Pierre Curie

The husband and wife team of Pierre and Marie Curie became interested in Becquerel’s discovery (The Discovery of Radioactivity). While experimenting with their own uranium-containing ore, they came up with the term "radioactivity" to describe the spontaneous emissions that they studied (The…

Radiation Therapy What is Radiation Therapy? Radiation therapy is one of the most common, innovative and successful forms of cancer treatments of the modern world. It can successfully treat and cure approximately 50 unique forms of cancer1, utilizing alpha, beta and gamma radiation to destroy or damage cancer cells2. This helps prevent the rapid multiplication of the destructive cells, with minimal impact upon the somatic cells surrounding the cancerous area, and treats both primary, and…

Sam Kean, a Washington D.C. writer with works in The New York Times Magazine, Mental Floss, Slate, The Believer, Air & Space, Science, and The New Scientist, has created a user-friendly book about how to explain the periodic table and the elements that occupy it by writing the book The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of Elements. He provides an insight into the world of chemistry that relates to his audience, even…

2.4 Medical Science It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has. – Hippocrates (460-377 BC), the ancient Greek physician – considered as one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine and, often referred to as the ‘Father of Medicine’ Visualize a chip that is implemented in the brain, which processes images from an artificial retina grafted in the eye and restores the vision of a blind person. Visualize a…

I n 1898, the radioactive elements Radium and Polonium were found by Marie and Pierre Curie. Thus the concept of treating cancers was born. The Curie’s work on radiation led to the possibility of cancer treatment, but also provided a better understanding of the atom. That is that an atom has a nucleus at its centre with surrounding energy shells which consist of negatively charged electrons. The electron was discovered in 1897 by J.J. Tomson, and was the first proved element of the atom. The…

planet long before the appearance of life on it, every living organism contains traces of radioactive substances. But less than a century that mankind discovered this phenomenon by scientists like Henri Becquerel, Wilhelm Roentgen and Marie and Pierre Curie and others. In 1945 we can say that tragically began the "Nuclear Age" with the fall of the first atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From there the certainty that nuclear bombs could destroy our civilization affects…

Within the first few decades of the 20th century, the science of physics was completely reformed with new understandings of the nature of atoms. In 1898 France, Paris, Pierre and his wife Marie Curie discovered a new substance within an ore of Uranium that they named radium that emitted large amounts of (as we now call) radioactivity. Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy Identified that atoms can break down and turn into different elements. For example if a block of uranium were left alone for…