Get smarter in six brain stuff from house Stuff Works dot com. Hi, Am Marshall Brain. When most people hear the word radiation, it tends to cause fear. But the fact is that we are all irradiated every day. How much radiation do we get and where does it come from? A good part of the radiation that we get every day comes from the air and from the ground. Cosmic rays from space bombard Earth twenty four hours a day
and give us a dose of radiation from above. Different radioactive elements in the ground are doing the same thing from below. Denver turns out to be not a great place to live if you want to avoid radiation. The altitude means more cosmic radiation, and the ground is about twice as radioactive as the rest of the country. We also get radiation from the food and water we consume, and if you smoke cigarettes there's more radiation coming in. Even something as simple as a brick can cause radiation.
People who live in a brick house are in a brick building get more radiation than those who don't. Overall, the average person in the US received something like three hundred to four hundred milli rims of radiation per year from all these different sources, then things like medical and dental X rays add to the total. For comparison, a chest X ray might give you ten milli rams. A Torso cat scan might give you a hundred milli ram. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast?
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