I stumbled upon a number of VERY INTERESTING papers recently, which are in fact genuine scientific investigations into matters we often take for granted, for eg. the radiation level of bananas.
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| Image: dvice.com |
I've read about radioactive bananas(oh by the way, all bananas are radioactive) in my nuclear physics class, and yet I never got bothered by it.
Bananas are radioactive because they contain potassium-40, which is pretty unstable. But you don't have to worry about gulping down the yellowish-radioactive-fruit, because it takes a whopping 37,290,000,000 bananas to kill you, and still, it won't qualify you for the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning.
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| Image: marcinthewild.com |
The paper takes 450mg as the mean amount of potassium contained in a banana. Of this, only a small percentage of the total mass is represented by potassium-40, around 0.0117%(5.27mg). The half-life of this small fraction is around 1.26 billion years, making the decay relatively slow, and hence ensuring a continuous burst of energy throughout your life.
The amount of energy released, however, is minute, around 0.0000000000000931 J/s, roughly 0.000000000107 Gray. It takes around 1 Gray to cause radiation sickness in an adult, and it takes 4 times that to have a good chance of killing someone. The simple multiplication that ensues gives 37,290,000,000 bananas.
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| Image: terry.ubc.ca |
Assuming that a dude takes a banana a day, oh... he would have to pump his age up to 102 million years in order to acquire enough bananas to kill himself.
Malcolm
info: https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/article/view/350/190
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