i heard somewhere that a cockroach can survive after a nuclear blast, why is that?
818013
It's not the blast itself they can survive...nothing can survive that really...what they can survive though is the radioactive fallout from the blast...it seems the little buggers have a very high tolerance to radiation
327246
Cockroaches are not clean, They eat rancid food and anything else they can find. They happen to be one of oldest creatures on earth. They adapt extremely well and live all over the world. Certainly millions of people have had roaches in food they have consumed and have even slept while roaches have crawled on them, Roaches spread germs and probably make people sick. But they can not kill you. unless they have come in contact with something we don't know about yet. There's even a few places people eat them (the really big ones !
811077
Cockroaches.  They can withstand nuclear radiation.
445580
http://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-bomb.htm
1024985
that's good question and i don't know. Maybe because of legal stuff. Like, if you can't speak or write or otherwise communicate, then yous assets and rights and stuff gets handed over to someone who's responsible for you. But since cockroaches can't communicate, any of them, then we kind of silently give responsibility for them to ourselves, collectively, and so we can do whatever we want.\n\nThat's just for cockroaches, though. I know some animals (dolphins, dogs, etc.) that can communicate with us, but people still kill and sometimes eat them. \n\nIt's because you humans think you're better than everything else.
900490
Cockroaches are just a susceptible to radiation as any other type of creature, more so than many types of insect.  Cockroaches resist radiation 6 to 15 times better than humans do.  They still die at levels FAR lower than that released by a nuclear detonation.  See the link under source for an entire article on the subject.
36742
A giant mantis has two reasons not to survive.\n\nTo sum the consequenses up, a giant prayer mantis has difficulty taking in oxygen; cannot fly; and will collapse.\n\nThe first, the oxygen thing. Just as the previous answer indicates, insects intake oxygen via diffusion.\n\nPicture a room with perfect still air, like a cellar. Suppose you put an open bottle of perfume at one end of the room. Some time later, you can smell the perfume at the other end of the room. There's no air current in the room to bring the fragrant to you. It's the perfume molecules, they wander around randomly. Some of them find their way into your nostrils so you can smell them. You will be able to smell the perfume sooner in a smaller room because the molecules have to wander through a shorter distance.\n\nThe blood of insects does not carry oxygen, they have a series of air-filled tubes (called trachea, plural tracheae) all over their body, opening to some 'port-holes' (called spiracles) along their abdomen. Most of insects are so small that the oxygen molecules, once entered the spiracles (port-holes), don't have long to wander along the tubes before reaching their destination -- the organs where they are consumed. Now, suppose the same insect is enlarged 80 times its length. The airway is also enlonged 80 times. It would take a LOT more time for oxygen to wander along this super long tube. During that time, the organs would have consumed all the oxygen around them without new oxygen coming in. So they die, and the insect dying with them.\n\nHowever this is only the case for small insects. Larger insects actually have air-bags withing their body to make a breeze along their tracheae (air tubes) to bring in oxygen. Quoting from the sourse page, "Larger insects, such as grasshoppers and wasps, have internal air sacs connected to their tracheae. These insects speed up their gas exchange by squeezing the sacs to make them suck air in from outside." I've no idea whether a prayer mantis has air sacs or not, but I've seen one bigger than any grasshoppers or wasps I ever saw. Nevertheless, a giant prayer mantis would need much more powerful air sacs than the grasshoppers'.\n\nNow come to the second reason. Size. We will look at the two consequences of a super-huge size seperately.\n\nThink of a car on a highway. It can drive over 100 feet in a matter of seconds -- let's say 2 seconds, so it's speed is 50 feet per second. Now the car shrinks to the size of a prayer mantis. In the same 2 seconds, how far can it drive now? 1 feet, more or less, so it's speed is 0.5 feet per second. We see that the mini car is much slower. But the driver, who shrank with the car, he thinks he's driving as fast! Now think of the mantis, and think of a helicopter. The mantis flies much slower than the helicopter, just like the mini car is slower than the real car. And we have it that the faster things move through the air, the more resistance they experience. The helicopter flies fast, so its shape must be streamlined, as to reduce air resistance. The prayer mantis flies slow, so he doesn't care much about air resistance, he can have any cool shape he desires. But for a giant mantis? He would move much faster, and experience so much air resistance that with his cool shape (not much streamlined) he won't be able to fly at all.\n\nLet's face the second consequence. Has anyone ever made a jelly block 5 feet long, 5 feet wide and 5 feet high? What will happen if such a giant jelly is constructed? It would collapse right away and flow like water. But any half-inch long, half-inch wide, half-inch high jelly block would stay all right in one's spoon. What happens when the jelly grows in size? For each bit of jelly in the bottom, there's simply much more jelly on top of it! And when that bit of jelly can no longer bear the burden, it breaks itself and flow away so that it won't have to support any more. So th
648046
The shockwave goes out with very destructive force (knocks buildings down, overturns cars, etc) for 1-2 miles or 2-3 km. The shockwave will still damage objects as far out as 5 miles or about 15 km. Yes, you can survive a nuclear blast. the key is to not live next to the military base, gov't buildings, etc.\n\nthe radiation is the worst part of it all. Fallout can last for a very long time, literally decades.
