Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseIs it bad or good or spicy or mild?
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Hey, Daniel, what would you sacrifice for the sake of a big scientific discovery?
Ooh, 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, but 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 history's most famous scientists, like Mary Currie, 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 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 long yellow and comes naturally wrapped in its own in its own packaging.
Oh man, are 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 Madame Currie's research in your favorite snack.
Have you heard the joke of what did Pier three tell Mary Cury?
Now? What did Pierre Currie tell Mary Cury?
He said, My dear, you are positively glowing tonight.
You look radiant.
Oh man. I am Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics.
I'm Daniel, I'm a particle physicist.
And together we're the authors of the book We Have No Idea and the host of this podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we look at things in the universe that make sense or don't make sense, or are slightly confusing or 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 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 safety gear when you need a banana, right.
Yeah, banana slipproof shoes.
No, I'm talking about a helmet. If you have a helmet, I'll want you to a banana. Then you know it's a big deal.
Oh, I see, I see. Today on the podcast, we're tackling a subject that a couple of people asses 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 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 on 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? Is it bad for you?
Spicy? Mild? What is radiation anyway?
Is it fizzle when you eat it? It tastes like bananas?
Right? That are those canes they 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 some of that.
Exactly. Oh, 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 they It's something that's sort of recently discovered, you know, like our ancestors had no idea about radiation. It's something that is a product of modern science.
Yeah, I mean it was sort of discovered not too long ago, right, maybe one hundred years.
Yeah, exactly. It's around the turn of the century, like eight late eighteen hundreds, people started to discover X rays and Catherine rays and all sorts of other kind of rays. They didn't really know what it was. There was this new mysterious thing. It was invisible. It could develop photographs, you could see it on photographic film. Later they discovered it could kill you, right, you could use it to like pictures the inside of the body. It was mysterious and weird, and so it's kind of new.
It's kind of it's powerful, right, it kind of violates our every day intuition.
Yeah, exactly. And I think that's part of the scariness of it, is that 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, it could help you, or it could hurt you. If you don't understand what you're doing, it could lead to dangerous side effects. Yeah.
I feel like it's also cracked up in 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 population is thinking about, what they are afraid of. Right, which is why red and 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 has had its day as the as the scientific villain.
But like you were saying, in society, we still think of it as bad, right, Like nobody 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 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? Are you getting some right now? Yeah, so we were wondering do people have an Yes, The answer is yes, you are being radiated right now. You listen to this podcast, right, and so you're you're getting sonic radiation right now.
But I'm not just from our the brilliance of our thoughts and words. But you are literally right now, Bavid 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, and so Daniel went out into the street to ask 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 X ray they emit radiation and other other forms also, yeah, there's like you we and other types. All right, cool, thanks very much. What is radiation?
It's some kind of like some kind of force or like chemical kind of that can like go through things like in X rays, Like there's radiation, MRIs, there's radiations.
It goes through things.
Well, radiation is bad, I think if you absorb it. But isn't radiation just like the splitting off of or like the breaking apart 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 UV radio about radiation, but specifically UV radiation, which causes diamontinge dimers, which is obviously cause of skin cancer. So that's a major concern. But then you have the ozone layer, which can block.
Some harmful radio radiation. Radiation is photon.
So no, well, I don't know, like it like gives off like I don't know it comes from somewhere, but I can give you cancer and stuff.
Like I don't know. Do you know what it's made out of? Like, what is No, I don't know what it's made out of?
Cool?
What is radiation?
I don't know.
I think that makes superheroes or something.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Is it good or it's bad? It's bad? Okay, all right, great, all right?
So I like the person said that it's the thing that makes superheroes. I was like, yes, there is something.
There's something good about radiation. It gives you superheroes exactly. I mean that's what you should do. We should just like take a bunch of our soldiers and radiate them and see what happens.
Yet, no, let's not do that.
What could what could go wrong, right.
Yeah, what could go wrong? But a lot of people just kind of immediately went with it that it's something bad.
Yeah, it's not good, definitely bad. Right, Radiation, Big Radiations lobbying firm has a lot of work to do on changing the 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 it, you know, smile and bounce around the scream with a little ditty playing in the background.
Like a cute little cancer cell or something.
Exactly cute, a cute little wave or a cute little particle. Maybe, Hi, I'm a proton. I'm here to help to give you cancer treatments. Right.
I don't know, but a lot of people just kind of had the idea that it's some sort of energy, some something that moves, the propagates, it goes through things. Right, that's accurate.
