What Is Radiation?

Is it bad or good or spicy or mild?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, Daniel, what would you sacrifice for the sake of
a big scientific discovery. Oh, that's a good question. I
would give up something juicy. I don't know, weekends, evenings, maybe,
like I don't know, a pinky toe. I'd probably give
up a pinky toe. Really, you wouldn't sacrifice your life
for science. You wouldn't risk your life for a big breakthrough.
I would love to reveal something deep about the universe,

(00:29):
but now I'd like to live to see it. You know,
I don't think. I don't think scientific breakthroughs are worth
sacrificing your life. Well, you know, some of my my history's
most famous scientists, like Marie Cree, died to make their
prize winning discoveries. That's true, and I'm pretty impressed. Though
I wonder if she really understood, like in advance, how
dangerous that research she was doing actually was. But let

(00:50):
me turn the table on you. Are you willing to
risk your life or something like a really tasty snack?
How tasty are we talking about? We're talking and long
yellow and comes naturally wrapped in its own um, in
its own packaging. Oh man, our snacks deadly? Now what
are you talking about? Well, I'm sorry to be the
one to tell you, but there's something in common between

(01:12):
Madame Curies research in your favorite snack. Have you heard
the joke of what did Pierre Cree tell Mary Curry? Now,
what did Pierre Curry tell Mary Cury? He said, my dear,
you are positively glowing tonight. You look radiant, Oh man.

(01:49):
I am Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of
PhD Comics. I'm Daniel, I'm a particle physicist, and together
were the authors of the book We Have No Idea
and the host of this cast, Daniel and Jorge Explain
the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio, in which
we look at things in the universe that makes sense
or don't make sense, or or are slightly confusing or

(02:11):
very confusing, and break them down for you to make
sure we understand what's actually going on. That's right, all
the amazing things in the universe that will astound you
and amaze you and possibly also kill you or save
your life. Sometimes there are good sides to things that
sound dangerous. Yeah, like bananas. Like bananas. Yes, bananas are

(02:33):
a double edged snack, exactly as we'll get into on
this podcast. You mean like you eat them and they're delicious,
But then the peel you can slip on and die. Well,
I assume that you're always wearing you know, safety gear
when you eat a banana, right, banana slipproof shoes. No,
I'm talking about a helmet. If you have a helmet home,
you eat a banana, then you know it's no big deal.

(02:55):
I see, I seem to be On the podcast. We're
tag playing a subject that a couple of people asks online,
but which is kind of a big deal. It's in
our everyday lives. We use it all the time, and
it can be both dangerous and can also save your
life at the same time. It's something you hear about
a lot in science and science fiction. It's something that's

(03:16):
vaguely mysterious, and I think has suffered from a bad
PR campaign. It definitely, I think is associated with something bad.
But as we want to show you in today's podcast,
there's two sides to every particle. So today on the podcast,
we'll be talking about radiation. Is it good for you?

(03:37):
Is it bad for you? Spicy? Mild? What is radiation anyway?
Is it fizzle when you eat it tastes like bananas? Right?
Is it that are those cans that put on your tongue,
Are those actually radioactive? Right? No? I think you're right.
I think radiation sort of has a bad name in society, right,
Like nobody thinks radiation and things. Oh, I could use

(03:57):
some of that, thanks, Actually, where do I get some? Yeah?
It definitely is a boogeyman, right, It's definitely something that
people are afraid of. And I think the roots of
it are are that it's something that's sort of recently discovered,
you know, like our ancestors had no idea about radiation.
It's something that it's a product of modern science. Yeah,

(04:18):
I mean it was sort of discovered not too long ago, right,
maybe a hundred years Yeah, exactly. So around the turn
of the century, like eight late eighteen hundreds, people started
to discover X rays and cathude rays and all sorts
of other kind of rays, and they didn't really know
what it was. It was this new mysterious thing. It
was invisible. It could develop photographs, you could you could

(04:39):
see it on photographic film. Um. Later they discovered it
could kill you, right, Um, it could you could use
it to like take pictures of the inside of the body.
It was mysterious and weird. Um and so it's kind
of new, it's kind of it's powerful, right, it kind
of violates our everyday intuition. Yeah, exactly. And I think
that's part of the the scariness of it is that

(05:01):
it shows us that the world is different from what
we understood, and that there's this untapped power, this untapped potential,
which could be terribly dangerous. Right. For me, radiation is
like the classic Frankenstein thing, like shows us that science
has cracked open a whole new world. And it could
go either way. Right, you could help you, or it
could hurt you if you don't understand what what what

(05:23):
you're doing, it could lead to dangerous side effects. Yeah.
I feel like it's also cracked open the world of superheroes.
You know, without radiation, you wouldn't have Spider Man, you
wouldn't have the Hulk, you wouldn't have Captain America. Yeah.
But I think that that just reflects that, right. I
think what you see in comic books are like reflect
what the what the population is thinking about, what they

