how does radiation work and why is it dangerous?
In: Physics
Think of radiation as bullets from a really really tiny machine gun shooting super fast and all the time. These bullets are so small and are moving so fast that they shoot right through your entire body and barely slow down at all, and you don’t even feel them!
Unfortunately, they are also so small that they cut your DNA, which is basically the instructions that every cell in your body has to follow to do their jobs and make another cell
Cells are just about everything that makes up your body! You can take pretty much any part and if you look small enough, like with a really really good microscope, you’d see cells *everywhere*. You’ve got skin cells, bone cells, brain cells, even silly things like tongue and nose cells!
It’s really important for all these cells to work right because just like a car that has a lot of parts to it that all do different things to make a car move, all of your cells are a part of you and they each have a specific job to do, and usually part of their job is to make more cells to help them out!
That’s what DNA is for. It tells each and every cell what they do all day and night, and how to make other cells and give them the same instructions to do their jobs and make other cells too!
Ever try building a Lego set with only part of the instructions? Or worse, with completely mixed up or missing instructions? You might get it to look kinda like the picture, but a lot of the important stuff just doesn’t seem right. Somewhere in there you got messed up instructions, like when the tiny bullets messed up your DNA.
So when a cell has messed up instructions (DNA) telling them how to do their job and make other cells, they don’t do their job right, and they don’t even make other cells right!
So, when too many of your cells start doing the wrong things for their jobs, or are making bad cells, or don’t make other cells at all, your entire body stops working right. Like when one small part of a car stops working it might still drive but if too many things break, it needs to be fixed before it’ll drive again
When this happens, it’s called “radiation sickness”, and it is very dangerous, because before long your entire body forgets what it’s supposed to be doing to keep you alive, and you die. It’s a really scary thing that can happen if you’re exposed to too much radiation, but it’s okay because the dangerous kind of radiation is usually stored farrrr away from people and in very safe places where really smart people can keep an eye on it
Not all radiation is bad though, some radiation is very helpful! We use different forms of radiation to communicate, to power cities, or even to make our skin a slightly different color! Some types of radiation are more dangerous, but it’s usually easy to tell which ones should be avoided because there are lots of signs around where we keep them telling you to stay away just in case
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