Did you know that bananas are radioactive? That's right - this humble fruit that we all know and love contains small amounts of naturally occurring radiation. But before you throw away your banana stash, let's take a closer look at what this really means. First, it's important to understand that radiation is all around us. We're exposed to it every day from sources like the sun, the earth's crust, and even our own bodies. And while high levels of radiation can be dangerous, the amount of radiation in a banana is so small that it poses no harm to humans. In fact, the radiation in a banana comes from a naturally occurring isotope of potassium called potassium-40 . This isotope is present in many foods and even in our bodies, and it's one of the reasons why bananas are such a great source of potassium. But just how much radiation does a banana actually contain? On average, a single banana contains about 0.1 microsieverts of radiation. To put that into perspective,
1. Alain Aspect 2. John F. Clauser 3. Anton Zeilinger 1. Alain Aspect The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 Born: 15 June 1947, Agen, France Affiliation at the time of the award: Institut d’Optique Graduate School – Université Paris-Saclay, Paris, France, École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France Prize motivation: “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science” Work The ability of two or more particles to coexist in what is referred to as an entangled state is one of the most amazing features of quantum physics. Even if two particles are far away, what happens to one of them in an entangled pair affects what happens to the other particle. Using entangled light particles, or photons, Anton Zeilinger carried out ground-breaking experiments in 1997 and 1998. These and other tests support the validity of quantum physics and open the door to quantum networks, computers, and encrypted communicat