(05:43):
are afraid of, right, which is why radiation played such
a big role, you know, Spider Man, as you said,
and Bruce banner and all that stuff, and these days
it's more like you see a lot of ai kind
of stuff in comic books, like the villain is some
computer that's taking over the world or something. And so
maybe radiation had its day as the as a scientific villain.
But like you were saying, in society, we still think

(06:05):
of it as as bad, right, Like nobody, um wants
to get any of that radiation, That's right. I think
if you say radiation, people think cancer, or they think
nuclear bombs, or you know, evil scientists and lab coats
cackling maniacally, right, not good things. But we're wondering, do
you think people really understand radiation? Like do they know

(06:26):
what it is, what it means? And is it all
that bad? All? Right? Where it comes from? Right? How
to make it? How to avoid it? Um? Are you
getting some right now? Yeah? So we were wondering too
people have understanding. The answer is yes, you are being
radiated um right now. You listen to this podcast, right,
and so you're listening, you're getting sonic radiation right now.

(06:49):
But I'm not just from our the brilliance of our
thoughts and words, but you are literally right now bathed
in radiation. Probably unless you're in a lead box somewhere,
in which case you probably have other problems. Then we
have to ask, yeah, what are you doing in that
lead box? What did you to deserve it? Right, it's
probably your fault. Yeah, Well, as usual, we got curious,

(07:11):
and so Daniel went out into the street as people
random people on the street. What is radiation? That's right?
And here's what people had to say. How would you
define or describe radiation? What is radiation? The one form
of radiation I know is like extray. They emit radiation.
I know there are other forms also, Yeah, there's like
EUV and other times. All right, cool, thanks very much.

(07:34):
What is radiation? Um, it's some kind of like some
kind of force or like chemical kind of that can
like go through things like an experience, Like there's radiation.
M R. There's radiations and it goes through things. Well,
radiation is bad, I think if you absorb it. But
isn't radiation just like the splitting off of like the

(07:56):
breaking a part of like particles and atoms, And so
they become like like isn't that kind of like related
to free radicals or something? And what is radiation? A
little bit about it? About radiation, but specifically UV radiation,
which causes diamondine dimers, which is obviously cause of skin cancer.
So that's a major concern. But then you have the

(08:16):
ozone layer, which can block some harmful radiation is photon.
So nope, well I don't know, like it like gives
off like I don't know, it comes from somewhere, but
like give you cancer and stuff like I don't know.
Do you know what it's made out of? Like what
you know? I don't know what it's made out of? Cool?
What is radiation? I don't know. I think that makes

(08:37):
superheroes or something. I don't know. I don't know. It's bad,
it's bad, Okay, alright, great, alright, So I like the
person who said that it's the thing that makes superheroes.
I was like, yes, something, here's something good about radiation.
It gives these superheroes exactly. I mean, that's what we
should do. We should just like take a bunch of

(08:57):
our soldiers and radiatum and see what happens. Yeah, no,
let's not do that. What could go What could go wrong? Right? Yeah,
what could go wrong? But a lot of people just
kind of immediately went with that it's something bad. It's
not good, definitely bad. Right, radiation, Big Radiations lobbying firm
has a lot of work to do on changing the

(09:18):
public perception of radiation. Oh man, I wouldn't want that job.
I work for Big Radiation. You know. What they need
to do is come up with like a cute anthropomorphic
character for radiation and have, you know, smile and bounce
around and the scream with a little Diddy playing in
the background, like a cute little cancer seal or something exactly,
a cute little wave or a cute little particle. Maybe Hi,

(09:42):
I'm a proton. I'm here to help to give you
cancer treatments, right, m I don't know. But but a
lot of people just kind of had the idea that
it's some sort of energy, some something that moves the
propagates and goes through things. Right, that's yeah, yeah, yeah.
A lot of people were on the right track. A
lot of people are on the right track. Faith thought
it was bad. Some people didn't really know. So people
listed an example of radiation, right, which is good, totally solid.

(10:06):
I'd give them a solid it be on that answer. Um.
And one of the guys whom I asked is actually
a physics professor in my department costed on the street
to ask him this question, and I gave a pretty
good answer on the spot. So, um, I think we
can we can break it down for people. What is radiation? Yeah,
break it down from Dana, what is radiation? Radiation most

(10:32):
generally can either be a particle or wave, but it's
basically just energy moving through space, right, So it can
be like photons, right, Like light is radiation. You know,
all kinds of light, from radio waves to visible light,
to X rays, to ultra violet light, to gamma rays
that we talked about in a previous podcast, those are
all examples of radiation. So basically light, you're saying. But

