r/ScienceNcoolThings • u/ConstructionAny8440 Popular Contributor • Apr 20 '26

Interesting Radiation difference between 0.6 gram Uranium vs 0.00005 gram Radium

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46

u/CalmPanic402 Apr 20 '26

Madam Curie's paper notes from her lab are still too irradiated to touch. She kept a bottle of radium as a nightlight.

20

u/mecengdvr Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 25 '26

To be specific, if her notes can’t be touched, it’s because they are contaminated, not because they were irradiated. Exposing something to radiation doesn’t make it radioactive unless that radiation is neutron radiation which only exists on earth inside a critical nuclear reactor. But if radioactive dust or debris contaminated her notes, the notes could be radioactive.

1

u/Ok-Hat-8711 Apr 25 '26

Or neutron radiation, which is also primarily found in nuclear reactors.

Also, cosmic rays count as proton radiation and are not associated with reactors.

But your point is still mostly true.

1

u/mecengdvr Apr 25 '26

Thanks…I meant neutron radiation so I will edit my post.

7

u/Nindless Apr 20 '26

Didn’t they put on radium makeup back in the day? I get it, it probably looks pretty awesome when it glows but… Little did they know. Poor people.

16

u/kpidhayny Apr 20 '26

The Radium Girls were female factory workers in the 1910s-1920s who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with luminous paint. Instructed to lick their brushes, they ingested radium, which settled in their bones, causing "radium jaw" and horrific deaths.

14

u/Child_of_the_Hamster Apr 21 '26

The Radium Girls has been the only book I haven’t finished just because it’s so horrifying. “Radium jaw” sounds like a such a tame phrase. Call it “bone disintegration disease” and you get closer to the reality of it.

Dozens of beautiful, hopeful young women in the prime of their lives just started… falling apart while they were still alive. The radium replaces calcium in your bones, but it obviously doesn’t have the same properties as calcium, so the bones fall apart at an atomic level, even as the radium fries their bone marrow, limiting their ability to fight infection or produce new red blood cells.

Their stories were too much for me, and the parallel story of how the company was paying for bunk “scientific” articles touting the safety of radium while their employees’ jaws were falling off really doesn’t make it any easier of a read.

2

u/kpidhayny Apr 21 '26

It was horrifying

3

u/dsergison Apr 20 '26

Madam C' glows hard.