Over at The Times of Israel I’ve gone into some detail about the nonsense claims that the stinky remains of evil, unrepentant, dead terrorist Yasser Arafat contain some evidence he was poisoned with Polonium-210.
Background radiation is like the noise when you’re standing on a street. If someone is standing next to you, talking to you, you can probably hear them. Detecting low levels of radiation is like listening to a whisper on a busy street. Best if you listen to the whisper in a quiet room.
Detecting Polonium 210 after 8 years is like trying to hear someone whispering on a busy street in New York. While you’re standing in London.
Conclusion
With the most amazing measuring equipment, in the most physically shielded room possible, you couldn’t find a piece of radioactive Polonium-210 8 years after it was made.
The decay products of Polonium-210 are not uncommon enough to find either.
There’s no way on earth this lab found anything scientifically significant in the corpse of Arafat.
He died of natural causes or Aids: releasing an unedited version of his medical records would go a long way to solving this little mystery. Certainly that would do a lot more than a pseudo-sicence dance in Switzerland. No matter what his widow and his adoring terrorist friends would like to think.