(10:55):
like we covered in a previous podcast, light of different
frequency have different names, but it's basically basically all this light.
It's all. Yeah, there's lots of different kinds of light, right,
which which comes because they have different they wiggle at
different speeds, right, wiggle really really fast, the gamma rays
that wiggle really really slow, their radio waves that wiggle
in the middle of their visible light, and all light

(11:17):
is radiation because it's energy moving through space, right, Like
when the sun makes light and shines it on the earth.
It's irradiating the earth. So next time you go out
and like enjoy the sun's warmth, you are like absorbing
radiation from the sun. Right, And so every photon you absorb,
every photon that hits your eye technically is radiation, but
it's not a particular frequency range where it's not a

(11:40):
particular type of light. Like all light is considered radiation,
Like the the light bulb in here in my house,
in my room, that that that is emitting radiation that
I'm receiving and I'm using it to see that's right.
And here again we run into the same problem that
we run into like all the time in this podcast,
where we have a name that people use in language, radiation,
and then we have the physics term, right, which is

(12:02):
a technical definition, so the technical definition, and like in science,
all light is radiation. Practically, when we you know, colloquially,
when we talk about radiation, what we mean is damaging radiation,
radiation that can hurt you, right, But technically light is radiation, right,
all light, visible lights from the life of the photons
in your room is also radiation. That's probably not what

(12:24):
people mean when they say radiation, but technically it's true.
And you know there are other things that are also radiation,
like sound. Sound waves is radiation. It's acoustic radiation. Right.
So I'm talking to my microphone, I'm irradiating this microphone,
and then I'm irradiating your ears and you listener are
being irradiated by our sonic vibrations right now. Wow. Okay,

(12:45):
so that you're saying to physics technical definition, it's really
just anything that moves and propagates through space. Yeah, anything
that transfers energy. It can be particles, it can be waves.
Some things are particles slash waves slash weird quantum mechanical things.
We don't really understand. All that stuff is radiation. So
that includes you know, protons and electrons and neutrons and

(13:06):
alpha particles which are just helium nuclei. It even includes
things like gravitational radiation, right, like gravitational waves that were
detected recently by Ligo, that big interfrometer that saw the
ripples in space and time when black holes collided. That's
radiation also. So basically you're saying that anything that moves
is radiation. It doesn't matter if it has energy, if

(13:27):
he has no mass, anything that moves through space is radiation. Like, yeah,
me walking down the hall, I'm radiating down the hall.
You know, I never thought of that, but yeah, you
are radiation, that's true. I am a peper here, Danny.
So radiation can't be all bad, right because it includes

(13:49):
people nice people like you. So there you go, there
you go, case closed, case closed. Radiation is not all bad. Um. Yeah.
But so from a technical point of view, radiation is everywhere.
It is. It's all around us. Um. And you know
sound is radiation, light is radiation, all this kind of stuff. Um.
One person said, you know radiation is a chemical or
it's a force, right, It's not. It's not really a

(14:11):
chemical or force. Um. People do get treatment for cancer
that's called chemotherapy, and some people think that involves radiation.
It doesn't involves chemicals, which is it's called chemotherapy. Um.
So radiation is not like a chemical you inject in
your body. It's not a force. It's not like gravity
or the electromagnetism or whatever. But though some of the

(14:33):
particles that transmit those forces, like photons, are radiation, so
it's not like its own force or its own chemical.
So there are things that are not radiation. It's not
everything not radiation. Yeah, there are things that are not radiation. Yeah.
And and actually we live in a time in the
universe when there isn't very much radiation. What. Yeah, if

(14:53):
you look at the history of the universe, like the
really long scale history of the universe, the very early universe,
there was a huge amount of radiation. Like if you say,
take all the energy in the universe, right, what is
what's in the universe that has energy? Well, there's matter, right,
matter has energy, there's radiation, radiation has energy, right, and
there's things like dark energy, mysterious forces that are expanding

(15:16):
the universe we don't understand. Well, the interesting thing is
that through the history of the universe, different slices of
that pie have been dominant. So in the very early universe,
most of the energy in the universe was in a
radiation like big bang, huge explosion. Mostly it's just a
bunch of photons. Oh, I see. But then something changed, yeah, exactly,

(15:37):
some of that energy to transformed into something else has right,
A lot of that energy is transformed into matter, right,
And the universe spread out and cooled, right, and a
lot of those photons were absorbed, right, they were sucked
up by matter um which is no longer ionized like
formed atoms, and those atoms could absorb photons. So for
in the very first period of the universe, or like

(15:58):
the first um sixty years or so, the universe was
radiation dominated. Most of the energy in the universe is radiation.
Then for billions of years it was matter dominated, like
most of the energy and the universe was stored in
matter um, and radiation was a smaller piece of the pie.
And then for the last five billion years or so,
those got outstripped by dark energy, this new mysterious thing