526111
Yes, one it is enriched and now radioactive because an atom has been split. I don't know the science. Two people still need to go in and get more uranium. There is a plan to bury it all in an abandoned mine, of limestone I believe to limit the leakage. The problem with burying it all in one place and setting up a perimmiter in this dead zone is that a) it will still spread/ leak. b) shipping stuff from all over the US to one place in the southwest is very risky. Now it is all required to stay on site at each nuclear plant in the special barrels. The plan for transport is very thourough but still not a pleasing idea. If a truck crashes/ terrorist/ whatever goes wrong you will severly contaminate a large area, 50 mile radius or more. \n\nWould you like to know the plan for shipment? Well here it is. First we've got super buckets to carry it in. Big red plastic looking capsules. We ran them over with a train. Didn't break. Was funny to see a huge red thing fly through the air though. Geographers used computer mapping to find routes that were the quickest but also went through the least populated areas. The final decision was based mainly on the least population and it doesn't travel through major cities. Many objected about going through suburban areas but in some cases there just wasn't enough farm land to pass through without having to make such a detour that it would take a long time and effect more population. The highways and streets it must pass through will be closed to traffic and the trucks will be escorted by military. If your local highway is closed for somereason chances are it's passing through your neighborhood.
311919
The Cockroach. It survived the fist ice age.
173310
In my expert opinion, of looking at dead roaches for many..ah ...months, I have noticed that their legs curl up...it is hard to stay standing with yourself in the fetal position.  I know of know other reason, it seems if you even step on them, they at least roll onto their sides.
548164
Your question is a very good one and everyone here is trying to help. Let me wade in with what I hope is a clear answer or two.\n\nCommercial reactors do not have the configuration to do what a nuclear bomb does: go promptly critical and thus have a large-scale supercritical nuclear explosion. Even Chernobyl (may the 40 or so people who died from it rest in peace) was mostly a steam explosion with a burning of the graphite core. The RBMK reactors like Chernobyl have mostly been shut down now - folks in the former Soviet Union may chime in now as to their status. \n\nModern commercial nuclear reactors (unlike the RBMK design) have large concrete domes called containments over them. The containment structures are designed to hold large amounts of pressure to guard against an accidental release of radiation. Even if the reactor core (part with the nuclear fuel) should become uncovered and thus lose its cooling, the containment will hold most of the radioactive material inside. That is precisely what happened at Three Mile Island. Most of the fuel and fission products were in the containment basement and plated out on the walls.\n\nThe most credible accidents are practiced for often at every power plant. Drills exercise the staff from the control room to the folks who go out into the field to survey for radiation. Those drills are graded not just by the plant, not just by the NRC, but by the county and state. \n\nNuclear reactors do not become nuclear bombs. If you were to take used fuel from nuclear reactors and chemically reprocess it - separating out the plutonium that is made in small amounts in the fuel - you could eventually make a bomb. We do not do reprocessing of commercial nuclear fuel in the US. There is a worry that some countries may do that. Of course, that is precisely what the military does do.\n\nMy job? I am a Health Physicist. I teach radiation protection, nuclear physics, and radiation chemistry. In the event of an accident, I read remote monitors and figure out what the pathway the radionuclides are taking out, how much, and what dose might be delivered to the population downwind. My predictions are used to advise the county about evacuation of persons living in a 20 mile radius of the power plant. I have a Bachelors of Science in biology from Baylor University, Masters in Applied Nuclear Science from Georgia Tech, and my PhD work was in leukemia research at Baylor Col. of Medicine. I was part of the Three Mile Island Recovery Team.
