Radon

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Third Edition, 1992). A radioisotope is a naturally or
artificially created isotope having an unstable nucleus that decays,
letting off alpha, beta, gamma rays until stability is reached (The America
Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition, 1992). Radon's
melting point is -71�C. The boiling point is -61.8�C. Radon is the densest
gas known (Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, 1995).
Radon is a heavy, colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-flammable gas
(therefore it cannot be detected with the human senses) produced by the
radioactive decay of radium, which is itself a product of uranium.
Radioactive means the emission or transmission of energy in the
form of waves through space or through a material medium; the term also
applies to the radiated energy itself. The term includes electromagnetic,
acoustic, and particle radiation, and all forms of ionizing radiation.
According to quantum mechanics, electromagnetic radiation may be viewed as
made up of photons. ...

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and he was the
first to elucidate the related concepts of the half-life and decay constant.
With Frederick Soddy at McGill University, Rutherford showed that elements
such as uranium and thorium became different elements (i.e. transmuted)
through the process of radioactive decay. At the time, such an incredible
idea was not to be mentioned in polite company: it belonged to the realm of
alchemy, not science. For this work, Rutherford won the 1908 Nobel Prize in
chemistry.
In 1909, now at the University of Manchester, Rutherford was
bombarding a thin gold foil with alpha particles when he noticed that
although almost all of them went through the gold, one in eight thousand
would ...

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