Yeah, a lot of people were on the right track. A lot of people were on the right track. They thought it was bad. Some people didn't really know. Some people listed an example of radiation, right, which is good, totally solid I'd give them a solid it'd be on that answer. And one of the guys who I asked is actually a physics professor in my department. I cast it on the street to ask them this question, and I give a pretty good answer on the spot. So I think we can break it down for people. What is radiation?
Yeah, break it down for a stand and what is radiation?
Radiation most generally can either be a particle or a 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 ultraviolet light, to gamma rays we talked about in a previous podcast. Those are all examples of radiation.
So basically light, you're saying, But like we covered in a previous podcast, light of different frequencies have different names, but it's basically all just light.
It's all light. Yeah, there's lots of different kinds of light, right, which comes because they have different they wiggle at different speeds, right, wiggle really really fast. The gamma rays that wiggle really really slow. They're radio waves that wiggle. In the middle, they're visible light and all light 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 or it's not a particular type of light. Like all light is considered radiation, like the light bulb. And here in my house, in my room, 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 a technical definition. So the technical definition, 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 light, the life, and the photons in your room is also radiation. That's probably not what people mean when they say radiation, but it 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 am 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, 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 alpha particles which are just helium nuclei. It even includes things like gravitational radiation, right, like gravitational waves that were detected recently by Lego, 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 if it does matter, if it has energy, if 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 Superherodana ie it.
So radiation can't be all bad, right because it includes nice people like you.
So there you go, there you go, case closed, case closed. Radiation is not all bad.
Yeah. But so from a technical point of view, radiation is everywhere, right, It's all around us. And you know, sound is radiation, light is radiation, all this kind of stuff. One person said, you know, radiation is a chemical or it's a force, right, It's not. It's not really a chemical or force. People do get treatment for cancer that's called chemotherapy, and some people think that involves radiation. It doesn't involves chemicals, which is quite it's called chemotherapy. 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 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 radiations.
Everything 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 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, Matter has energy, there's radiation, radiation has energy, right, and there's things like dark energy, mysterious forces that are expanding 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 radiation, like big bang, huge explosion. Mostly it's just a bunch of photons.
Oh, I see. But then something changed, yeah, exactly, some of that energy to transformed into something else.
Yeah, it's 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 which was no longer ionized like formed atoms, and those atoms could absorb photons. So for in the very first period of the universe, or like the first sixty thousand years or so, the universe was radiation dominated. Most of the energy in the universe was radiation. Then for billions of years it was matter dominated, like most of the energy in the universe was stored in matter, 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 which is expanding the universe, and now eachs seventy two percent of the whole pie, the energy budget of the universe. Now we live in a dark energy dominated universe.
Wow, it's 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.
You sound like somebody talking about your niece or nephew. You're like, you got so big, I can't.
Believe I got Like, whoa, how did you get those? So Harry?
What exactly he used to be all radiation? And now you got these. Now you got so much dark energy.
Now you're this email team. I don't get it.
Yeah, the universe is evolving and we don't know, like what's the next hipoch of the universe? Right? Is dark energy gonna go away? Is something else gonna turn on and swamp dark energy? Radiation are 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, yeah, which is kind of specifically which specifically means something that energy that somehow causes damage or affects your bodily functions or your your cellular the things in your body.
Yeah, exactly. You can think of damaging radiation as sort of like really fast, super tiny little bullets. Each one can cause a tiny little bit of damage, And I think that's the kind of radiation people are most interested in. So let's focus on that for a minute, right, And there's kind there's different kinds of radiation that can damage you, right. For 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 ionize. Ionizing means that it deposits enough energy on the electron in an atom 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 they can change your DNA and can cause mutations and all sorts of stuff.
But wait, what about regular light like chromin light bulb. Why isn't that Why doesn't that one 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, stop by your skin. That's why your skin. That's why your body is not transparent, right, because like can't pass through it. That's why you're not invisible. If light could pass through you, you would be invisible.
That you know of. But what do you mean that doesn't have enough energy? Like it it gets to the cells in my skin and it doesn't have enough 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 basically dead cells, right, and so it doesn't penetrate into anything important. Whereas ultraviolet light and gamma rays, those are the things that give you cancer, and the reason they give you cancer is 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, because that has things in it that are good at absorbing those kind of that frequency photon.
So it's not a 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 the size 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. You just think of the body as 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 stops at the outermost layer 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. But if it gets into that bag of water and penetrates and you know, can ionize something important, then yeah, it can cause cancer.
Well, it's interesting to me that it's not just light like gamma rays and X rays. It's also like radiation, harmful. Radiation can be also like protons, right, 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 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 could deposit a lot of energy in a part of your body, that's bad, right. I think of a proton as 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 going to hurt you. Right, It's going to deposit all of its energy in your body. It's going to tear a hole in you. So it's the energy that that particle has that's the problem, right, not the proditicle itself.
