Freaky Fzx Friday - Radioactivity

My kids are radioactive and so are you.  It's just one of those things.

Hopefully neither they nor you will grow up to live in the sewers and run with rats like these guys.

Superheroes are real.  The most modern Spider Man was injected with nanobots but the original was bitten by a radioactive spider.

      

I remember watching Lou Ferrigno as "The Incredible Hulk" back in 1979.  His exposure to gamma rays made him the Avenger he is today.

David Banner's transformation into the monster whose pants grew with him gave me nightmares but we know that radioactivity can't do that to people

Because we've tried.

Radioactivity is nuclear, not atomic.  Unlike chemistry, it has nothing to do with those infamous valence electrons.  It's all about what happens inside that teeny tiny nucleus that makes up an incredibly small part of every atom.

The scale is horrific.

At this size the nucleus wouldn't even be the tiniest pixel.

Sometimes the nucleus that was formed in the sun is unstable.  Those unstable nuclei will eject energy or particles to move toward more stability.  Other unstable nuclei are the products of nuclear fission or cosmic ray interaction in our atmosphere (like Carbon-14).

It's a complicated process but it's what we use to date organic materials.

We have to use different radioisotopes for rocks since it only works up to about 60,000 years.  

Traveling the world is great but here are some places you probably don't want to spend much time.

Low sodium salt and bananas are both radioactive because of their potassium content but bananas are good for you and so is low sodium salt.

So we live with radioactivity hoping to become superheroes.