(16:20):
which is expanding the universe and now eats seventy of
the whole pie, the energy budge of the universe. Now
we live in a dark energy dominated universe. Wow, so
weird to think the universe is changing, you know, like
it's it's a composition, what it's made out of is
not constant. He sounds like somebody talking about your niece
or nephew. You're like, you got so big, I can't

(16:41):
believe you, Like, whoa, how did you get so so harry?
What exactly used to be all radiation? And now you
got these energy Now you're this emailed team I don't
get it. Yeah, the universe is evolving and we don't know,
like what's the next epoch of the universe, Right, Is
dark energy going to go away? Is something else going

(17:02):
to turn on and swamp dark energy? Radiation is gonna
come roaring back? Or you know who knows? Right? But
I like, I like sort of how you said that.
There's sort of the official physics definition of radiation, and
then there's the kind of cultural societal definition of radiation yea,
which is kind of specifically which specifically means something that

(17:23):
energy that's somehow causes damage or effects your bodily functions
or your your cellular the things in your body. Yeah, exactly,
you can think of damaging radiation. It's sort of like
really fast, super tiny little bullets. Each one can cause
a tiny little bit of damage. And I think that's

(17:44):
the kind of radiation people are most interested in. So
let's focus on that for a minute, right. And there's
kind of there's different kinds of radiation that can damage you, right.
So for example, gamma rays, these are just high energy photons,
but they have enough energy that they can penetrate through
your skin and they can eye eyes. Ionizing means that
it deposits enough energy on the electron in an atom

(18:04):
that the electron it like escapes, right, It's like gets
escape velocity, and so it can fly off and the
atom then becomes an ion. And that's bad. It changes
the chemistry that's happening inside your body, and it can
change your DNA and can cause mutations and all sorts
of stuff. But wait, what about regular light, like from
a light buelb. Why isn't that Why doesn't that one

(18:26):
cause any damage? Because it's absorbed by your skin. It
doesn't have enough energy to penetrate your skin. The higher
the frequency, the higher the energy. So gamma rays have
more energy than normal visible light. Normal visible light, you know,
stopped by your skin. That's why your skin, that's why
your body is not transparent, right because light can't pass
through it. That's why you're not invisible. If light could

(18:46):
pass through you, you would be invisible that you know of.
But what do I mean that doesn't emit enough energy
like it it gets to the cells in my skin
and it doesn't another energy to puncture through to wiggle around.
What does that mean? Yeah, it's absorbed by the energy
by the very outer layer of your skin, which is

(19:08):
basically dead cells, right, and so it doesn't penetrate into
anything important, whereas ultra violet light and gamma rays, those
are the things that give you cancer and the reason
they give you cancers because they go deeper into your skin.
And so the way to protect yourself is like be
inside because then the house absorbs the energy of the
gamma rays or the UV light or wear sunscreen, right,

(19:30):
because that has things in it that are good at
absorbing um those kind of that frequency photon. So it's
not it's not a it's is it an energy thing
or like a frequency thing? You know, Like we had
an episode about why is the sky blue and you
said that the light it's because blue light is at
the right sort of wavelength of that of the size

(19:52):
of the molecules in the atmosphere, Is it something like
that or is it just just energy, Just it just
barrels through. It's just energy. Yeah, Just think of the
body is like a bag of water, right, and it
eventually gets slowed down and absorbed, and it's just a
question of how deep into the body it gets. And
so if it if it stops at the outermost layer

(20:12):
where it's all just dead skin, then it doesn't really
do any damage. Or you know, it gets stopped by
your clothing, right, like visible like gets stopped by your clothing. Um,
but if it gets into that bag of water and
penetrates and you know, can ionize something important, then yet
it can cause cancer. Well, it's interesting to me that
it's not just like like gamma rays and X rays.
It's also like radiation harmful. Radiation can be also like protons, right,

(20:36):
and which is what I'm made out of and you're
made out of. Like the things we're made out of
can also be radioactive and and not good for you,
that's right. And so like as we said before, like
a proton can be good or bad. It can be
part of a tasty snack, or it can come bringing cancer.
And the only difference is that is whether it has energy.
Like if I shoot a proton at you, and I

(20:58):
could deposit a lot of energy in a part of
your body, that's bad. Right, Think of a proton, it's
like a tiny bullet. I mean, I could hand you
a bullet. It's not going to kill you, right. A
bullet by itself doesn't kill you. If I shoot a
bullet at you really really fast, right, then it's gonna
hurt you. Right, it's gonna deposit all of its energy
in your body. It's gonna tear a hole in you.
So it's the energy that that particle has that's the problem, right,

(21:19):
not the particle itself. You're saying, bullets don't kill people.
It's the protons. Kinetic energy kills people. Bullets people don't
kill people. Physics stuff. Technically that's true. Oh man, oh man,
I'm gonna be in trouble with the physics community after

