Apologies if the tag is wrong!
From what I understand, the radiation doesn’t do squat untill it’s ionized. The way it was explained to me is that the Radiation is the knife, while the ionization is the hand weilding the knife.
So how does it affect the body? I know it does something to our DNA but what does it do specifically?
Bonus Question: What did scifi writers assume Gamma Ray’s would do to Bruce Banner to make him the Hulk, as opposed to what it does IRL and just… kill you.
In: 63
There’s lots of different kinds of radiation. The light from a bulb, heat from a fire, etc..
Microwaves can cause molecules to vibrate to and make heat, so you can heat cells (cook them) until they die. No mutations, but dead cells anyway.
Ultraviolet (UV) light stimulates the bases that make up DNA to bond together. Your body has proteins to fix the damage by removing those bonded bits and replacing them, but periodically it makes a mistake and puts the wrong bases back in. When that happens, sometimes there’s subtle changes that cause the cell to stop working properly. It can cause it to go haywire and grow out of control (cancer), cause a inflammation, or just get overwhelmed and die. For people, the UV can’t get farther than our skin, so it means sunburn or skin cancer.
Ionizing radiation is fast-moving particles or very energetic packets of light that can hit a chemical bond and break it. The radiation itself doesn’t become ionized; it breaks apart molecules that become ions (charged atoms / molecules). This type of radiation can damage all sorts of bits of a cell and make some very harsh chemicals in a cell (and interfere with its function), but it’s really when they hit DNA that they cause the biggest issue. The energy is enough to break the DNA chain. A single nick can be repaired fairly easily, but if it happens while DNA is being copied, it might mean errors in the copy (mutations). A nick in multiple places might mean the DNA is cut and maybe reassembles differently the way (rearrangements of DNA). Those can cause cancer, or change the way something grows or looks. A lot of radiation can break the DNA into many pieces that cannot be repaired, and without the DNA intact the cells die off (radiation poisoning). This is the sort of radiation exposure we usually think of when we think of mutations or death from radiation.
Latest Answers