During World War I, Marie Curie left her lab behind, inventing a mobile X-ray unit that could travel to the battlefront and training 150 women to operate these ‘Little Curies.’
A recent Canadian trial reports breast cancer over-diagnosis rates of up to 55 per cent, from routine screening mammograms.
(Shutterstock)
October is breast cancer awareness month. Women should know there is no reliable evidence that routine mammograms reduce death from breast cancer, and there’s good evidence that they cause harm.
Spend many months attached to the ISS and see how well you grow.
NASA
If you want to live on Mars, you’re going to need to grow food. Seeds are naturally equipped to handle challenging Earth environments, but how well can they survive what they’ll encounter off-planet?
Captain, we’re being pummeled by cosmic rays!
muratart via Shutterstock.com
The true radiation risk from commercial flying has nothing to do with security scans. A radiation expert explains how much cancer risk the most frequent of flyers take on when they take to the skies.
Radiotherapy treats cancer by directing beams of high energy x-rays at the tumour.
from shutterstock.com
Getting the right amount of radiation is a fine balance between therapy and harm. A common way to improve the benefit-to-cure ratio is to fire multiple beams at the tumour from different directions.
A study found children are at greater risk of developing later cancers from radiation from CT scans.
from www.shutterstock.com.au
In a recent study of almost 11 million young Australians, we showed those exposed to a CT scan before the age of 20 had a small increase in cancer risk in the years after exposure.
In the early stage of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma the disease is curable in more than 90% of the cases.
Shutterstock
Did your holiday gift list include radiation-shielding undies to protect your privates from cellphone radio waves? A radiation expert explains they’re unnecessary – your phone won’t affect your fertility.
Refreshingly radioactive?
Drink image via www.shutterstock.com.
Back in the early 1900s, if you felt a bit sluggish you could reach for a beverage enhanced with radioactive elements to really add some pep to your step. It wouldn’t be a healthy choice, though.
‘A-Day’ marked the first of 23 atomic bomb explosions at Bikini.
Department of Energy
In the summer of 1946, the U.S. government detonated the first of many atomic bomb tests in the Marshall Islands. Seventy years of radiation exposure later, residents are still fighting for justice.
Tim Peake, Yuri Malenchenko and Tim Kopra are about to return to Earth after a six-month stay at the ISS.
NASA/Victor Zelentsov
Don’t throw away your phone quite yet. There are a lot of unanswered questions surrounding the latest study that found a connection between mobile phones and cancer.
Australia could take spent fuel from nuclear power stations overseas. This one is in South Korea.
IAEA Imagebank/Flickr
Chernobyl is already responsible for up to 5,000 cases of cancer in Europe.
After one reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant caught fire and exploded in 1986, the whole site was encased in a concrete sarcophagus.
Vladimir Repik/Reuters
The meltdown at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 exposed 572 million people to radiation. No other nuclear accident holds a candle to that level of public health impact.
Pripyat is often portrayed as a haunted ghost town.
EFREM LUKATSKY / AP/Press Association Images
Chernobyl’s liquidators have come up with some intriguing ways of dealing with what they’ve gone through – without directly confronting painful memories.
A breast cancer patient undergoes radiation treatment at a hospital in Honduras in 2012.
Jorge Cabrera/Reuters
Remediation will never get radiation to zero in the area affected by the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant. Rather than safety, the conversation should focus on acceptable risk.