Germany's Wild Boars Are Still Radioactive — Scientists Found Where It Actually Came From

Germany's wild boars are still too radioactive to eat — and scientists just reopened the case. Forty years after Chernobyl, deer in the forests of Bavaria have been getting steadily cleaner, while wild boars from the same woods keep failing radiation tests — some of them at 25 times the German legal limit. Scientists call it the wild boar paradox. In this video you'll find out what a deer truffle is and why this one small underground fungus carries most of a boar's radiation while making up only 6% of its diet, how researchers can tell fallout from a nuclear bomb apart from fallout from a reactor by counting atoms, why published half-lives for boar contamination range from 7 years to 239 years, and why a study released weeks ago by the same institute that solved this mystery in 2023 says that famous answer was only half right. It's a story about contamination moving through a forest on a clock nobody was watching — and about how a solved case comes undone. Topics: radioactive wild boar, wild boar paradox, cesium-137, cesium-135, deer truffle, Bavaria, Chernobyl fallout, nuclear weapons testing, radioecology #Chernobyl #WildBoar #Radiation #Germany #Bavaria #Science