They are incorporated into your molecules and eventually decay and produce radiation in your body. You emit radiation because many of the foods you eat, the beverages you drink and even the air you breathe contain radionuclides such as Potassium-40 and Carbon-14. Your radiation dose level can go up by one or two millirem for every eight hours you spend sleeping next to your similarly radioactive loved one. That’s the same amount of radiation you’d be exposed to from having four chest X-rays. You receive an annual 40-millirem dose from the natural radioactivity originating inside of you. Your body is a small-scale mine of radioactive particles. Scientists believe that almost all of your body’s mass comes from the kinetic energy of the quarks and the binding energy of the gluons. If your mass doesn’t come from the masses of these particles, where does it come from? Energy. Gluons, carriers of the strong nuclear force that holds these quarks together, are completely massless. The mass of the quarks, which comes from their interaction with the Higgs field, accounts for just a few percent of the mass of a proton or neutron. The protons and neutrons inside of an atom’s nucleus are each made up of three quarks. If we lost all the dead space inside our atoms, we would each be able to fit into a particle of lead dust, and the entire human race would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.Īs you might guess, these spaced-out particles make up only a tiny portion of your mass. If the nucleus were the size of a peanut, the atom would be about the size of a baseball stadium.
Nuclei are around 100,000 times smaller than the atoms they’re housed in. The size of an atom is governed by the average location of its electrons. The very heavy elements in you were made in exploding stars. The hydrogen atoms in you were produced in the big bang, and the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms were made in burning stars. While most of the cells in your body regenerate every seven to 15 years, many of the particles that make up those cells have actually existed for millions of millennia.
You also contain much smaller amounts of the other elements that are essential for life. About 99 percent of your body is made up of atoms of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.
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