Radiation & Superheroes

I can say for sure that I know way more about radiation & superheroes today than I did 2 days ago.  I spent most of my afternoon yesterday reading about types of radiation for this assignment that I'm trying to work on.  Trying to find out what types of radiation each superhero was exposed to was difficult.  Most of their histories just say "radiation."  And some of the types of radiation they were exposed to won't work with this project that these students are working on.  BTW, their assignment is to look for radiation in items we use in everyday life and look at the impact it's had on our lives.

My goal was to have 3 superheroes with different types of radiation exposure so we could have 3 types of radiation being studied by students in this library instruction.  Then they could partner off and look at different  resources available that will help them find not only items with radiation in them but resources to help them move forward.

First I looked at the Fantastic Four.  They were exposed to cosmic rays when they took their spaceship into outer space. While fun & interesting, cosmic rays are not found in everyday items on earth.  If they were, as my husband put it, we would all be dead.  They're quite deadly these cosmic rays so I couldn't use that.

Then I looked at The Hulk.  Success!  Dr. Bruce Banner was exposed to gamma radiation from a bomb he invented which gives him his alter-ego, The Hulk.  Gamma radiation is used to irradiate food, as a way to do surgery, and in cancer treatments.  Perfect!!

Next I looked at Daredevil.  He was blinded as a child by radioactive waste while saving an old man from a truck barreling down the road.  Doesn't say what kind of radioactive waste.  Interesting, also incredibly unrealistic, but also not helpful.

On to Spider-man!  For this project, we're using the comic book version of Spider-man because he was bitten by a radioactive spider.  But there is no reference made about how this spider became radioactive or what type of radioactivity he had.  But considering the effect it had on Peter Parker, one can only assume that it was ionizing radiation since non-ionizing radiation is around us everyday and doesn't cause us all to be spider-people.  So after discussing with my physicist husband, we decided that I could use Spider-man and his ionizing radioactive spider and make that alpha & beta particles. 

That gave me two superheroes but I still needed a third.  And that was HARD. There are a lot of them out there that I have never heard of before and if I haven't then most likely lots of other people haven't either.

After lots of review with physicist husband, we settled on Dr. Manhattan.  The blue guy from the movie & comic books Watchmen.  According to the web sites I found on him, was disintegrated in an Intrinsic Field Subtractor.  A fictional science contraption.  So I kept reading and apparently his blue "glow" comes from Cherekov radiation, or electromagnetic radiation (according to husband). COOL, electromagnetic radiation is all over the place!

So my first hurdle is done.  I found 3 superheroes and 3 types of useful radiation.  Reading the stories of these superheroes is fun, they're all kind of ridiculous.