Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What Is Radiation?

Episode Date: May 30, 2019

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Find out how you can make stars part of your talent strategy at tear the paper sealing.org. Brought to you by opportunity at work in the ad council. 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 a, 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 scientific breakthroughs are worth sacrificing your life. Well, you know, some of history's most famous scientists like Marie Curie 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? Hmm. How tasty are we talking about?

We're talking long, yellow, and comes naturally wrapped 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 Curie's research and your favorite snack. Oh. Have you heard the joke of what did Pierre Curie tell Marie Curie? No, what did Pierre Curie tell Mary Curie?

He said, my dear, you are positively glowing tonight. You look radiant. Oh, man. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of Ph.D. Comics. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. And together with the authors of the book, We Have No Idea, and the host of this podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio.

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, you know, safety gear when you eat a banana, right? Banana slip-proof shoes. No, I'm talking about a helmet.

If you have a helmet on me, you eat a banana, then, you know, it's no big deal. Oh, I see, I see. Today on the podcast, we're tackling a subject that a couple of people ask us 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 say, 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?

Tastes like bananas? Right. Is it that, are those cans 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 thinks, oh, I could use some of that.

Exactly. Ooh, where do I get some? Yeah. It definitely is a boogeyman, right? It's definitely something that people are afraid of. Right. And I think the roots of it 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 is a product of modern science. Yeah. I mean, it was sort of discovered not too long ago, right? Maybe 100 years? Yeah, exactly. It's around the turn of the century, like late 1800s. People started to discover x-rays and catherud rays and all sorts of other kind of rays. They didn't really know what it was.

It 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 see you could use it to like take pictures of 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 everyday intuition yeah exactly and I think that's part of the the 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 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 what 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 just reflects that right i think what you see in comic books are like reflect what

what the population is thinking about, what they are afraid of, right? Which is why radiation played such a big role, 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 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 in lab coats cackling maniacally.

Right, not good things. But we were wondering, do you think people really understand radiation? Like, do they know what it is, what it means, and is it all that bad? 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 understanding? The answer is yes. understanding. The answer is yes. You are being radiated. Right now. Right now. You listen to this podcast, right? And so you're getting sonic radiation right now. But I was curious. Not just from the brilliance of our thoughts and words, but you are literally right now bathed in radiation. Probably. That's right. No, exactly. 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 do to deserve it, right? It's probably your fault. 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 radiations. Okay, and are there other forms also? Yeah, there's, like, UV 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 MRI there's radiation it goes through things great 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 isn't that kind of like related to free radicals or something and what is radiation a little bit about uv about radiation about radiation but specifically UV radiation, which causes thymidine 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 radiation. Radiation is photon, so no? Okay. Well, I don't know, like it gives off, like, I don't know, it comes from somewhere, but I can give you cancer and stuff. Like, I don't know what it's made out of? No, I don't know what it's made out of.

Okay, cool. What is radiation? I don't know. I think that makes superheroes or something? I don't know. Is it good or bad? It's bad. It's bad.

Okay. All right, great. All right. So I like the person who said, it's the thing that makes superheroes. I was like, yes. Is that me? Did I answer that question? There is something good about radiation.

It gives these superheroes, exactly. I mean, that's what we should do. We should just take a bunch of our soldiers and radiate them and see what happens. No, let's not do that. 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.

Yes. Like it's not good. Definitely bad, right? Radiation, big radiation's 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, you know, smile and bounce around on the screen with a little ditty playing in the background. Like a cute little cancer cell or something.

exactly a cute a cute little wave or 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, something that moves,

that propagates, it goes through things, right? That's pretty 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 a B on that answer.

And one of the guys who I asked is actually a physics professor in my department. I cost it on the street to ask him this question. And I gave 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 us, Daniel. 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 that 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 yeah there's lots of different kinds of light right which which come because they have different they wiggle at different speeds right wiggle really really fast the gamma rays they wiggle really really slow their radio waves they 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 focus 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 in here in my house, in my room, 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 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 light from the photons in your room is also radiation. That's probably not what 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 a cool. 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, so that you're saying, the 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 lygo that big interferometer 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 because matter if it has energy if it 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 superhero, Daniel. I knew 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 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 really a chemical or a force. People do get treatment for cancer that's called chemotherapy,

and some people think that involves radiation. It doesn't involve chemicals, but it's why 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 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 radiation. It's not just everything. There are things that are not radiation. Yeah. 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's in the universe that has energy? Well, there's matter, right? Matter has energy. There's radiation. Radiation has energy. 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 transformed into something else. Yes, right. A lot of that energy transformed into matter, right? And the universe spread out and cooled, right? And all of those photons were absorbed, right? They were sucked up by matter, which was no longer ionized, like it formed atoms, and those atoms could absorb photons.

So in the very first period of the universe, probably like the first 60,000 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 eats 72% of the whole pie of 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 a composition, what it's made out of, is not constant. You sound like somebody talking about your niece, your nephew. You're like, you got so big, I can't believe how tall you got. Like, whoa, how did you get so hairy?

What? Your voice changed. It used to be all radiation, and now you got these, now you got so much dark energy. Now you hear this email teen. 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 to turn on and swamp dark energy?

Is radiation going to come roaring back? Or, you know, who knows, right? But I like sort of how you said it, 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, like energy that somehow causes damage or affects your body.

bodyly functions or your cellular 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 different kinds of radiation that can damage you.

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 ionize. Ionizing means that it deposits enough energy on the electron in an atom that the electron escapes, right? It's like gets the 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 it can cause mutations and all sorts of stuff. But wait, what about regular light?

