I watched the Chernobyl miniseries recently and read up about some of the specifics a bit. A lot of it is still beyond my comprehension, but I ran into the picture below (i hope you can see it):
It says (among other things) that sleeping next to someone increases your absorbed dose of radiation, and also that eating a banana increases your absorbed dose. From what I understand so far, many things (I assume mostly organic things) are a bit radioactive. Is this true and if so, why?
In: Physics
There are different isotopes of elements. Different isotopes have the same number of protons, but a different number of neutrons. This changes their properties slightly, for example, making them radioactive. Many of these isotopes are naturally occuring, so if you have an object of a large enough size, there is a good chance that they are *very* slightly radioactive, yes. But you will never really notice it.
For example, bananas include potassium. They include different potassium isotopes, mostly Potassium-39 and Potassium-41, which are stable and not radioactive, but also a small amount of Potassium-40, which is radioactive.
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