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The hunt for Marie Curie's radioactive fingerprints in Paris
- baxtr 1y ago> Marie Curie worked here from 1914 until 1934, the year of her death, handling radioactive elements including radium, which she and her husband Pierre Curie had discovered in 1898. For most of her life, she did this with bare, increasingly radium-scarred hands. This almost sounds medieval to my ears. It’s kinda freighting how far we’ve gotten in merely 100 years.
- londons_explore 1y agoNearly everything you find in nature has such low levels of radioactivity that handling them isn't dangerous. It's only when you start refining and enriching natural things that they become really risky. Unfortunately thats what Curie did.
- HPsquared 1y agoInhaling/ingesting concentrated radioactive substances is a big danger with that kind of thing. There are so many variables and it's hard to measure. Health effects depend on where it ends up within the body.
- kergonath 1y ago> It's only when you start refining and enriching natural things that they become really risky. It’s a big factor, but not only. You don’t need to refine or enrich anything to have radon poisoning, for example.
- Retric 1y agoIt’s still similar. Radon concentrations in medieval dwellings would never reach the kind of concentrations you can see in modern homes because they leaked far more air. I wouldn’t necessarily call a tight home refining or enriching but it’s still dramatically increasing the concentration. Tunnels and caves could still be problematic though there’s a lot of gasses that can cause problems in such environments.
- signalToNose 1y agoXkcd radiatorn chart: https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/
- tgv 1y agoSomeone has to find out the hard way. It was a time when people to Röntgen pictures for fun. Medieval? The 19th century was not a good place.
- tobylane 1y agoMy dad had childhood shoe shopping helped by xrays on the high street.
- lupusreal 1y agoI wish we still had this. It could be done using far less power today, and besides, it's not like baby boomers are all getting foot cancer.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoI wonder if it’s more of an issue for the person giving the x-rays.
- lupusreal 1y agoNo doubt, but now with CCDs they don't need to be near the operating machine. The machine could be in a lead lined booth with a video display outside it for the shoe store employee to watch.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoI think the x-ray machines can now be made much more sensitive so the dose could be vastly smaller. That said, it's a bit unnerving when someone tells you something is save and then goes and hides behind a lead lined booth - even for me as someone who understands the stats around it. I do think it's in general a good idea to use such tools for better fits, shoes tend to focused more on narrow feet which is possibly a side effect of the shoes themselves. I have to stick to certain brands that cater towards wide feet. Perhaps in the future 3D printed shoes will be good enough that I can swap out my regular shoes for hyper-customized ones.
- fhsm 1y agoThe ~15% infant mortality at the time was spectacular progress and yet by modern standards unbearable. Medieval would have been closer to 50%. So on this measure about a third of the way back to the Middle Ages. https://www.ined.fr/en/everything_about_population/demographic-facts-sheets/focus-on/infant_mortality_france/ https://www.ined.fr/en/everything_about_population/demograph...
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- js2 1y agoModern rates range from 0.15% (Slovenia) to 10% (Afghanistan): https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/infant-mortality-rate/country-comparison/ https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/infant-mortalit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an...
- gmerc 1y agoOh, we're going back there baby.
- zdragnar 1y agoLouis Pasteur's work establishing germ theory happened in the 1860's, and germ theory as the cause of disease wasn't really widely accepted until roughly this time period. Blood letting (and its foundation the four humors) was still a thing when the Curies discovered radium. We have come a long way indeed.
- OkayPhysicist 1y agoI've recently come around on bloodletting. It seems barbarous, but there are some ailments that it really does help with. It wasn't a wild extrapolation for our ancestors to think it helped with other things. For example, gout: I recently had an appointment to give blood during a pretty bad gout flare, but I didn't want to reschedule so I hobbled over there, cane and all. By the time I was done, I felt better than I had in days. Looked it up, and turns out there's a not-insignificant amount of research on the subject. I can totally imagine one of my gout-ridden relatives incidentally discovering that after losing a good chunk of blood (maybe a hunting accident, or a fuckup in a pottery workshop) that their foot stopped stabbing in pain. And then going "what else can I cure this way?". And there's some new things that bloodletting is the only known treatment for. Like PFAS accumulation.
- zdragnar 1y ago> And then going "what else can I cure this way?" That's the difference. Bloodletting seems barbarous because it definitely didn't cure most things it was used for.
- _aavaa_ 1y agoWhat is the mechanism by which bloodletting helps? And could we not accomplish the same thing by filtering it, dialysis style? > PFAS accumulation Highly overblown. People drink alcohol at quantities know to be carginogenic and we don’t have the histeria that we do about something in the ppb range.
