Marie and Pierre Curie and the Discovery of Radium

Do you know why radium is an interesting element? In “Radium Girls” by Kate Moore, radium is similar to that two-sided friend. The only difference is that it has both a benefit and a negative concept. Some girls from the book suffered because of this element. Radium is not only an element, but it also has a whole story behind it. It could cause cancer or inflict effects on your body but can also cure the illnesses that are caused by it.

People may not realize that they can have radium cancer because the symptoms can be mistaken for other symptoms like Phosphorus poisoning, toothaches, and more. Radium is still used in many situations. Radium can be dangerous but a saver in some situations.

To begin with, radium is a radioactive metal that is the color white or silver but tarnishes to the color black due to the air. According to SoftSchools, “Radium is not a primordial element, but is a trace element that occurs from the decay of other heavier elements”.

This component is boiling and it emits light-weight rays that cause it to glow in the dark. Radium reacts with other elements and substances including water. It is found in the uranium ores which people seem to find rare. To produce one gram of radium, it takes about seven tons of ores. Since this element is dangerous, it only produced a few ounces a year. Radium gets its name from the Latin word “radius” which means ray. Before scientists started to investigate the dangers of the element it was known as the wonder metal because it gave heat and light.

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The element uranium was far-off from the ore and the remains were found to still be hot. The new remains were then separated. Then, once the spectrum was studied, the material was found to be number fifty-six. One of all the isotopes of the tinny components that has the longest half-life is radium-226 which contains a half-life of 1602 years. Some radiation from radium is continually being free into the setting. It is this unharnessed radiation that causes concern concerning the security of radium and every different hot substance. Each atom of radium releases radiation at its rate.

In addition, radium was discovered by Marie Curie and Pierre Curie. As you can tell they are both married and both were the founders of the element. On December 20th, 1898, Pierre scrawled the word radium in his notebook, and then Marie found it in the laboratory in Paris. Pierre Curie was born in 185 and studied at the University of Paris and in 1882 was appointed the head of the laboratory at the varsity of Physics and Chemistry in Paris. Marie Curie was born on November 7, 1867, and started life in the capital of Poland as Maria Sklodowska in 1867. She was famous because she discovered not only radium but polonium too. She visited Paris in 1891 to check science and sleep in a Latin Quarter level on tea, bread, and butter. She met Pierre and fell crazy in love and were married in 1895, once she was twenty-seven, and he was thirty-six. It was a cheerful partnership of two individuals absorbed in science and every alternative. They engineered their ionization chamber out of wood grocery crates. Her husband, who, meanwhile, had been turned down for a chair at the university, joined her to continue the experiments within which the Curies set the foundations of atomic physics. Marie won two Nobel Prizes. One was Physics and the other one was Chemistry. Later on, she died of aplastic anemia. She died in the year 1934. Pierre Curie died of a traffic collision. He died in the year 1906. As reported by Biography.com “The Internet was on fire yet again with another high-profile trolling incident involving some famous names…from over a century ago. Everyone seems to be talking about a recently released letter from Albert Einstein to pioneering female physicist Marie Curie telling her not to sweat the “reptiles” a.k.a. trolls of their day. The year was 1911 and haters were hating on Nobel Prize winner Curie who was denied a seat in the French Academy of Sciences, possibly because she was a woman, an atheist, and for having a scandalous relationship with a married man, fellow scientist Paul Langevin who, at the time, was estranged from his wife.” Not only is Einstein a smart man but, he is caring, and he told Marie to just ignore the haters that were attacking her.