You're saying, bullets don't kill people. It's the bullets. Does kinetic energy kills people? Bullets done don't kill people?
Physics technically that's true.
Oh man, oh man, I'm going to be in trouble with the physics community after that comes out. You can deposit kinetic energy somebody with lots of things, right. You could use a brick, you can use a bullet, you could 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 energy on somebody, you're gonna hurt them. Now, proton is basically just a super tiny bullet. And so if a uranium atom shoots out a proton at really high speed and it hits you, then you know it doesn't cause 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 like a DNA molecule inside of you. That's when the mutations happen, and 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 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 podcast, which is that it's kind of a sweet spot, right, Like if 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 animals and species can evolve.
Yeah, I think it's a difficult thing to study, right. It'd be fantastically interesting 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 to everything just get cancer and die off more quickly. 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 a really complex thing that I think physicists at a tempted to simplify superheroes. But you touched on something interesting, which is that you know where the radiation comes from, right, Like a lot of the radiation that we worry about comes from space. It comes from our sun. Our sun is a huge, huge factory of radiation. I mean, some of that radiation is good, like the light that you soak up when you're enjoying a nice day here in southern California, or the protons that make up the solar wind right that are really dangerous for astronauts.
So what's more dangerous to be nice 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 gamma rays and the UV light. Most of that is absorbed by either the ozone or other parts of our atmosphere and protects us. It's like a huge shield. But of course it doesn't protect you from all of it. Right. A lot of UV light makes it to the surface and can give you a sun 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 bit more. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about radiation, and we know that it's it's basically anything that moves around with energy kind of right, Like 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 were 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, a flight across the country or around the world, you're actually getting a pretty serious dose of radiation.
Really yeah, So the plane doesn't protect you like the shell of the plane.
No, the shell of the plane is not enough to stop protons and really high energy photons from penetrating. You need to be like really thick lead. And I remember airplanes are designed to be light so that they can fly right and be fuel efficient and so for example, this is why flight attendants and pilots are limited in how many flights they can take because otherwise they'd all get cancer.
Wow, because of the radiation.
The 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 actually know this because you know, I work on this app that detects particles using your phone. And 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. We take these long flights, we run the app.
You don't put it on airplane mode like you're supposed to.
No, 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 there's definitely a lot of radiation up there.
I mean, you have you put on sunblock whenever you get on an airplane.
Sun block won't help you from protons man or from gama rays. No, we'll tet you from UV light, but not from gamma rays and not from protons. And there's a lot of those up there. 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 flight to Thailand. Remember there's a lot of radiation on those flights.
WHOA, does that mean that people who fly a lot age faster, possibly.
They're definitely an increased risk for cancer. Yeah? Absolutely, yikes, Yeah, exactly 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 just have to avoid nuclear plant meltdowns or nuclear weapons or evil scientists. Like, there's sources of radiation in our everyday lives, not just in airplanes though, also a lot of things that we eat have radiation.
Yeah. I heard something near and dear to me and that our listeners are probably tired of hearing about, which is bananas. Bananas are very radioactive.
Yeah, I would say very radioactive, 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 what do you mean 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 it can have like more or less neutrons, And the exact configuration of protons and neutrons in the nucleus determines how stable something is and whether or not it decays. But shooting off a proton or a neutron.
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. The radiation the.
Loss of that lobby's called because 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 eating banana does increase your amount of radiation, but really by a tiny amount. So go out there and eat one hundred banas 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 they want to see if like terrorists are going to 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. Bananas really are radioactive.
So if the agent is like, are you carrying a dirty bomb with you, you can be just like nope, just the banana bomb.
That sounds pretty dirty to me too.
It's slippery but not dirty, that's right.
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 them, you know, trace amounts of uranium for example, in the earth crust. You do get radiation from just radioactive elements that are decaying slowly over time.
But none of these is dangerous, right, Like potatoes, kidney beans, sunflower, seas 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 general rule, since we'd have no expertise in nutrition or dietary science. But specifically you should not be worried about the radiation from food. Right. 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, So you're saying I can keep eating French fries as much as I.
I'm saying French fries won't give you cancer due to the radiation. That's all I'm gonna say.
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 radiation is good for you or bad for you. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, break it down for us. Is radiation good for us or bad for risk?