- imzadi 1y agoI just read The Radium Girls, about the ̶w̶o̶m̶e̶n children who were hired to paint clock faces and military instruments with radium paint. 100s of young girls who died in their 20s and 30s because they were carelessly exposed to the radiation. It struck me that they were born around the same time as my own grandmother. We really have come a long way in a fairly short amount of time.
- rtkwe 1y agoYou're leaving out the horrific part where they weren't told about the known dangers and we routinely licking/shaping their brushes to get finer points which was a big source of the radium exposure.
- citizenpaul 1y agoI've heard this licking paint brush as a cause of many early deaths. I just don't get it. WTF would you put a paintbrush in your mouth with whatever substance on it? Who does this? How did it start? How is it so common? What is wrong with people!
- rtkwe 1y agoIt's part of shaping the brush to get a fine point often you run it along the back of your other hand to help shape it but I've seen licking it too on occassion.
- HeyLaughingBoy 1y agoI agree with your point, but describing women in their 20s & 30s as "children" is rather demeaning.
- odiroot 1y ago*Maria Skłodowska-Curie, as she herself insisted on being called. BBC should know better.
- misiek08 1y agoShe even wanted to be Skłodowska, but then she wouldn’t be able to work as scientist and be respected. Curie is her husband's and that was the only way to be someone back then.
- lo_zamoyski 1y agoThis sounds false. "Contrary to the practice of some other countries, French women do not legally change names when they marry; however, it is customary that they adopt their husband's name as a "usage name" for daily life." [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_name
- closewith 1y agoThe BBC are quite poor at this kind of thing, preferring their style guide to official names. The still use Czech Republic for Czechia, Republic of Ireland for Ireland, and Turkey for Türkiye.
- Galanwe 1y ago> The still use Czech Republic for Czechia Naive question but is Czechia a new name? The UN lists "Czech Republic" as official name and "Czechia" as the short name. > Republic of Ireland for Ireland To be fair, I don't think this is partisan, but rather just a way to differentiate the state from the island.
- Symbiote 1y agoIf an article would use "Islamic Republic of Iran" then it should use "Czech Republic". If they would just write "Iran" then they should use "Czechia".
- shmeano 1y agoWould it be possible to make a radioactivity camera? I guess not because it doesn’t refract?
- voidUpdate 1y agoFrom my limited knowledge, itwould be very hard to make it react to all types of radiation (alpha, beta, gamma) since they penetrate differently and interact with forces differently. You could potentially make a magnetic "lens" that would interact with alpha and beta particles, but gamma rays would ignore it. The best way I can think of to make a "radiation camera" is similar to how you can make a "wifi camera", by hooking up a radiation detector to a pan-tilt mechanism, and moving it around very slowly and sampling the amount of radiation detected at each point. Essentially a single pixel "camera" that you have to move around to take a full picture. However, you'd also have to shield the detector from any radioactivity coming from directions that it's not pointed in, which is especially hard if you're trying to capture gamma rays, since they like to penetrate through everything. Its like if light could leak into the side of a normal camera, you'd get rubbish photos
- dmurray 1y agoWhy would it have to be a single pixel instead of an array of sensors like any digital camera? Sure, we probably can't make Geiger counters in a form factor that allows an array of a million of them in a handheld device, but maybe 20x16 or something?
- voidUpdate 1y agoI mean you could make that work, but you'd have to shield between all of the detectors so that you don't get the radiation equivalent of bloom on your pictures. If you have only one, it'll be easier to shield, in my head anyway
- adrian_b 1y agoYou could make a pin-point camera with an array of detectors that will receive thus only the radiation coming from the direction fixed by the positions of the aperture and of the detector. However that might not work well because the material around the pin-point aperture might not absorb sufficiently the rays coming from different directions and it cannot be made thick. So what may work better is to make the detector array in the form of a compound arthropod eye, where each detector is at the bottom of a long tube whose walls absorb the rays coming from any other direction except its axis. In practice, besides trying to absorb the rays coming from different directions, preventing them to reach the detector, for high-energy rays there is the alternative to use 2 or more collinear detectors for each direction (corresponding to an image pixel). A high-energy particle or photon will pass through all collinear detectors, causing simultaneous pulses at their outputs. Whenever such pulses are not simultaneous, they are discarded, because they correspond to rays coming from another direction than intended for that pixel. The accumulated count of filtered pulses per some time interval will give the luminosity of the corresponding image pixel.
- aconst 1y agoI live in Sceaux, bit south of Paris, where she lived some years. I once visited her house (now owned by someone who worked with one or more descendants of her) at some special occasion. One of the bedroom has a radiation sticker, and is officially controlled by the authorities, as some radiation were found. She obviously used to bring some work home :)