50 Fun Facts About Radiation

Which food gives its name to an informal unit of radiation dose because of its radioactive potassium?

A banana's potassium-40 is harmless, yet a truckload of them can set off the radiation alarms that screen cargo at US ports.

Which garment was named in 1946 after a Pacific atoll where the United States had just tested an atomic bomb?

The bikini went on show in Paris four days after the first peacetime nuclear test. Designer Louis Réard is said to have hoped for an equally explosive reaction.

Which Japanese movie monster is a prehistoric sea creature awakened and empowered by nuclear radiation?

Godzilla was conceived as a metaphor for nuclear weapons, months after fallout from an American hydrogen bomb test contaminated a Japanese tuna boat and its 23 crew.

From the 1920s until about the 1970s, which retailers installed X-ray machines for customers to use while shopping?

Shoe stores bought an estimated 10,000 of the fluoroscopes in the US alone, and by 1970 the machines were banned in 33 states.

Golfer Eben Byers died after drinking some 1,400 bottles of Radithor, a patent medicine containing which element?

Radium built up in Byers's bones, and his death in 1932 was put down to radium poisoning. The same element poisoned the factory women who painted glowing watch dials and pointed their brushes with their lips.

Which Nobel-winning scientist's notebooks remain so radioactive that readers must wear protective clothing?

Marie Curie's papers from the 1890s are kept in specially lined boxes, and even her cookbooks are highly radioactive. The notebooks should stay that way for well over a thousand years.

Which cartoon dad works as a safety inspector in Sector 7-G of his home town's nuclear power plant?

Homer Simpson was given the job because creator Matt Groening saw a nuclear plant as a workplace full of chances for comedic chaos.

Which household safety device often contains a speck of radioactive americium-241 to ionize a small chamber of air?

A smoke detector of the ionization type holds about 0.3 micrograms of americium-241. Smoke drifting in changes how the air conducts, and the alarm sounds.

The Elephant's Foot is a mass of solidified radioactive lava lying beneath the ruined reactor of which power plant?

Chernobyl's Elephant's Foot, named for its wrinkled look, was found months after the 1986 disaster. Back then, just 3 minutes beside it delivered a 50/50 lethal dose.

Which Marvel superhero, a blind lawyer, gained heightened senses from a radioactive substance that spilled from a truck?

Daredevil's accident also gave him a kind of radar sense for the shape and position of nearby objects. His co-creator's legally blind daughter inspired the sharpened hearing.

Most of Earth's supply of which gas began as alpha particles shot out by uranium and thorium decaying underground?

Helium nuclei are exactly what alpha particles are. The gas gathers in natural gas fields and, once released into the air, escapes into space for good.

Which dense metal lines the aprons worn for dental X-rays because it is so effective at stopping gamma rays too?

Lead owes its stopping power to its high density and heavy atoms. The same metal guards hospital X-ray machines, laboratories and nuclear power plants.

Which type of radiation in sunlight causes both sunburn and suntan while also helping skin to make vitamin D?

Ultraviolet rays damage the genetic material in skin cells, and sunburn is the body's inflammatory response. A bare welding arc gives off enough to burn skin within seconds.

Mobile phones, Wi-Fi routers and television transmitters all communicate using which low-energy type of radiation?

Radio waves are non-ionizing: they carry too little energy to knock electrons out of atoms. X-rays and gamma rays can, which is what makes those two hazardous.

Which uncharged particle, discovered by James Chadwick in 1932, can make the ordinary materials it strikes radioactive?

Neutron radiation can induce radioactivity in most substances it meets, body tissue included. Chadwick's find won him the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics.

A microwave oven's walls and mesh door trap the radiation by forming which enclosure, named after an English scientist?

A Faraday cage keeps the microwaves in, where food turns their energy into heat. The energy is non-ionizing, so it cannot make a meal radioactive.

Which animals strike warm prey accurately in total darkness using facial organs that sense infrared radiation?

Rattlesnakes, like all pit vipers, carry heat-sensing pits on their faces that pick out warm-blooded prey at night. The pits work only over a range of about a foot.

