40 Fun Facts About Polonium

Which country, then carved up between three empires, gave polonium its name as the homeland of its co-discoverer?

Poland had no state of its own in 1898, and the element's Warsaw-born discoverer hoped the name would draw attention to that. It may be the first element named to make a political point.

Which co-discoverer of polonium is the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences?

Marie Curie found polonium with her husband Pierre by chasing radiation far too strong for the uranium in their ore to explain. It was the first element ever discovered that way.

Which former Russian FSB officer died in 2006, three weeks after being poisoned with polonium-210 at a hotel bar?

Alexander Litvinenko was the first person confirmed to have been deliberately killed with polonium. A photograph of him in his hospital bed, his hair fallen out, went around the world.

Polonium-210 is found in the smoke of which everyday product, whose makers privately studied the problem for 40 years?

Cigarettes carry polonium because tobacco leaves gather it from the air and from phosphate fertilisers. Tobacco firms spent decades trying to remove it, failed, and never published the results.

A concentrated sample of polonium-210 energises the surrounding air so strongly that it glows which colour?

Blue is the colour of the glow, which comes from the air around the sample rather than from the metal itself. The same radiation heats a single gram of polonium-210 to about 500 °C.

In the 1970s, polonium-210 heaters kept two Soviet robot rovers working through freezing nights on which world?

The Moon was explored by Lunokhod 1, the first remote-controlled rover on another world, and its successor. Each shut its lid at night and let a polonium heater keep the instruments warm.

Weight for weight, polonium-210 is reckoned about 250,000 times more toxic than which notorious fast-acting poison?

Hydrogen cyanide kills at around 250 milligrams, while less than a microgram of polonium-210 can be fatal. The polonium does its damage purely through radiation once it is inside the body.

Polonium-210 ends a long natural decay chain by turning into a stable, non-radioactive form of which heavy metal?

Lead is where the uranium decay chain finally stops. Polonium-210 is the last radioactive link, which is why it turns up in tiny traces wherever uranium is found.

Polonium-210 was built into special brushes designed to remove what from photographic film and rolls of paper?

Static electricity vanishes because the radiation charges the nearby air, which then cancels the charge on the surface. The polonium in such a brush had to be replaced about once a year.

Which element, later used in glowing watch dials, did polonium's discoverers find in the same ore five months later?

Radium soon eclipsed its older sibling because it could be gathered in weighable amounts. Polonium decays so quickly that its discoverers never managed to isolate a pure sample.

In which European capital did polonium's discoverers do most of their research, in a leaky former dissecting shed?

Paris was where the young scientist had come to study, and where she stayed to work. The shed was badly ventilated and not even waterproof, and nobody yet knew what radiation did to the body.

Polonium's discovery was honoured with a 1911 Nobel Prize in which field, the second Nobel for one of its discoverers?

Chemistry was the field, eight years after a shared physics prize for work on radiation. The winner collected this one alone, since her husband had died in a street accident in 1906.

Polonium was first extracted from which uranium ore, in which it makes up only about one part in ten billion?

Pitchblende is so poor in polonium that the largest batch ever extracted from natural material weighed just 9 milligrams. Getting it took 37 tonnes of ore-processing leftovers.

Polonium is a chalcogen, sharing a periodic-table column with sulfur and selenium; which familiar gas tops that column?

Oxygen heads group 16, a family whose name means ore-forming. Polonium sits near the bottom as its heaviest natural member, so the column runs from the gas we breathe to a radioactive metal.

Polonium is now made by bombarding which heavy metal, its neighbour on the periodic table, with neutrons in a reactor?

Bismuth absorbs a neutron and then decays into polonium-210 within days. Even so, world output has been put at only about 100 grams a year, nearly all of it from Russian reactors.

Polonium-210 is deadly if swallowed yet harmless outside the body because it emits which radiation, stopped by skin?

Alpha radiation cannot get through the dead outer layer of skin, so a sealed sample is safe to stand beside. Inside the body the same particles tear into living tissue at point-blank range.

The polonium-210 that killed a former Russian spy in 2006 had been slipped into which drink at a hotel's Pine Bar?

Green tea was poured for him from a pot later found to be contaminated. The dose he swallowed was put at about 200 times the amount needed to kill.

Doctors treating the spy poisoned with polonium in 2006 first suspected which toxic metal, known to make hair fall out?

Thallium was once sold as rat poison, and early tests even appeared to confirm it. Polonium is easy to miss, since ordinary radiation detectors barely register it.

Swiss scientists found abnormal polonium levels in 2012 on the belongings of which Palestinian leader, who died in 2004?

Yasser Arafat was exhumed for further tests, which settled nothing. French and Russian teams concluded that the raised polonium levels were not the result of deliberate poisoning.

Which American tyre company sold spark plugs laced with polonium from 1940 to 1953, promising a more efficient spark?