(21:39):
that comes out. You can deposit kinetic energy on somebody
with lots of things, right. You could use a brick,
you can use a bullet, you can use a rock like,
you could even use a banana. I guess I don't know.
But the thing that kills somebody is the kinetic energy transfer. Right,
you hit somebody with a car, right, doesn't have to
be a small thing. You deposit a lot of kinetic

(22:01):
energy on somebody, you're going to hurt them. Now, proton
is basically just a super tiny bullet. And so if
a uranium atom shoots out a proton a really high
speed and it hits you, then you know it doesn't
cause you make you bleed, but it can knock out
some atoms and do some damage internally, which screws up
the chemistry, and then it can give you cancer. Right,
And I think specifically the problem is when it hits

(22:22):
like a DNA molecule inside of you, that's when the
mutations happen. That's what really kills the cells. Right, that's right.
And again though it's not always bad. Right if one
of your you know, sperm or eggs gets hit by
a proton and it changes the DNA that you're passing
on to your kids, maybe that's what makes your kid
like the next Michael Phelps or Albert Einstein. Right, mutations

(22:43):
can be good. It's a critical part of evolution that
we have mutations to explore the evolutionary space. Radiation is
an important part of how evolution works. So you know,
a lot of times it's bad, but also sometimes it's good.
And I think we touched it. We talked about this
a little bit in a previous cast, which is that
it's kind of a sweet spot, right, Like, if if

(23:03):
our planet had been in an area of the galaxy
where there was a ton of radiation, then you probably
couldn't develop living things. But at the same time, you
need a little bit of radiation to kind of stimulate
all that evolution and mutation to that, to that animals
and species can evolve. Yeah, it's I think it's a
difficult thing to study, right. It would be fantastically interesting

(23:25):
to get to like simulate the Earth with more or
less radiation and say, like would life evolve more rapidly
with more radiation because things would mutate faster or everything
you just get cancer and die off more quickly. Um.
I think it's a huge complex question because it's so
interconnected with you know, ecosystems and how things live and
die and eat each other. So I think it's really
complex thing that I think physicists are attempted to simplifying superheroes. Um.

(23:50):
But you touched on something interesting, which is that you
know where the radiation comes from, right, Like, Um, A
lot of the radiation that we worry about comes from space.
It comes from our son. Our sun is a huge, huge,
um factory of radiation. I mean, some of that radiation
is good, like the light that you soak up when
you're enjoing a nice day here in southern California, or
the protons that make up the solar wind right that

(24:12):
that that are really dangerous for astronauts. So what's more
dangerous to be next to like a uranium stone or
mine or to be out in space? Floating around out
in space is really dangerous. Yeah, there's a huge amount
of radiation out there, and the reason that we are
protected from that radiation is because of our atmosphere. Our
atmosphere absorbs most of it, like the protons and the

(24:33):
gamma rays and the UVY light, most of that is
absorbed by either the ozone or other parts of our
atmosphere and protects it. It's like a huge shield. But
of course it doesn't protect you from all of it. Right,
A lot of uvy light makes it to the surface
and can give you a sunburn and maybe even skin cancer. Right,
But definitely out in space. Out in space is a
very high radiation environment. All right, let's get into a

(24:54):
bit more. But first let's take a quick break. All Right,
we're talking about radiation, and we know that it's um
It's basically anything that moves around with energy kind of right, Like,

(25:16):
it can be protons, or it can be electrons, or
it could just be light that hits you and imparts
energy on you. That's right, and a lot of it
comes from space. We're saying the atmosphere protects us, but
you know, the atmosphere is not super thick, and the
higher up you go in the atmosphere, the less atmosphere
you have to protect yourself, which is why every time
you take, for example, of flight across the country or

(25:38):
around the world, you're actually getting a pretty serious dose
of radiation. Really so that the plane doesn't protect you
like the shell of the plane. No, the shell the
plane is not enough to stop protons and really high
energy photons from penetrating. You need to be like really
thick lead. And remember airplanes are designed to be light
so that they can fly right and be fuel efficient.
And so for example, this is why UM flight attendants

(26:01):
and pilots are limited in how many flights they can
take because otherwise they all get cancer. Wow, because of
the radiation. Radiation. Yeah, and you know those folks are
exposed to more radiation than people who work at like
nuclear power plants. Really. Yeah, no, it's a serious amount.
And I actually know this because you know, I work
on this app that detects particles using your phone, and

(26:23):
some of the best data we get is when we
fly around the world, like we fly to Discern all
the time in Switzerland and back, and we take these
long flights, we run the app. You don't put it
on airplane mode like you're supposed to know. We put
it on airplane mode. But then we turn on our
app and we can see those particles like we can
see them zooming through the through the device. So it's
it's definitely a lot of radiation up there. Um, you have,

