WORLD ACHIEVEMENT

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIX, Issue 70, 20 February 1939, Page 9

WORLD ACHIEVEMENT

RADIUM AGAIN. The mind reels when we consider for a moment what really happens every second of every hour of every day that a piece of radium is active. We may see a sample between two thin glass plates—the minutest speck of star-like dust on a background as black as midnight. We take it from a cupboard, examine it closely, and find that what look like sparks are being given off all the time. AA’e put it away and examine it again a few hours later —still - the radio-activity gives some indication of itself by the shooting stars. AVe look at it again after it has been in the cupboard a year—and still the activity goes on; and if we put it at the back of the cupboard and leave it there for twenty years we shall see the showers of sparks just the same. It never stops. It never wears out. It never rests. Apparently it never changes, though it is really changing all the time. In anything from 1600 to 1730 years (as we have seen in a previous panel) half the nuclei of its atoms will have burst. It is a long period for this shower of activity to go on without intermission, and it staggers us to think that in all these 1600 years (to take the lesser figure) the speck of radium we are considering is throwing out 24.000 million nuclei a second. The* wonder behind all this is, first that w r e know anything of it, a triumph of modern achievement; and secondly that we know how to use many of the rays emanated, especially for the healing of disease.—(L.)