Page 23 - Curriculum Visions Dynamic Book

becquerel: a unit of radiation equal to one nuclear disintegration per second.
curie: a unit of radiation. The amount of radiation emitted by 1 g of radium each second. (The curie is equal to 37 billion becquerels.)
transmutation: the change of one element into another.
X-rays: a form of very short wave radiation.
Radon
Radon is a radioactive gas that occurs naturally in rocks and soils. Radon is emitted from the radioactive decay
of radium and has a half-life of about 3 days. It is responsible for about half of the natural background radiation on Earth (see page 14).
Radon levels can be high above areas where there are granite rocks. The gas can build up inside homes as it seeps from the ground. In such areas special precautions have to
be taken to ventilate houses. If this
is not done, then the radioactivity, breathed as gas into the lungs over
a number of years, can increase the risks of cancer.
Marie and Pierre Curie
The husband-and-wife team of Marie and Pierre Curie is most commonly associated with the discovery of radioactivity.
Pierre Curie was interested in the nature of crystals and how their properties could
be used. He became the head of the laboratory in the Ecole de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle in Paris. After their marriage, Marie Curie studied the strange nature of radioactivity that had been discovered accidentally in 1896 by Henri Becquerel. During this work the Curies discovered a new radioactive element, polonium (named after Marie’s country of origin, Poland), and then radium. By 1903 the Curies and Henri Becquerel had been honoured with the Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering radioactivity.
After the accidental death of her husband, Marie became a lecturer in the Sorbonne University in Paris and received a second Nobel Prize in 1911, on this occasion in chemistry for finding out the properties of radium.
Later, Marie Curie become interested in X-rays and saw their potential for use in medicine. Sadly, her death from leukaemia was the price she had to pay for working so long with radioactive materials without the knowledge that radiation could be harmful to people.
The work of the Curies, coupled with other research that explained the structure of atoms, led the way to realising that it was possible to release nuclear energy.
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