(26:44):
do you put on some block whenever you get on
an airplane. Sun block won't help you from protons man
or from Gama raise. No, protect you from the UV light,
but not from Gamma raise and not from protons. And
there's a lot of those up there. Um. So you know,
if you're the kind of person who's like, you know,
not sure you want to take a dental X ray
because of the radiation, but you're happy to take a

(27:05):
flight to Thailand. Remember there's a lot of radiation on
those flights. Wow. Does that mean that people who fly
a lot age faster, possibly they're definitely an increased risk
for cancer? Yeah? Absolutely, yeah, exactly. I think that. I
think that's something a lot of people don't realize that
there's radiation sources in our everyday lives. Right, You don't

(27:25):
just have to avoid nuclear plant meltdowns or nuclear weapons
or evil scientists like their sources of radiation in our
everyday lives. Not just an airplane though, also a lot
of things that we eat have radiation. Yeah. I heard
um something near and dear to me and that our
listeners are probably tired of hearing about, which is the bananas.
Bananas are very radioactive. Yeah, I would say very radioactive,

(27:48):
but they are. They have potassium in them, and the
potassium is of a kind that radiates it it decays
and it shoots off radiation, and so of a kind
is it. So there's different kinds of potassium. Yeah, there's
more and less stable versions of potassium. You know. Potassium
has isotopes, just like every other element, which means you
can have like more or less neutrons, and the exact

(28:10):
configuration of protons and neutrons in the nucleus determines how
stable something is and whether or not decays by shooting
off a proton or a neutron. Um And so somehow bananas,
when banana plants make bananas, they somehow gather a lot
of this kind of radioactive potassium. Yeah, and you know,
I don't want to get a lot of angry emails
from big Banana supporters, so let's be specific about it.

(28:33):
On the radiations that he called the big banana of
Big Banana, I think I've seen that movie, actually Big Banana.
But the radiation exposure from consuming a banana is approximately
one percent of the average daily exposure to radiation. So
you're getting radiation from the sun and just from you know,
natural radioactive elements in the earth and stuff, and so

(28:54):
eating banana does increase your amount of radiation, but really
by a tiny amount. So go out there and eat
a hundred bananas and don't worry about it. But you
told me something cool earlier, which is that a truckload
of bananas, like if I have a truck full of bananas,
will actually cause a false alarm when going through a
radiation detector. Yeah. They have these things at ports because

(29:15):
they want to see if like terrorists are gonna try
to smuggle in uranium to make a dirty bomb or something.
So they have these scanners that look for radiation inside
shipping containers. If you have like a truckload or a
shipping container full of bananas, it'll set one of those
things off. Like, this is real, people, Banana really are radioactive.
So if the agent is like, are you carrying a
dirty bomb with you? You can be just like, nope,

(29:35):
just the banana bomb. That sounds pretty dirty to me too.
It's slippery but not dirty, that's right. And um, and
there are other natural sources of radiation, you know, just
in the earth and the rocks around us, there are
radioactive elements, not in huge quantities, but you do get
some radiation from the trace amounts of uranium, for example. UM,

(29:57):
in the earth crust, you do get radiation from just
radioactive elements that are decaying slowly over time. But none
of them so now. But none of these is dangerous, right,
Like potatoes, kidney, beans, sunflower seeds, nuts, they all radiate
kind of like bananas, but it's you know, maybe not
that bad for you. That's right. You should not change
your diet based on this podcast. I mean that's a

(30:17):
general rules and we have no expertise in nutrition or
dietary science. Um, but specifically, you should not be worried
about the radiation from food, right. Um. Also, your body
is pretty good at regulating this stuff, and so like
you'll take in that radioactive potassium and then you'll pass
out some more. So your body maintains like a steady
state amount of these chemicals because it needs some. Right,

(30:40):
So you're saying I can keep eating French fries as
much as I'm saying French fries won't give you cancer
due to the radiation. That's all I'm gonna say. No,
don't kill you. They'll kill you in other ways. What
you're saying, that's right, You could definitely think of creative
ways to die from French fries that are not getting cancer.
All right. Well, let's get into this idea of whether

(31:01):
radiation is good for you or bad for you. But
for us, let's take a quick break al right, Ianne,
break it down for us? Is radiation good for us

(31:22):
or bad? Frisk? Well, you know I think both, right, Um?
The classic cancer is yes and no. So radiation is
good for you in some ways and it's bad for
you in other ways. You know. Let's remember what radiation
can do, right. Radiation can break the bonds in your atoms.
You can ionize, right, Um, if it has enough energy,
and if it has less energy, right, then it can

(31:43):
just sort of deposit something or just have to ionize
the electron to deposit some energy um in your system.
And this can be good or it can be bad.
Like you know, what's an example of how radiation can
be good, well at particle accelerators. We use the accelerators
sometimes to treat people who have cancer because you can
use it like um, you can you can shoot protons