Breeders used radiation to trigger mutations in which citrus crop, fixing a red flesh color that used to fade to pink?

Grapefruit with red flesh first turned up by chance on a pink variety, and the 1929 Ruby Red patent made it a commercial hit. Radiation breeding later stopped the red from fading.

Which measure of radioactive decay is about 5,700 years for carbon-14 and about 4.5 billion years for uranium-238?

Half-life is the time a sample takes to fall to half its starting amount. The term began as the longer 'half-life period' in 1907 and was shortened only in the early 1950s.

Which German physicist named X-rays after the mathematical symbol for an unknown and refused to patent his discovery?

Wilhelm Röntgen wanted society as a whole to benefit from the rays. Six weeks after finding them he made an image of the bones in his wife's hand, and in 1901 he won the first Nobel Prize in Physics.

Which French physicist discovered radioactivity when uranium salts fogged photographic plates left in a dark cabinet?

Henri Becquerel expected sunlight to trigger the rays, but two dark, overcast days kept his plates shut away. He developed them anyway and found the shadows just as sharp.

Which New Zealand-born physicist named alpha and beta radiation and later showed that atoms have a tiny nucleus?

Ernest Rutherford has been called the father of nuclear physics. He is buried in Westminster Abbey near Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, and element 104 carries his name.

Victor Hess rode a balloon to 5,300 meters in 1912 to discover which radiation from space, a hazard for airline crews?

Cosmic rays grew stronger the higher Hess climbed, even with the Moon blocking the Sun during an eclipse. Long-haul flight crews get nearly double the usual yearly radiation exposure.

Which British physicist predicted in 1974 that black holes slowly leak radiation and will eventually shrink and vanish?

Stephen Hawking showed that quantum effects at the event horizon let a black hole radiate. For all but the very smallest ones, the shrinking happens extremely slowly.

Which inventor gave up X-ray research after radiation burns cost his assistant Clarence Dally both of his arms?

Thomas Edison said he was afraid of X-rays after watching his glassblower sicken. Dally is thought to be the first American to die from experimenting with radiation.

Hermann Muller won a 1946 Nobel Prize for showing that X-rays cause genetic mutations, using which laboratory insects?

Fruit flies revealed their mutations to Muller through the sex ratios of their offspring. He spent later years warning doctors about the careless use of X-ray equipment.

Which instrument, first devised at Manchester in 1908, marks each burst of ionizing radiation with an audible click?

A Geiger counter became a practical instrument only in 1928, with the development of the gas-filled tube at its heart. It picks up alpha, beta and gamma radiation alike.

Which nickname was given to the plutonium sphere that killed two Los Alamos physicists in separate accidents?

The demon core went critical in 1946 when Louis Slotin's screwdriver slipped during a test colleagues called tickling the dragon's tail. It was melted down that summer.

Which photography company deduced in 1945, from fogged products, that a nuclear bomb had gone off somewhere in America?

Kodak employee J. H. Webb studied the spotted film, which was packed in cardboard, and concluded a bomb had gone off somewhere in the country. He kept the secret until 1949.

What name was given to the civil and military personnel sent to deal with the 1986 Soviet reactor disaster in Ukraine?

Liquidators numbered about 600,000, going by the special certificates issued. Many were praised as heroes, while others struggled for years to have their part officially recognized.

Which Japanese nuclear plant was crippled in 2011 when an earthquake and tsunami knocked out its backup power?

Fukushima is regarded by the UN's radiation committee as the worst nuclear incident since 1986. At least 164,000 residents of the surrounding area were displaced.

Which Pennsylvania plant suffered a partial meltdown in 1979, the worst accident in US commercial nuclear power?

Three Mile Island failed just twelve days after The China Syndrome, a thriller about a reactor accident, opened in cinemas. Its small releases had no detectable health effects.

After a nuclear accident, potassium iodide tablets are handed out to protect which gland from radioactive iodine?

