This documentary traces the grim, fascinating history of how ionizing radiation has killed people — starting with the Radium Girls of 1922, factory workers in Orange, New Jersey who painted glowing watch dials while licking their brushes to a fine point, unknowingly ingesting radium that would later dissolve their jaws and bones.

From those early industrial tragedies, the film appears to walk through the full catalog of radiation deaths: the criticality accidents at Los Alamos (Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin's demon core incidents), the medical radiation overdoses like the Therac-25 software bug, industrial source accidents like Goiânia in Brazil where scavengers cracked open a cesium-137 medical device, and reactor disasters like Chernobyl's acute radiation syndrome cases.

What makes this worth watching is that each mechanism of death is different — alpha emitters lodged in bone marrow, gamma bursts frying the central nervous system, beta burns from external contamination. Understanding radiation biology through real historical cases is far more effective than any physics textbook explanation. The dose thresholds, the timelines of symptoms, and the terrifyingly specific ways cells fail all become concrete.

At 305 subscribers, Mindwired is a genuinely small channel, but the description reads like careful research rather than AI-generated filler.