During the 1800’s, the late 1800’s, scientist discovered radioactivity. The study of radio activity became a phenomenon amongst scientist during this time period. With the discovery of new elements polonium and radium by Marie and Pierre Curie, the use of radioactivity to probe the center of an atom, provided the instructions of a nuclear weapon that will kill innocent Japanese, leaving there face disfigured, and permanently changed. The majority of people know of the effect of radioactivity but not how it was discovered and its close relation to physics.
The discovery of radioactivity can also be referred to the dawn of the nuclear age. Many scientist, were interested in satisfying their curiosity and began to explore nature and the function of atoms. Marie and Pierre Curie was apart of the exploration, being a husband and wife team. Marie and Pierre Curie began their experiment with a uranium-containing ore. The husband and wife team were the first ones who coined the word radioactivity. This term is used to describe the special characteristics of some elements that are radioisotopes. While comparing the activity of pure uranium to a uranium ore sample, they found that the ore was significantly more radioactive than the pure material. They fulfilled that the ore contained additional radioactive components besides the uranium. This observation led to the discovery of two new radioactive elements which they named polonium and radium.
The next scientist to follow the discovery of radioactivity was Ernest Rutherford. Through his accomplishments, many of the aspects of radioactivity were named and characterized by him. Another accomplishment that Ernest Rutherford made was the naming of the language use to make up the ato...
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... that could cause brain loss or deformity in people. Also if the cell has too much radiation and it becomes cancerous then that could spread all across the body therefore killing the person. Doctors use radioactivity in chemotherapy to kill the bad cells in a particular part of a persons body. They have a way to aim the radiation where they want it to go then they shoot it to kill the cancer cells before they spread throughout the body. This causes the person to lose hair because there hair cells are being killed by the radiation as well.
Radiation and transmitted radioactive waves are harmful. When knowledge is provided about the subject it alleviates the ignorance and allows us to be aware. Through history and the discovery of radiation we are able to prevent the spreading of the effect it has on people. Don’t be dumb. Educate yourself on radioactivity.
There are essentially three main types of cancer treatments; surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. Surgery allows doctors to effectively remove tumors from a clear plane. Chemotherapy uses drugs to treat the tumor; but often the drugs affect other healthy cells in the process. Using radiation as a treatment can be either precise or vague. Many health stigmas can come from the vague forms of radiation or conventional radiation therapy. Conventional radiation treats both the unhealthy and healthy cells, therefore exposing healthy cells to harmful radiation (Radiation Oncology, 2011, p.6). When healthy cells are exposed to gamma radiation they are also exposed to ionizing radiation. The ionization can cause “breakage of chemical bonds or oxidization (addition of oxygen atoms)” in a cell; the main impact of this is on a cell’s DNA, if two strands of DNA break it can result in “mutations, chromosome aberrations, ...
Radiation has always been in everyday life even before Roentgen discovered x-ray. The mountains give off natural radiation, other forms of radiation are coal burning power plants, x-rays from a TV, and an airplane ride. The average dose from background radiation is about 360 mrem every year. There are two types of radiation, nonionizing and ionizing radiation. Examples of nonionizing radiation are microwaves and radio waves broadcasting. Ionizing radiation refers to gamma and x-rays. Ionizing radiation means that the rays are able to remove an electron from the atom then ions can be formed. The ions can cause damage when reacting with other atoms. Cells are able to be repaired if low dose are received. However, if cells get a high dose, the cells will be damaged or possibly die. If the cell is damaged permanently then it is referred to as a mutated cell.
Ionizing radiation has enough energy to break chemical bonds and knock electrons out of atoms, some examples of these are x-rays and ultraviolet light rays from the sun. That is why radiation is a way to treat cancer because of the strong energy it has to destroy a cancer cell, actually any cell in the body. That’s the issue with radiation therapy, is it worth the damage? It can damage any cell, whether it is healthy or cancerous, which can cause a major affect in the body later on. Although it sounds scary, there are other types of treatments such as chemotherapy, targeted therapy, immunotherapy, photodynamic therapy, etc.
Born on August 30th, 1871 in New Zealand, Ernest Rutherford accomplished to be one of many successful chemists throughout the world in the 19th and the 20th centuries. With his brilliant experiments he explained the puzzling problem of radioactivity and the sudden breakdown of atoms. In addition, he determined the structure of the atom and was first to ever split it. Rutherford's great mind triggered innovations of new technology such as the smoke detector that saves many lives today.
...sp; Becquerel's discovery had not aroused very much attention. When, just a day or so after his discovery, he informed the Monday meeting of l'Académie des Sciences, his colleagues listened politely, then went on to the next item on the agenda. It was Röntgen´s discovery and the possibilities it provided that were the focus of the interest and enthusiasm of researchers. Becquerel himself made certain important observations, for instance that gases through which the rays passed become able to conduct electricity, but he was soon to leave this field. Marie decided to make a systematic investigation of the mysterious 'uranium rays'. She had an excellent aid at her isposal - an electrometer for the measurement of weak electrical currents, which was constructed by Pierre and his brother, and was based on the piezoelectric effect.