(32:04):
at people and shoot it just exactly at their cancer
and basically just like target the cancer itself. Right, It's
called proton therapy, and you can try to kill just
the tumor and that works. Like you can save lives
by shooting people with radiation. It's like you purposely radiate
yourself because you're trying to kill something inside of you. Yeah,

(32:24):
I mean that's always the game with cancer, right. Cancer
is part of you, and if you want to kill it,
you have to like be willing to hurt it more
than it hurts than it hurts you. Right, It's a
it's a like a medical game of chicken um uh
and uh. In one way to do that, it's so yeah,
shoot these tiny little proton bullets inside you. And there's
a lot of physics that goes into that, like how

(32:45):
how much radiation do you need and how do you
angle it so that it lands mostly in the tumor
and doesn't hurt the surrounding tissue. Um, there's a whole
field of medical physics and people who are really real
experts at that. Yeah, but I think it it's sort
of targets cancer selves because of the fat that cancer
cells are multiplying all the time, right, Like, just the
idea that they're multiplying more than your regular cells kind

(33:07):
of makes them more vulnerable to things like protons and
getting their DNA changed. I don't know, maybe, Um, I
think from the physics point of view, we just treat
them as bags of water. Like seriously, we treat everything.
Every human, every flesh is just like bags of water
to a physicist, and we think about how much energy
we deposit, and I think we just try to kill it. Um. Right, Well,

(33:29):
it can also save your life if you dial nine
one one on your cell phone, right, if there's an emergency,
because radiation is basically how cell phones work. That's right,
All communication relies on radiation, right, You're using electromagnetic radiation
to communicate wirelessly all the time. Um, you're listening to
this podcast thanks to radiation, right, and so without radiation

(33:52):
we would have any sort of wireless communication. Um, so yes,
thank you radiation for connecting the world and downloading information
into our brains. And I've heard a lot of scaremongering
about like the dangers of cell phones and is five
G safe, etcetera. People worrying about whether their cell phone
is going to give them cancer. They won't. You don't
have to worry about it. That radiation is not dangerous.

(34:13):
It's very very low energy radiation. It's r F frequency,
which means it's radio waves. It's very low frequency, which
means it's very low energy, so it can't ionize your atom.
So you can just make them wiggle a little bit,
you know, kind of gently. Bananas are more dangerous than
cell phones, So don't worry about using your cell phones. Okay,
what if you're like watching a movie on your phone

(34:38):
about a superhero who got irradiated by radiation? Is that
just just just that just blows your mind? Are you
about to pitch me banana man? Is that what this is? Potato?
It's the whole team, Potato Man, Kidney Man, Kidney bees Man,
Brazil not Man, Brazilian. He's he's just called the Brazilian. Okay,

(35:02):
I'm gonna disavow loud laughing at that joke. Seems culturally
insensitive somehow. I'm not sure how. But yeah, radiation plays
a big role, right, not just in communication also or
in treatment, but also in diagnosis. Right. You go to
the hospital and you want to see, like did I
break my wrist or is it just really hurt? Right?
What do they do? They take an X ray? You
want to see, like, hey, what's going on inside my guts?

(35:24):
Do I have appendicitis or not? Right? They do a
cat scan. All that uses radiation to image what's going
on inside your body. So, I mean, you work at
the large Hadron collider, and so you you know that
there's a lot of radiation out there. There definitely is,
Yet you still go to work. Yet people go to work. Yeah,
you could die every day due to anything, but people

(35:45):
just seem to get up and go to work anyway. Right,
That's kind of amazing. I see, it's like an acceptable risk. Yeah, Well,
we don't have much radiation at the large Hagon collider.
The particles do collide and they create a lot of radiation,
but it's a hundred meters underground, and so we're shielded
by a lot of earth. So there's not a lot
of radiation risk at the at the LHC. You know,

(36:06):
I mean just from staring at your computers along. Oh yes, absolutely,
you know there's radiation everywhere and it's just part of life, right,
and so you go about your normal day, you get
your dose of radiation. Um. You know you can you
can use apps or you can get a dissimiter to
track your radiation dose. Um. There is one thing which
people should be aware of, which is rate on gas.
Rate on gas is something that happens in various places

(36:27):
around the world and on the East Coast. It's this
invisible radioactive gas that seeps out from people's basements and
it actually does kill like tens of thousands of people
every year. So real. Yeah, that is actually something you
can do to potentially save yourself from cancer is just
get like a cheap rate on detector. Wow. So this
this is gas that is radioactive. Like it it's gas