532943
I don't think it will make a difference. Roaches can survive and practically anything. I live on Guam where they are abundant.\n\nI am a Scuba instructor and have seen them eat silicon off masks! I have also seen evidence of them eating things like the gum on envelopes.\n\nRemember these guys are small and just even a crumb of bread is a feast to last them days or even weeks. Water in the pans may deter them but any food floating or on the rim will be a wonderful snack.\n\nIf your roommate is messy enough to leave pans unwashed I'm sure he has spilled food around to contribute to the species.\n\nI think you should get rid of your roommate before getting rid of the roaches.\n\nGood luck and clean living!
1160742
Completely dependent on the megaton yield and geography, e.g., mountains reflecting the blast wave or shielding from the heat wave.\n\nSettle for Washington DC. Virtually no one in an area of about 40-65 square miles would survive.\n\nTo visualize the destructiveness of a nuclear bomb, imagine a powerful strategic nuclear weapon detonated above the Pentagon, a short distance from the center of Washington, D.C.  Imagine it is a "near-surface" burst--about 1,500 feet above the ground--which is how a military planner might choose to wreak blast damage on a massive structure like the Pentagon. Let us say that it is an ordinary, clear day with visibility at 10 miles, and that the weapon's explosive power is 300 kilotons--the approximate yield of most modern strategic nuclear weapons. This would be far more destructive than the 15-kiloton bomb detonated at Hiroshima or the 21-kiloton bomb detonated at Nagasaki. \n\nThe detonation of a 300-kiloton nuclear bomb would release an extraordinary amount of energy in an instant--about 300 trillion calories within about a millionth of a second. More than 95 percent of the energy initially released would be in the form of intense light. This light would be absorbed by the air around the weapon, superheating the air to very high temperatures and creating a ball of intense heat--a fireball. \n\nBecause this fireball would be so hot, it would expand rapidly. Almost all of the air that originally occupied the volume within and around the fireball would be compressed into a thin shell of superheated, glowing, high-pressure gas. This shell of gas would compress the surrounding air, forming a steeply fronted, luminous shockwave of enormous extent and power--the blast wave. \n\nBy the time the fireball approached its maximum size, it would be more than a mile in diameter. It would very briefly produce temperatures at its center of more than 200 million degrees Fahrenheit (about 100 million degrees Celsius)--about four to five times the temperature at the center of the sun.\n\nThis enormous release of light and heat would create an environment of almost unimaginable lethality. Vast amounts of thermal energy would ignite extensive fires over urban and suburban areas. In addition, the blast wave and high-speed winds would crush many structures and tear them apart. The blast wave would also boost the incidence and rate of fire-spread by exposing ignitable surfaces, releasing flammable materials, and dispersing burning materials. \n\nWithin minutes of a detonation, fire would be everywhere. Numerous fires and firebrands--burning materials that set more fires--would coalesce into a mass fire. (Scientists prefer this term to "firestorm," but I will use them interchangeably here.) This fire would engulf tens of square miles and begin to heat enormous volumes of air that would rise, while cool air from the fire's periphery would be pulled in. Within tens of minutes after the detonation, the pumping action from rising hot air would generate superheated ground winds of hurricane force, further intensifying the fire.\n\nVirtually no one in an area of about 40-65 square miles would survive.
760952
According to the Article I listed below as the source, they can but cut in half, and you need to pour salt over them once this is done.\n\nThat's a bit gruesome, but fitting for a gruesome critter such as this Over sized Steroid pumped Cricket.\nApparently, a friend of mine told me that they have been found dead in her pool. this means they can be drowned.\n\nCatch it in a bottle, and drown it. Nothing else will work, as it's impervious to Insect spray, and it's exoskeleton is the same as a cockroach, meaning it can survive decapitated!\n\nYup, I say drown the bug.
1047658
You putting it in the freezer is probably what saved it.  if you had not kept it cold, it probably would have drowned. (ever see the movie "The Abyss"? that's essentially how one of the main characters survives.  then again, it's just a movie.)  \n\nmany insects and lower forms of life are like that.  also works well with spiders.
537536
Duck and cover according to the 1950s civil defense videos.\n\nWe maneuver around the irradiated areas.  not everywhere is blown up.\n\nNot everything is blown up in even the largest nuclear war.  Many of the bombs would blow up in the same spot to ensure they were not shot down.  Life would suck but you would be alive.