Well? You know, I think both right. The classic answer is yes and no. So radiation is good for you in some ways and it's bad for you in other ways. You know, remember what radiation can do, right. Radiation can break the bonds in your atoms. It can ionize, right if it has enough energy, and if it has less energy, right, then it can just sort of deposit some or just have to ionize the electron to deposit some energy 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 accelerator sometimes to treat people who have cancer because you can use it like you can you can shoot protons 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, I mean that's always the game of 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. Then it hurts you. You it's a like a medical game of chicken, and and one way to do that is to, yeah, shoot these tiny little proton bullets inside you. And there's a lot of physics that goes into that, like how 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. So there's a whole field of medical physics to people who are really real experts at that.
Yeah, but I think it sort of targets cancer cells because of the fact that cancer cells are multiplying all the time, right, Like just the idea that they're multiplying more than your regular cells kind of makes them more vulnerable to things like protons and getting their DNA changed.
I don't know. Maybe 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.
Right, Well, it can also save your life if you dial nine one one on your cell phone, right if there's an emergency, Because that's right, 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. You're listening to this podcast thanks to radiation, right, And so without radiation we would have any sort of wireless communication. So yes, thank you radiation for connecting the world and downloading information into our brains. And I've heard a lot of scare mongering about like the dangers of cell phones and is five G safe, et cetera. 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. It's very very low energy radiation. It's RF frequency, which means it's radio wave. So 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 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?
Tato? It's the whole team, Potato man, kidney Man, kidney.
Bees Man, Brazil nut man.
Brazil's he's just called the Brazilian.
I'm gonna disavow laughing at that joke. It 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? 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 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 Hadron Collider. The particles do collide and they create a lot of radiation, but it's one hundred meters underground, and so we're shielded by a lot of earth. So there's not a lot of radiation risk at the LHC.
No, I mean just from staring at your computer so long.
Oh yes, absolutely no. 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. You know, you can use apps or you can get a disciminer to track your radiation dose. There is one thing which people should be aware of, which is rate on gas, right on gas. If something happens and various places around the world and on the East Coast, it's this invisible radioactive gas that seeps out from people basements and it actually does kill like tens of thousands of people every year. So really, yeah, that is actually something you can do to potentially save yourself from cancer is just get like a cheap radon detector.
Wow, So this is gas that is radioactive, like it it's a gas 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 seeps up from underground. It's like a naturally occurring thing. So a lot of people like if the earth shifts, it'll start to collect in your basement, and then people can be getting these high doses of radiation without even knowing about it, breathing it in, right, yeah, 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, whatever, you should definitely look to see if you live in a kind of place where where radon occurs naturally in the sow, you should get it checked out because that is really a health hazard.
Well, this one's interesting. You also write 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'll kill almost everything in there. So that's one way we can use radiation to keep ourselves safe. Of course, 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, here's something that I've never quite understood, which is that radiation seems to be something that you can pass from one thing to the other. Do you know what I mean? Like chernobyl happen and all this radioactive stuff went out there. But it also you can also sort of radiate things make things radioactive. Yes, that's true.
Yeah, the way that works, it's not like contagion, like a disease, though there's something in common. What happens is that radiation can cause other things to become radioactive. Right, it can make yours, It can make new things unstable. So how does that work? Well, radiation like uranium breaks down or shoots out protons and neutrons. Those protons and neutrons can hit other atoms and make those unstable. It can cause like a chain reaction. Right, So radiation can 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 inside that concrete or that that brick or that block then became unstable because it got hit by a passing particle and now it's emitting part Oh 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 it can also you know, if you get overexplosive, 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, and that power can be used for good or for bad. Yeah, exactly. It can hurt you or it can help you. I think. One of my favorite stories about life and radiation. Came from my wife who told me this 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 blasts one open, it's like, no worries. I got forty nine backups and it just like repairs.
Whoa, and it fixes the 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 got a backup of your hard drive and something goes wrong, you recover from the backup. This thing is like fifty backups simultaneously at all times, and so it can survive a lot of radiation.
So that's something you can do to prevent radiation poisoning. Become yourself fifty times.
Become a bacteria. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend that, all.
Right, Daniel, Well, I think I learned that I'm going to have to stop eating bananas and going on airplanes.
Well, I think you should fly less, yes, but I think 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 violet light, it's gamma rays, it's particles shut up by radioactive elements, and it can certainly hurt you, and 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 where you're a sunscreen or Lisa hat.
That's right, And if you're eating a banana, make sure to wear a helmet.
Or make your make a hat out of ben at us. Does that cancel out?
That sounds totally safe to me. Absolutely, I totally recremmend that. 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.
Before 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 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielanhorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
There are children, friends and families walking, riding pass and the roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to get home safely. Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they're people too, Go safely, California from the California Office of Traffic Safety and Caltrans.
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