Like from a light bulb, why doesn't that one cause any damage? Because it's absorbed by yourself. 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 pass through you you would be invisible that you know of but what do I 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 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 it's not a it's uh 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 of the molecules in the atmosphere is it something like that or is it just just energy, it just barrels through. It's just energy, yeah. 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 light 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? 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? 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 particle itself. You're saying bullets don't kill people. It's the protons in the bullet that kill you. It does. Kinetic energy kills people, bullets. People don't kill people. Physics does.

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 on 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? It doesn't have to be a small thing. You deposit a lot of kinetic energy on somebody, you're going to hurt them.

Now, a 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 it doesn't 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 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 so 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 simulate the earth with more or less radiation. Say, like, would life evolve more rapidly with more radiation because things would mutate faster or do 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 are tempted to simplify. And superheroes. But you touched on something interesting, which is that, you know,

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 sun our sun is a huge huge um factory of radiation i mean some of that radiation is good like the light that uh 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 uh 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 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 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 it a bit more. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m. everything changed.

There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus. focus to a threat that hides in plain sight.

That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her.

Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not?

To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show. And we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino.

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I mean, seriously, y'all. The guest list is absolutely stacked. for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports.

All right, we're talking about radiation, and we know that it's basically anything that It 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. 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. Mm-hmm. Because of the radiation. Yeah, and, you know, those folks are exposed to more radiation

than people who work at, 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 some of the best data we get is when we fly around the world,

like we fly to CERN all the time in Switzerland and back, and we take these long flights. We run the app. You mean 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 device. So it's definitely a lot of radiation up there.

Does that mean you have to you put on sunblock whenever you get on an airplane? Sunblock won't help you from protons, man. Oh, it won't? No. It'll protect 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. Wow. Does that mean that people who fly a lot age faster? Possibly?

They're definitely at increased risk for cancer. Yeah, absolutely. Yikes. Yeah, exactly. 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 decays, and it shoots off radiation. Wait, 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 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 by 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. I wonder who the boss of that lobby is called. Is 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 1% of the average daily exposure to radiation. So you're getting radiation from the sun and just from natural radioactive elements in the earth and stuff. And so eating a banana does increase your amount of radiation, but really by a tiny amount.

So go out there and eat 100 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 they want to see if 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 truck load 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 seeds, nuts. They all irradiate 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 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 want. I'm saying French fries won't give you cancer due to the radiation. That's all I'm going to say. Don't 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. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, he's been a bombing. The explosion actually impelled metal glass.

The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't. don't trust her now he's insisting we get to know each other but i just want her gone now hold up isn't that against school policy that sounds totally inappropriate well according to this person this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age and it's even more likely that they're cheating

he insists there's nothing between them i mean do you believe him well he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet so do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not to hear the explosive finale listen to the okay Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all. Season 2 of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino to the show, and we had a blast.

We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? the final, the final, and the locker room. I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate, you can't get back, showing up to the locker room every morning

just to shit talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar A.Z. Fudd. I mean, seriously, y'all, the guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah. Spain on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. All right, Daniel, break it down for us. Is radiation good for us or bad for us? 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. you in other ways, you know. Let's 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 has less energy, then it can

just sort of deposit some energy, 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 um 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 irradiate yourself because um you're trying to kill something inside of you yeah 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 like a medical game of chicken. 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 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, people who are real experts at that. Yeah. But I think it's a lot of, 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 911 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. 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 scaremongering about like the dangers of cell phones and is 5G 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 waves. So it's very low frequency, which means it's very low energy. So it can't ionize your atoms. 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, 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 beans man. Brazil, not man. Brazil. No, he's just called the Brazilian. I'm going to disavow laughing at that joke. It seems culturally insensitive somehow. I'm not sure how.

But yeah, radiation plays a big role, right? And not just in communication 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 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 know that there's a lot of radiation out there. There definitely is. But yet you still go to work. Yet people go to work. Yeah, you can 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 100 meters underground and so we're

shielded by a lot of Earth. So there's not a lot of radiation risk at the LHC. 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 disimeter to track your

radiation dose there is one thing which people should be aware of which is radon gas radon gas is something happens in various places 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 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 this is gas that is radioactive Like it's 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, you'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. Wow. 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 young kids or whatever you should definitely look to see if you live in a kind of place where radian where radon occurs naturally and if so you should get it checked out because that is really a health hazard well this one's interesting you also wrote 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 stakes, 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 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 happened and all this radioactive stuff went out there.

But you can also sort of irradiate things, make things radioactive. Is that 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 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 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 a block of concrete, right? That got irradiated a lot. Then it becomes radioactive. And the reason is that stuff inside that concrete or that brick or that block then became unstable because it got hit by a passing particle and now it's emitting particles. Oh, wow.

Yeah. So it's sort of good and bad, right? Radiation can be good for all these treatments to communicate, to. to kill bacteria but it can also, you know, if you get overexposed to it, it can give you cancer. Yeah, exactly. 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. 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 the story about this amazing bacteria they discovered that can survive like almost any amount of radiation. And the way it does it is it has like 50 copies of its DNA inside it. So if radiation comes in and blast one open, it's like, no worries, I got 49 backups and it just like repairs itself. And it fixes the one that got damaged too, right now. 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 got a backup of your hard drive and something goes wrong. you recover from the backup, this thing is like 50 backups simultaneously at all times. And so we can survive a lot of radiation. So that's something you can do to prevent radiation poisoning. Just copy yourself 50 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, ultraviolet light, it's gamma rays, it's particles shot out 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 wear your sunscreen or at least a hat. That's right. And if you're eating a banana, make sure to wear a helmet. Or make a hat out of bananas. Does that cancel out? That sounds totally safe to me. Absolutely. I totally recommend 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. 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, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.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. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, Kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged. Terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon.

This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If a baby is giggling in the back seat, they're probably happy.

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