Curie’s Notebooks Still Emit Radioactivity After a Century
More than a century after Marie Curie’s experiments, her notebooks remain contaminated by radium-226 (half-life ~1,600 years). The original volumes are kept in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, with researchers signing risk waivers and wearing protective gear to inspect them. Radium decays into other radioactive products (including radon), so the pages will remain hazardous for millennia, highlighting the lasting costs of early scientific discovery.