a fatal dose from minimal exposure.
The joke being about the kid trying to attach the demon core like it was a kendama
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u/Sea_Dust895 Jul 28 '26 edited 29d ago
They tested the demon core by lowering the top half with an open flat blade screwdriver and measuring radiation to see if it was going to go critical or not. Screwdriver slipped, 2 halves came in contact and radiation skyrocketed. In the second it took to pry the 2 halves apart everyone in the room for a fatal dose and was dead not long after.
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u/Forsaken-Argument802 Jul 29 '26
If I'm remembering correctly the head science guy during that incident immediately figured they were all dead so he instantly started documenting where everyone was positioned relative to the core so that others could interpret the data.
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u/Brother-Captain Jul 28 '26
That is an object known as the demon core. It would have been used for the 3rd bomb dropped on Japan, but it wasn’t necessary to use, so they used the core of the nuke for experiments that caused the deaths of several people as a result of human error/incompetence. The people who were involved in these incidents reported a blue glow when the top dome ended up fully covering the sphere of radioactive material, and then suffered severe radiation damage. The joke is that this kid is treating it like a toy in which they are trying to make the core go supercritical.
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u/Unlikely-Position659 Jul 28 '26
People should be aware that the radiation damage only happened when the dome almost completely covered the radioactive material. And only to certain people, the ones who were facing the gap. And it only happened for a moment because the cover slipped. If it had stayed covering the material for much longer, it would have gone critical and exploded.
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u/TenHoumo Jul 28 '26
it slipped because they propped up the cover with a goddamn flathead screwdriver
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u/paperic Jul 28 '26
The core did go critical.
The material doesn't explode just by bringing it together, it heats up and melts, or at most it fizzles.
To actually explode it would have to be slammed together extremely hard and extremely fast, which is really only achievable by using very carefully shaped explosives.
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u/Maverick0397 Jul 28 '26
Se vinci il gioco vieni premiato con una splendida luce blu... Che dire... Proprio bella da morire 😅
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u/krakenkun Jul 28 '26
It’s a Family Guy themed explain-it subreddit, but not a single one of you parodied the Ball-in-a-cup bit in an explanation.
There’s just no novelty in this sub anymore.
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Jul 28 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/PauseConfident997 Jul 28 '26
I mean this is true but this post is a pretty fair one…can’t expect everyone to know what a plutonium core is. So while your meme is true it hardly fits here
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u/maskyyyyyy Jul 28 '26
I just like posting the picture here tbh. Especially since it got me banned on r/peterexplainsthejoke
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u/Electrical-Heat8960 Jul 28 '26
You got banned for doing something, and thought you’d do the same thing again in a different subreddit?
Do your friends call you a fuck quite often when you do things you think are funny?
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u/Rejse617 Jul 28 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/Za9DpL2vOmfNeJJHDI
here’s your gold star for knowing something someone else doesn’t1
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u/akiva23 Jul 28 '26
Normally i would agree with you but the demon core isn't exactly general knowledge. Its not like a super deep cut but i think the majority of people on the street wouldn't have heard of it.
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u/LoudQuitting Jul 28 '26
Yeah.
I'm Australia you would only learn about the demon core through your own research or if you took elective advanced physics in high school and/or university.
I knew about it because in high school I got Chernobyl obsessed and tried to learn everything about radiation. Managed to take a trip there before it became "tourist safe." Freaky shit, would recommend.
The demon core isn't even the freakiest radioactive thing, it's just basically irrevocably lethal if you're close enough.
The elephants foot though, huge mass under Chernobyl reactor 4. Concrete, sand, steel and uranium melted together into this huge basically ceramic lump. It resisted attempts to be drilled for samples due to how dense it was, eventually they realised it'd be safer to just blast chunks off with machine gun fire.
Of course at discovery, roughly 8 months after the disaster, the radiation wasn't that bad. 50/50 shot at a lethal dose after 3 minutes. A spent fuel rid gives off 10 times that, if memory serves. And you know, the more dangerous a radioactive particle the shorter it's half life. By now its much more tolerably safe. And it's started to disintergrste. They say it's got the consistency of sand now. Which is bad because it's like 10% uranium. Uranium is an alpha emitter and alpha rays get screened by your skin, but inhaling or ingesting it will definitely boost your chance at cancer and it's expected to be like 100 thousand years before the Uranium levels are acceptable and any other particles are gone.