(36:50):
that's breaking down and emitting all kinds of protons and
particles exactly. It's emitting radiation and it's invisible and it
doesn't smell like anything, and it's see up from underground.
It's like a naturally occurring thing. So a lot of people,
like the earth shifts, it'll it'll start to collect in
your basement, and then people can be getting these high
doses of radiation without even knowing about it, reaping it in, right, yeah,

(37:13):
breathing it in exactly. So I can't imagine why anyone
would think radiation is bad. Exactly. No, it can be dangerous,
and so if that's the kind of thing you worry about,
you should, or you have the young kids or whatever,
you should definitely look to see if you live in
a kind of place where radiant where radar occurs naturally,
so you should get it checked out, because that is
really a health houzard. Well, this one is interesting. You

(37:35):
also wat down here that we use radiation to make
our food safer. Yeah, exactly. If you take a slab
of meat, for example, and you zap it with a
bunch of radiation, you can kill everything that's still alive
in it, meaning bacteria. Right, So you want to keep
your meat safe, you can zap it with radiation. It
will kill almost everything in there. Um, So that's one

(37:56):
one way we can use radiation to keep ourselves safe.
Of there's a twist to that, which is that you're
applying artificial selection, which means you zap enough steaks and
eventually all that's going to be left is bacteria that
can survive radiation, and so you're like helping breed radiation
proof bacteria. Well, you're something that I've never quite understood,

(38:18):
which is that um radiation needs to be something that
you can pass from one thing to the other. Do
you know what I mean? Like like chernobyl happen and
all this radioactive stuff went out there. But it also
you can also sort of irradiate things make things radioactive. Yes,
that true? Yeah, the way that works, it's not like contagion,
like a disease, though there's something in common. What happens

(38:41):
is that radiation can cause other things to become radioactive. Right,
It can make yours, It can make um new things unstable.
So how does that work? Well, radiation, like uranium breaks down,
it shoots out protons and neutrons. Those protons and neutrons
can hit other atoms and make those unstable. It can
cause like a chain react action. Right, So radiation can

(39:02):
definitely spread it's not just like, oh that radiation hit
me and I'm done. It can make something inside you radioactive,
which could then unstable, which means it like breaks up
and shoots out more particles. Right. Right. So, for example,
you have like a block of metal that was at
Chernobyl or block of concrete right that got irradiated a lot.
Then it becomes radioactive. And the reason is that stuff

(39:25):
inside that concrete or that that brick or that block
then became unstable because I got hit by a passing
particle and now it's emitting particles. Wow. Yeah, so it's
sort of good and bad. Right. Radiation can be good
for all these treatments to communicate, to kill bacteria, but

(39:46):
it can also you know, if you get overexposed to it,
it can give you cancer. Yeah, exactly. It's you know,
it's like everything else in science. It's an awesome power.
It shows us that the universe is incredible and has
so much that we have not yet understood. Um. And
that power can be used for good or for bad. Exactly.
It can hurt you or it can help you. Um.

(40:06):
I think. One one of my favorite stories about life
and radiation came from my wife who told me the
story about this amazing bacteria they discover that can survive
like almost any amount of radiation. And the way it
does it is it has like fifty copies of its
DNA inside it. So if radiation comes in and blast
one open, it's like, no worries. I got forty nine
backups and it just like repairs and it fixes the

(40:30):
one that got damaged to right, Yeah, exactly. It has
a bunch of copies and it has all these things
zooming around all the time to fix mistakes. It's like,
you know, you gotta drive, you gotta backup of your
hard drive and something goes wrong, you you recover from
the backup. This thing is like fifty backups simultaneously at
all times, and so we can survive a lot of radiation.
So that that's something you can do to prevent radiation

(40:52):
poisoning yourself become a bacteria. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend that,
all right, Daniel, Well, I think I learned that I'm
gonna have to stop eating bananas and going on airplanes. Well,
I think you should fly less, yes, but I think

(41:13):
you can eat bananas without worrying about it too much.
Maybe you should trade, you should take fewer trips and
eat more bananas. Take fewer trips to eat more bananas exactly.
So there you go, folks, that's what radiation is. A
lot of people did understand what radiation was. It's you know,
ultra vilet light, it's gamma rays, it's particles shut out
by radioactive elements, and it can certainly hurt you, and

(41:34):
you should be on the lookout for radon gas and
you should think about the flights you take. But it
can also help you. So like everything in science, it's
fundamentally neutral and it just depends on how it's applied.
And in either case, just remember to wear your sunscreen
or at least a hat. That's right. And if you're
eating banana, make sure to wear a helmet or make

(41:54):
your make a hat out of bananas. Does that does
that cancel out? That sounds totally safe to me. Absolutely,
I totally open. Please please go ahead and send me
a picture. All right, Thanks for listening, everybody. We hope
you enjoyed that. Tune in next time, keep on radiating.

(42:20):
If you still have a question after listening to all
these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to
hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter,
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email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain
the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio from

(42:41):
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