Firestone could offer only a short-lived boost, because any benefit faded within about a month. The polonium decayed quickly and deposits on the plug blocked what radiation was left.

Polonium was paired with which lightweight metal in the neutron triggers that set off the first atomic bombs?

Beryllium throws out neutrons when polonium's radiation strikes it, so crushing the two together at the right instant starts the chain reaction. The design stayed classified until the 1960s.

Which company, later famous for weedkiller, ran the secret wartime project that purified polonium for atomic bombs?

Monsanto did the work in the middle of a city rather than at a remote site. It took over a former seminary and then a wealthy family's private playhouse, ballroom and all.

Which Ohio city lent its name to the Manhattan Project branch that made polonium in the middle of a residential suburb?

Dayton hosted the work in plain sight, unlike most of the bomb programme's remote sites. Even the local council was not allowed to know why the Army wanted the building.

Which English physicist used a polonium source in the 1932 experiment that discovered the neutron?

James Chadwick aimed polonium's radiation at a light-metal target and detected the uncharged particles knocked loose. The same trick later became the trigger inside the first atomic bombs.

Polonium-210 settles on plant leaves as a decay product of which gas that seeps out of rocks and soil?

Radon drifts into the air and decays within days, and its descendants settle back to Earth as polonium-210. That is how the element ends up in every living thing, people included.

Traces of polonium-210 occur naturally throughout the food chain, but are especially concentrated in which kind of food?

Seafood builds up polonium-210 as it passes from one sea creature to the next. The amounts are tiny, and everyone carries a trace of the element in their body.

Which longer-lived radioactive fuel beat polonium-210 to power American space probes, thanks to its 87.7-year half-life?

Plutonium-238 keeps producing heat for decades, while polonium-210 fades far too fast for a long voyage. A polonium-powered atomic battery was working by 1958, but it was passed over.

Alone among the elements at room conditions, polonium packs its atoms in which structure, one atom at each cube corner?

Simple cubic is the plainest arrangement there is, yet polonium is the only element known to adopt it under ordinary conditions. The metal also has a second, rhombohedral form.

German scientist Willy Marckwald isolated polonium in 1902 but, thinking it new, named it after which related element?

Tellurium sits directly above polonium in the periodic table, so the two came out of the ore together. His 'radio-tellurium' was shown in 1905 to be the element found in 1898.

Polonium-210 loses half its radioactivity in roughly what time, which is why devices using it need refilling every year?

About 138 days is all it takes, which is why polonium barely exists in nature. Even the longest-lived form of the element lasts little more than a century before half of it is gone.

Which British nuclear site suffered a 1957 reactor fire whose release of polonium-210 was covered up at the time?

Windscale's polonium release was left out of government reports until 1983. Once it was counted, the estimate of long-term cancer deaths from the fallout was put at 33.

Traces of polonium from a notorious 2006 poisoning were found aboard jets of which airline flying the Moscow route?

British Airways listed 221 flights made by the contaminated aircraft and urged about 33,000 passengers to seek advice. The jets had flown the route in the weeks around the poisoning.

Which Iowa-born US Army technician passed details of America's polonium bomb triggers to Soviet military intelligence?

George Koval held security clearance inside the laboratories handling polonium, then left America in 1948 and never came back. Russia posthumously named him a Hero of the Russian Federation in 2007.

Which symbol stands for polonium on the periodic table, where it sits at atomic number 84, just before astatine?

Po is the symbol, taken from the first two letters of the name. With 84 protons, polonium is the heaviest member of its family that occurs in nature.

Polonium takes its name from the word for its discoverer's homeland in which ancient language, long used in science?

Latin gave the element its name, and its discoverers handed science another word around the same time. They coined the term radioactivity.

The polonium trigger at the heart of the first atomic bomb ever tested was code-named after which sea creature?

Urchin was a grooved ball weighing only about 7 grams, sitting at the very centre of the bomb. When the core was crushed around it, it released the burst of particles that began the chain reaction.

Which New York university hosted Manhattan Project tests in which five terminally ill volunteers were given polonium?

Rochester researchers wanted to learn how the body handles polonium, out of concern for workers who might be exposed to it. None of the doses came close to a fatal amount.

A British inquiry found in 2016 that the polonium killing of a former spy was probably approved by which president?

Vladimir Putin was named alongside the then head of the FSB in the inquiry's findings. Europe's human rights court later held the Russian state responsible for the killing.

Polonium that enters the human body concentrates mostly in the spleen and which larger organ?

Liver tissue soaks up polonium, which appears to stand in for sulfur in the body's proteins. Packing the dose into small organs makes it far deadlier than if it spread evenly.

Polonium is often kept dissolved in which strong acid, which can carry it straight through latex gloves?

Nitric acid keeps polonium from sticking to glassware, but the mixture seeps through natural rubber. Handlers therefore work in sealed glove boxes held below room pressure.