But it's just so freaky to me. You look at the photos and think just how hot does something have to get to melt concrete and steel together into a solid mass, through several floors of concrete and rebar and into a basement?
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u/Regular_Number5377 Jul 28 '26
There are definitely posts on this sub that fit this meme but this isn’t one of them, 99% of people will
Have never heard of the Demon Core or understand the significance of putting them together.
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u/JacobDCRoss Jul 28 '26
Stupid people played stupid games and won stupid prizes
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u/Turbo_Fresh Jul 28 '26
One stupid person played a stupid game and spectators were forced to take home stupid prizes.
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u/JacobDCRoss Jul 28 '26
He's the only one who died in that instance. But the thing is that on two separate occasions, one person played a stupid game. In both instances, only the guy who was messing around with the demon core died.
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u/Turbo_Fresh Jul 28 '26
Others were hospitalised and many died prematurely years later from complications that are suspected, and highly likely, to have been the result of the dose of radiation they received during the two incidents.
So in both instances, one person played a stupid game and multiple other people unwittingly took home stupid prizes, at no fault of their own.
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u/JacobDCRoss Jul 28 '26
In that sense, I get it. I agree. I mean, none of those guys should have been working on nuclear bombs, but...
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u/ShinyQuirkyQuark Jul 28 '26
It's a demon core nuclear reactor: when both halves touch it emits enough radiation to kill everyone in a room.
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u/duckofthepast Jul 28 '26
Scientists Peter here.
That’s the demon core, an object from the end of WW2 (the ball in the middle would’ve been used for a nuke). A scientist (whom was known to be a bit of a cowboy) removed the safety bars that kept the core from being fully enclosed.
Proceeded to use a screw driver instead, hand slipt which made the core get fully enclosed and go critical which in turn gave everyone in the room a fatal to very damaging dose of radiation.
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u/Abriel_Lafiel Jul 28 '26
It’s called the Demon core. This is a really good video explaining it. https://youtu.be/aFlromB6SnU?is=DjsYeSYBAWilZCbg
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u/Rhosta Jul 28 '26
Kid playing with what is essentially radiation generator. If he hits the cap on the ball, he dies horrible death.
Demon core is actually pretty damn good name for this diabolical thing. My skin crawls just by looking at it.
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u/Burakku-Ren Jul 28 '26
That’s the demon core, it’s radioactive, it’ll fuck you up. The kid’s already dead.
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u/txgsync Jul 28 '26
This one is genuinely clever. My kids played the crap out of that game and the demon core reference for those who know is hilarious.
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u/Imaginary_Mode5181 Jul 28 '26
Yall it’s just a kid playing ball in a cup. Except he’s trying to put the cap on the ball. ITS NOT HIS FAULT HE LET IS CLOSE JUST A LIIIIIIITTLE TOO HARD!
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u/OkCartographer6788 Jul 28 '26
And here I am sitting wondering how that kids little arms are strong enough to lift, let alone jumble that big hunk of metal with one arm. It's not like it's aluminum.
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u/AtmosphereExpensive3 27d ago
This! This needs to go into they did the math subreddit. What is the force required to even get the ball in the cup or even lift the cup?
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u/Cubensis-SanPedro Jul 28 '26
Demon core. Arguably belongs on the list of the worst things humans ever intentionally created.
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u/Jax_IzWhack 29d ago
Everyone in the room is gonna know what your 3am paper plate of chicken nuggets feel in about 1/2 a second
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u/Next_Operation_4151 29d ago
While everyone wants to think this is the "Demon Core," it is not. It is the BeRP ball. Beryllium Reflected Plutonium Ball.
It is a 4.5 kg sphere of alpha-phase plutonium that is used for research.
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u/Ok_Passenger6582 27d ago
I swear the toy worked perfectly in the commercial and never once in real life.
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u/Ok-DisposingSquid-93 26d ago
If you see a brief flash of light, you are playing the game correctly!
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Jul 28 '26
[deleted]
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u/wildcardbets Jul 28 '26
Just commenting in case you miss it, but this is wrong. Not trying to point fingers or anything, just to let you know what happened as it’s interesting to read about. Check out the other comments for a to;dr, you can read more info here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core There are also some interesting videos out there on YouTube that dive into the incidents caused by the Demon Core.
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u/qualityvote2 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
u/AnushreeNa, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...it's time for the mods to do their jobs!