Radioactive@Home gone for good?

Its been a little while since I popped in to Radioactive@home, only to find the website has been taken over. After a little investigation the projects looks dead. 

At first I thought the site had been hijacked. The website redirects to americanfencecarolina.com and when following any of the links on there you usually end up at some online casino. I started looking into it and found that the lead project scientist passed away not too long ago, and with that the funding went away. It looks like only their lead scientist had access to the domain name and when it expired it was bought by someone else (probably because of the traffic numbers), effectively rendering the project dead. With no lead scientist, money or domain, it seems like it may be gone now forever. AI had the following to say:

Radioactive@Home appears to be effectively dead, and the domain has almost certainly fallen out of the control of the original project.

What Radioactive@Home was: Radioactive@Home started around 2011 as a Polish BOINC-based citizen science project led by Krzysztof Piszczek ("krzyszp"). Volunteers connected Geiger-counter hardware to their computers and contributed radiation measurements to build a continuously updated radiation map.

The project was unusual because it combined:

• BOINC distributed computing
• custom radiation detector hardware
• a public radiation monitoring map
• community-built sensors and kits

The original founder was actively posting in BOINC forums in 2011 announcing detector production and pre-orders.

Signs the project had been struggling for years.

One interesting find: the domain had already lapsed once back in 2018.

A BOINC thread from January 2018 reports thathad expired. Users could still reach the project only through a raw IP address because the servers were running even though the domain was gone.

That tells us two things:

1. Domain management was already becoming neglected.
2. The project's infrastructure was being maintained by a very small number of people.

Evidence of long-term inactivityA 2022 report discussing citizen radiation-monitoring projects noted that:

the last news on the project website dated from 2012

and that the map was no longer functioning.

That doesn't necessarily mean the BOINC backend stopped in 2012, but it strongly suggests the public-facing project had largely stagnated years ago.

Even as late as 2023, BOINC users on Reddit were asking whether the project was dead and where hardware could still be obtained, suggesting there was little visible activity or communication from the project team.

The lead scientist issue

The most revealing information comes from a 2025 BOINC discussion.A volunteer moderator explained that:

• the lead scientist had died,
• funding had run out,
• the person who maintained the servers was no longer active,
• no replacement scientific team had been found,
• and both Radioactive@Home and another related BOINC project were effectively finished.

Importantly, the moderator also noted that there had never been an official shutdown announcement for Radioactive@Home.

That matches the pattern you often see with small academic volunteer projects: they don't formally close, they simply stop being maintained after key people leave or pass away.

About the current domain

I couldn't obtain a fresh WHOIS record through the search system, but based on what you're seeing and the historical evidence, the most likely explanation is:

1. The original owners stopped renewing the domain.
2. The domain expired.
3. Someone else acquired it through the normal expired-domain market.
4. The new owner is using it for unrelated content, advertising, SEO, parking, or affiliate traffic.

Domains from abandoned projects frequently get recycled because they still have backlinks and search-engine history.

So unless there's evidence that the original operators still own the registration, I'd lean toward:
expired and re-registered, not hacked.

My conclusion, based on everything I found:

• Is Radioactive@Home still active? Almost certainly no.
• Is there evidence of recent scientific activity? None found.
• Did key personnel disappear? Yes; reports indicate the lead scientist died and the maintainer stopped active involvement.
• Was there an official shutdown announcement? Apparently not.
• Is the current domain likely owned by the original project? Unlikely.
• Was the domain probably hijacked? Less likely than expiration and re-registration.

My best assessment is that Radioactive@Home is a dead project whose infrastructure lingered for years after active development stopped. The domain appears to have fallen out of project control and been repurposed by a new registrant.