Radiation
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50 free Radiation trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Radiation is one of the most misunderstood words in science. It covers the warmth of sunlight and the signal reaching a phone as well as the invisible rays from unstable atoms, and much of what people believe about it comes from comic books, monster movies and disaster headlines. Sorting the real hazards from the harmless background is where the fun starts. This quiz covers the ground a radiation test usually does: the main types and what blocks each one, ionizing versus non-ionizing rays, how doses are measured, and where everyday exposure comes from. Around that foundation are fact-or-fiction favorites about food, flying, gadgets and glowing things, plus the accidents, experiments and space discoveries that shaped what we know. The early questions suit curious beginners and school science classes, and the later ones will stretch physics students and quiz regulars. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the quiz works for revision as well as a trivia night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which food gives its name to an informal unit of radiation dose because of its radioactive potassium?
Banana
A banana's potassium-40 is harmless, yet a truckload of them can set off the radiation alarms that screen cargo at US ports.
Q 02Which garment was named in 1946 after a Pacific atoll where the United States had just tested an atomic bomb?
Bikini
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.
Q 03Which Japanese movie monster is a prehistoric sea creature awakened and empowered by nuclear radiation?
Godzilla
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.
Q 04From the 1920s until about the 1970s, which retailers installed X-ray machines for customers to use while shopping?
Shoe stores
Shoe stores bought an estimated 10,000 of the fluoroscopes in the US alone, and by 1970 the machines were banned in 33 states.
Q 05Golfer Eben Byers died after drinking some 1,400 bottles of Radithor, a patent medicine containing which element?
Radium
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.
Q 06Which Nobel-winning scientist's notebooks remain so radioactive that readers must wear protective clothing?
Marie Curie
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.
Q 07Which cartoon dad works as a safety inspector in Sector 7-G of his home town's nuclear power plant?
Homer Simpson
Homer Simpson was given the job because creator Matt Groening saw a nuclear plant as a workplace full of chances for comedic chaos.
Q 08Which household safety device often contains a speck of radioactive americium-241 to ionize a small chamber of air?
Smoke detector
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.
Q 09The Elephant's Foot is a mass of solidified radioactive lava lying beneath the ruined reactor of which power plant?
Chernobyl
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.
Q 10Which Marvel superhero, a blind lawyer, gained heightened senses from a radioactive substance that spilled from a truck?
Daredevil
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.
Q 11Most of Earth's supply of which gas began as alpha particles shot out by uranium and thorium decaying underground?
Helium
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.
Q 12Which dense metal lines the aprons worn for dental X-rays because it is so effective at stopping gamma rays too?
Lead
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.
Q 13Which type of radiation in sunlight causes both sunburn and suntan while also helping skin to make vitamin D?
Ultraviolet
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.
Q 21Which French physicist discovered radioactivity when uranium salts fogged photographic plates left in a dark cabinet?
Henri Becquerel
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.
Q 22Which New Zealand-born physicist named alpha and beta radiation and later showed that atoms have a tiny nucleus?
Ernest Rutherford
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.
Q 23Victor Hess rode a balloon to 5,300 meters in 1912 to discover which radiation from space, a hazard for airline crews?
Q 14Mobile phones, Wi-Fi routers and television transmitters all communicate using which low-energy type of radiation?
Radio waves
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.
Q 15Which uncharged particle, discovered by James Chadwick in 1932, can make the ordinary materials it strikes radioactive?
Neutron
Neutron radiation can induce radioactivity in most substances it meets, body tissue included. Chadwick's find won him the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Q 16A microwave oven's walls and mesh door trap the radiation by forming which enclosure, named after an English scientist?
Faraday cage
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.
Q 17Which animals strike warm prey accurately in total darkness using facial organs that sense infrared radiation?
Rattlesnakes
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.
Q 18Breeders used radiation to trigger mutations in which citrus crop, fixing a red flesh color that used to fade to pink?
Grapefruit
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.
Q 19Which measure of radioactive decay is about 5,700 years for carbon-14 and about 4.5 billion years for uranium-238?
Half-life
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.
Q 20Which German physicist named X-rays after the mathematical symbol for an unknown and refused to patent his discovery?
Wilhelm Röntgen
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.
Cosmic rays
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.
Q 24Which British physicist predicted in 1974 that black holes slowly leak radiation and will eventually shrink and vanish?
Stephen Hawking
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.
Q 25Which inventor gave up X-ray research after radiation burns cost his assistant Clarence Dally both of his arms?
Thomas Edison
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.
Q 26Hermann Muller won a 1946 Nobel Prize for showing that X-rays cause genetic mutations, using which laboratory insects?
Fruit flies
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.
Q 27Which instrument, first devised at Manchester in 1908, marks each burst of ionizing radiation with an audible click?
Geiger counter
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.
Q 28Which nickname was given to the plutonium sphere that killed two Los Alamos physicists in separate accidents?
Demon core
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.
Q 29Which photography company deduced in 1945, from fogged products, that a nuclear bomb had gone off somewhere in America?
Kodak
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.
Q 30What name was given to the civil and military personnel sent to deal with the 1986 Soviet reactor disaster in Ukraine?
Liquidators
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.