Thyroid tissue takes up whatever iodine it is offered. Saturating the body with the stable form beforehand means the radioactive kind tends to be excreted instead.

Which tissue fails first in acute radiation sickness, leaving victims short of blood cells and prone to infection?

Bone marrow is hit at the lowest doses because radiation harms rapidly dividing cells most. Treatment can include transfusions, antibiotics and a stem cell transplant.

Which SI unit of radiation dose, named after a Swedish medical physicist, is designed to reflect the risk to health?

Sievert figures weight the energy absorbed according to the type of radiation and the tissue it hits. The unit honors Rolf Sievert, who studied radiation's biological effects.

Which small device do radiation workers wear on their clothing to keep a running record of their personal exposure?

A dosimeter may hold film or a crystal that is processed after use. Modern electronic versions show the running total and sound an alarm when a set level is passed.

Radiation safety training sums up protection as time, distance and which other simple measure?

Shielding, less time and more distance all serve a principle known as ALARA: keeping every dose as low as reasonably achievable.

Which hospital scanner builds its images with powerful magnets instead of the ionizing radiation used by CT machines?

MRI was originally called nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, but the word nuclear was dropped to avoid negative associations. Doctors often prefer it when a CT scan would show the same thing.

Which radioactive gas seeps from the ground into basements and is the biggest natural source of background radiation?

Radon is denser than air, so it gathers in basements and crawlspaces. US regulators rank it second only to cigarette smoking as a cause of lung cancer.

Which zones of charged particles trapped around Earth were confirmed by America's Explorer 1 satellite in 1958?

The Van Allen belts take their name from University of Iowa physicist James Van Allen. Apollo astronauts flew through them and received only a very low, harmless dose of radiation.

NASA's Juno probe keeps its electronics inside a titanium vault to survive the intense radiation around which planet?

Jupiter's radiation is fierce enough to wreck electronics and solar panels. Juno's vault walls, a centimeter of titanium, cut the dose reaching its instruments by a factor of 800.

The highest natural background radiation of any inhabited area is found in Ramsar, a city in which country?

Iran's Ramsar owes its record mainly to local limestone, naturally radioactive, that residents used as a building material.

Which French scientist discovered gamma rays in Paris in 1900 while working at the École Normale Supérieure?

Paul Villard was a modest man who never suggested a name for the very penetrating rays he had found. Their Greek-letter label came from another physicist in 1903.

Which crop concentrates radioactive polonium-210, giving its regular users considerably greater doses of radiation?

Tobacco leaves attach and concentrate polonium-210, a link documented as early as 1964. Cigarette smokers take the radioactive metal straight into their lungs.

Satellites and the Space Station meet unusually strong radiation above which region, where trapped particles dip lowest?

The South Atlantic Anomaly is where Earth's inner zone of trapped protons dips to an altitude of about 200 kilometers. Spacecraft crossing it get several minutes of strong radiation.

What color is the Cherenkov radiation that glows around highly radioactive fuel in an underwater nuclear reactor?

Blue Cherenkov light is the optical cousin of a sonic boom. It appears when charged particles pass through water faster than light itself can travel there.

The faint microwave glow that fills the whole sky, found by accident in 1964, is radiation left over from which event?

The Big Bang left the young universe full of hot, dense plasma. The expansion of space has since stretched that fierce glow into microwaves under 3 degrees above absolute zero.

Which household pests are popularly said to be set to inherit the Earth if humanity destroys itself in a nuclear war?

Cockroaches can take perhaps six to 15 times the dose that kills a human, yet they are not exceptionally radiation-resistant compared with other insects.

Which sky displays are caused by charged particles from the Sun striking atoms high in Earth's atmosphere?

Auroras glow green, red and purple as the collisions excite oxygen and nitrogen in the upper air. Stronger gusts of solar wind make the displays more vivid.

Which brand-name container uses silvered walls around an airless gap to slow heat transfer by radiation and conduction?

A Thermos is a vacuum flask, a design invented by Scottish scientist James Dewar in 1892. He never patented it, and the German firm that sold it for home use picked the name.