In 1917 a young female right out of high school started working at a radium factory in Orange, New Jersey. The job was mixing water, glue and radium powder for the task of painting watch dials, aircraft switches, and instrument dials. The paint is newly inventive and cool so without hesitation she paints her nails and lips with her friends all the while not knowing that this paint that is making them radiant, is slowly killing them. This was the life of Grace Fryer. Today there are trepidations on the topic of radiation from fears of nuclear fallout, meltdowns, or acts of terrorism. This uneasiness is a result of events over the past one hundred years showing the dangers of radiation. Although most accidents today leading to death from radiation poisoning occur from human error or faults in equipment, the incident involving the now named "radium girls" transpired from lack of public awareness and safety laws. (introduce topics of the paper)
Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie of France discover artificial radioactivity, i.e. the radioactivity of atoms produced in transmutation experiments.
Radioactive elements were not known of until about 1896 when a man named Henri Becquerel was experimenting with uranium to see why it was fluorescent under UV light. He believed that as the uranium sat in the sunlight, it absorbed sunlight and reemitted it on the paper, creating the film. He later found this to be incorrect when the uranium continued to create film when not exposed to sunlight. This was because the energy was not coming from the sun, but rather from inside the uranium.
The inevitable discovery of atomic power started back in 1898. According to Fetter-Vorm, “The chemist Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, discovered the elements polonium and radium, which both emitted a mysterious energy. They called this energy radioactivity”(4). By 1911 a British physicist discovered
Using an instrument invented by Pierre, Marie detected faint electrical currents in the air that had been bombarded with Uranium. This lead to two things: a conformation of Becquerel’s finding that the more Uranium there is the more rays it admitted, and her hypothesis that stated the rays emitted by the Uranium were caused by atomic properties. Her hypothesis was revolutionary because it suggested that the atom is made up of particles which would mean the atom was not the smallest thing in the world. Marie’s recent discoveries lead her to testing all known chemicals in order to see if they would emit the “Becquerel rays”. Radioactive was as term Marie coined to describe materials that gave off Becquerel
Imagine picking through a pile of rocks and finding a new element that had not been discovered. That is exactly what Marie Sklodowska-Curie did when she was working with radioactive substances. Marie was best known for her discoveries in radioactivity. Marie Curie was a world-renowned scientist known for her scientific discoveries in radioactivity that changed society by advancing medical techniques and nuclear energy.
Uranium, a radioactive element, was first mined in the western United States in 1871 by Dr. Richard Pierce, who shipped 200 pounds of pitchblende to London from the Central City Mining District. This element is sorta boring but I found something interesting, they used it to make an an atomic bomb in the Cold War. In 1898 Pierre and Marie Curie and G. Bemont isolated the "miracle element" radium from pitchblende. That same year, uranium, vanadium and radium were found to exist in carnotite, a mineral containing colorful red and yellow ores that had been used as body paint by early Navajo and Ute Indians on the Colorado Plateau. The discovery triggered a small prospecting boom in southeastern Utah, and radium mines in Grand and San Juan counties became a major source of ore for the Curies. It was not the Curies but a British team working in Canada which was the first to understand that the presence of polonium and radium in pitchblende was not due to simple geological and mineral reasons, but that these elements were directly linked to uranium by a process of natural radioactive transmutation. The theory of radioactive transformation of elements was brilliantly enlarge in1901 by the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford and the English chemist Frederick Soddy at McGill University in Montreal. At dusk on the evening of November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Rontgen, professor of physics at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, noticed a cathode tube that a sheet of paper come distance away. He put his hand between the tube and the paper, he saw the image of the bones in his hand on the paper.
That same year Marie met Pierre Curie, an aspiring French physicist. A year later Maria Sklodowska became Madame Curie. Marie and Pierre worked as a scientific team, in 1898 their achievements resulted in world importance, in particular the discovery of polonium (which Marie named in honor of Poland) and the discovery of Radium a few months later. The birth of her two daughters, Irene and Eve, in 1897 and 1904 did not interrupt Maria's work. In 1903, Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize for Physics. The award jointly awarded to Curie, her husband Pierre, and Henri Becquerel, was for the discovery of radioactivity. In December 1904 she was appointed chief assistant in the laboratory directed by Pierre Curie.
The impact of nuclear power on the modern world has improved Various sectors of the economy and society .i.e. Food and Agriculture, Insect control, Food Preservation, Water Resources, Military, Medicine, Research and Industry. “In 1911 George de Hevesy conducted the first application of a radioisotope. At the time de Hevesy was a young Hungarian student working in Manchester with naturally radioactive materials. Not having much money he lived in modest accommodation and took his meals with his landlady. He began to suspect that some of the meals that appeared regularly might be made from leftovers from the preceding days or even weeks, but he could never be sure. To try and confirm his suspicions de Hevesy put a small amount of radioactive material into the remains of a meal. Several days later when the same dish was served again he used a simple radiation detection instrument - a gold leaf electroscope - to check if the food was radioactive. It was, and de Hevesy's suspicions were confirmed.
Even the neutron, discovered by James Chadwick, owes its name to Rutherford. The exponential equation used to calculate the decay of radioactive substances was first employed for that purpose by Rutherford and he was the first to elucidate the related concepts of the half-life and decay constant. With Frederick Soddy at McGill University, Rutherford showed that elements such as uranium and thorium became different elements (i.e., transmuted) through the process of radioactive decay. At the time, such an incredible idea was not to be mentioned in polite company: it belonged to the realm of alchemy, not science.