Third, radium can cause cancer and cure cancer. Calcium and radium both behave the same way. Since the body uses atomic number 20 which is calcium to create bones, eaten metal is mistaken for radium and gets incorporated into the bone. The major health risk of ingesting metal is radiation-induced bone sphacelus and bone cancers. Radium 223 can cure cancer. Radium 223 is a gently radioactive sort of metal. It is accustomed be referred to as Alpharadin and currently has the name Xofigo. Doctors use radium 223 to treat prostate cancers that have to unfold to the bones. It can also help cure the pain in the bones. They use it more often on men when cancer has spread all over their bones after surgery or other treatments. Radium 223 is used by injecting it into the vein once a month for a total of six doses. Exposure to high levels of Radium Leads to an Associate in Nursing accumulated incidence of bone, liver, and cancer in the upper part of the body. As stated in ShareCare, it states “There is no cure for radiation poisoning instead, treatment involves reducing radiation exposure (if possible) and managing the health effects caused by radiation. Chemicals such as potassium iodide can reduce the body’s exposure to radioactive materials. However, these chemicals are not 100 percent effective and can only be used to counteract certain types of radioactive material.” Not only does radium cause cancer but can cause radiation poisoning. The downside of getting that is that there is no cure as statesstated above.

Fourth, radium can affect your body physically. Although all the types of effects are different, it still causes dangers in life. However, exposure to higher levels of radium over an extended amount of your time might end in harmful effects together with anemia, cataracts, broken teeth, cancer (especially bone cancer), and death. Radium offers off nonparticulate radiation, which might travel fairly long distances through the air. Radium is extremely radioactive and its immediate female offspring, radon gas, is additionally radioactive. Exposure to atomic number 88, internal or external, will cause cancer and alternative disorders, as a result, atomic number 88 and chemical elements emit alpha and gamma rays upon their decay, which kill and change cells. A good example of the effects of radium is the radium girls. While they were working in the factory, they were asked to do the lip, dip, and paint routine. The routine was basically to put the paintbrush to their lips. Then they dipped it into the radium. Lastly, they had to paint the dials. They were told to put it on their lips because they wanted to make the point of the paintbrush thinner. The girls asked the managers if the material they are going to use is safe and they said yes but what they don’t know is that the material is not safe. One of the girls named Mollie started to have problems with her mouth. She had pain in her teeth which ended up just falling by themselves. Not only did she have pain in their teeth, but she was getting pain in the lower gum and jaw. Later on, her jaw started to fall bit by bit. Unfortunately, she died, but they couldn’t find what was the actual cause at that moment.

Lastly, radium was used back then and it’s still used today. By 1910, atomic number 88 was factory-made synthetically within the U.S. however before the results of radiation exposure were well understood, atomic number 88 terminated up during a heap of crazy places for its putative charming healing properties and its glow-in-the-dark novelty. Radium is employed to provide the atomic number 86, a radioactive gas accustomed to treating some sorts of cancer. One gram of radium-226 can turn out 0.000l milliliters of atomic number 86 every day. Metal is concerning meg times additional active than U. The laboratory notebooks utilized by the Curies’ area unit are too extremely contaminated to be safely handled nowadays. As I mentioned in the third paragraph about radium 223, it also is used today. In the Radium Girls book, the girls used radium in watches and clocks. They also use it today in watches and clocks. At the start of the twentieth century, atomic number 88 was thought to own useful health properties and was typically supplemental to shopper merchandise like dentifrice, hair creams, and even food. Radium was used until the first Nineteen Seventies in ”glow-in-the-dark” paints, for dials on clocks, and in different industrial applications like instrument activity. It was even utilized in medical applications throughout the twentieth century. You can even be exposed to radium but you might not realize it. It is used in water, plants, and even food. Based on Moore’s book states “The element was dubbed “liquid sunshine,” and it lit up not just the hospitals and drawing rooms of America, but its theater in cartoons and novels, and Katherine who loved to sing and play the savepianosame piano was probably familiar with the song “Radium Dance…”(Page 6).

In conclusion, the element can cause death or safesave death from happening. Radium is an element that is rare and dangerous. It is a highly radioactive element. It was discovered by Marie Curie and her husband named Pierre Curie. Different types of radium can help cure radium cancer but it can also cause. Radium cancer can cause different types of sickness but there’s one that everyone is afraid of which is death. There are a lot of things that radium can be used even in the past and future. Now that I have told you all about radium and that’s it’s not that their element, that we use for science class, there are also real-life things happening because of radium and the effects that it causes too many people like the Radium Girls.