On this day in 1898, Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie discovered the element Polonium when it was extracted from the uranium ore pitchblende. Polonium was named after Marie Skłodowska-Curie’s homeland of Poland, which at the time was partitioned between three countries.
Polonium is a rare and highly radioactive metal with no stable isotopes, Due to the short half-life of all its isotopes, its natural occurrence is limited to tiny traces of the fleeting polonium-210 (with a half-life of 138 days) in uranium ores, as it is the penultimate daughter of natural uranium-238. Though two longer-lived isotopes exist (polonium-209 with a half-life of 124 years and polonium-208 with a half-life of 2.898 years), they are much more difficult to produce.
Polonium has few applications, and those are related to its radioactivity: heaters in space probes, antistatic devices, sources of neutrons and alpha particles, and poison. It is extremely dangerous to humans.
The cause of the 2006 death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian FSB agent who had defected to the United Kingdom in 2001, was identified to be poisoning with a lethal dose of 210Po; it was subsequently determined that the 210Po had probably been deliberately administered to him by two Russian ex-security agents.
Polonium-210 in tobacco contributes to many of the cases of lung cancer worldwide. Most of this polonium is derived from lead-210 deposited on tobacco leaves from the atmosphere; the lead-210 is a product of radon-222 gas, much of which appears to originate from the decay of radium-226 from fertilizers applied to the tobacco soils.
Marie Curie
Having a worse day than you…
Hmmm…
‘All you can eat’…
Those Brits…
Today is the birthday, in 1945, of Danny McCullock, guitarist in The Animals who had the 1964 UK & US No.1 single ‘House Of The Rising Sun’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-43lLKaqBQ
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