The Raspberry Pi is the hardware core of a small computer. It was conceived primarily as a sort of sophisticated, educational toy that kids would learn to program, gaining basic skills of programming and computer systems in the process. You buy a board with a processor and some memory. The board has interfaces so one can attach a keyboard, video display device (a TV - HDMI not VGA) and various other sorts of device. There's a USB socket. It's just credit card sized, so it's great for all sorts of physically small projects that need some computing power, flying a webcam on a balloon to take aerial photos for instance. The teddy bear that repeated Felix Baumgartner's amazing leap from the edge of space was Raspberry Pi-powered.
The Raspberry Pi and some other bits of hobbiest scale electronics form the heart of the AuroraWatchNet magnetometer design, for monitoring geomagnetic activity (manifested visibly as the aurora).
Various enthusiasts are thinking about radiation detectors based around raspberry Pi's. Here's a forum discussion. A simple radiation detector kit built around a photodiode rather than a Geiger tube might be a good starting point.
Don't know how many people read these; probably more than find them interesting! If you find this and know something about these topics, any comments will be read eagerly.
Added next day: you run Linux on these. The preferred flavour is Debian. Ubuntu and no doubt others cannot support the Raspberry Pi.
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