How to write a good April Fools article

Many people remember a recent article about an improvised nuclear reactor . I have to admit that the article was an April Fool's joke, an extremely successful one.

In this brief article I want to tell you how you could quickly understand that this is a joke and what key factors I see for a successful April Fools article can be useful for you in writing your articles a year later (or alerting you when reading). It is also worth noting that very often there are similar frauds in ordinary media.

So, let's get started (publish in DIY so that everyone who saw the first article saw and refutation).

How to understand that this is not really?

At reddit (there was a link to the translation published), comrade one made the correct calculations: With a power of 7 milliwatts, for 10 years 0.007J / 24h / 3600s / 365d / 10y = 2212000 joules of energy, or 1e25 eV, which is 7e20 beta decays tritium (each 18keV). 1 mole of substance is 6e23 atoms, here we have 0.001 mole, or 3 milligrams should disintegrate in 10 years at 100% efficiency.
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If the battery efficiency is 10%, 33% of the whole world enters the battery, and the phosphor efficiency is 50%, then we already need 200mg of tritium. And this is 2200 cubic centimeters of gas.

In fact, tritium is good there if micrograms are present, and the energy released is so small that I cannot even measure it with my own devices. All you can see is that there is something, so this is at least a nanowatt (well, at least I contributed to the development of nanotechnology ).

Some could be alerted by an unnecessarily complex scheme - the lenses do not need anything here, it is enough to just make foil pyramids. Actually, when I assembled the device “seriously”, there was exactly a pyramid there.

About juggling photos

Hello to reporters from FoxNews. The key ring glows so faintly that during the day it is not even visible. At night, just visible green dash. How to make it so that you can see exactly the glow, as in the photos in the article?

Dark room, ISO 1600, shutter speeds of 30 seconds. The hardest thing was to take a picture of a trinket on the arm;
Well, by itself, the LED is powered by a small battery, which is imperceptibly glued to the back of the board with electronics (however, the LED lit up everything so that nothing is visible anyway). Ionistor was not even soldered.

Key success factors

1. Immediately refer to any successful article in the past.
2. We start with a brief insight into the theory, everything is as serious as possible.
3. In the body of the article - as much as possible relevant links.
4. We give similar to the truth, but difficult to verify figures.
5. Carefully manipulate photos - photoshop, exposure ...
6. We give links where you can buy the necessary components.
7. We do not give in to provocations ;-)

I hope you enjoyed the article. If you have already ordered key chains, do not be offended :-)

Ps. And finally, the teaching is light!