What are some of the industrial and medical applications of radioactivity and nuclear physics?
Radioactive materials give off charged particles (electrons, antielectrons, helium nuclei) and (uncharged) neutrons, and also high energy photons (packets of light). The charged particles collide with the charged particles in ordinary matter and give off more high energy photons. A photon has (is?) an electromagnetic field. If it has sufficient energy, it can interact with an electron and remove it from its atom. This is called ionizing radiation. Such radiation can, in sufficient doses, kill cells because, if it strikes DNA in enough places, it disrupts the molecule and prevents reproduction. and how is this property utilised in medicine and industries? In medicine, hard (high energy) X-rays are used to treat cancer. Because the cancerous cells divide more quickly than normal ones, they are more vulnerable, so the radiation kills the cancer cells preferentially. Sometimes the photons are delivered directly from an X-ray beam (e.g. breast cancer). In other cases, radioactive sources ma
