Glow-in-the-dark paint

The use of radium for glow-in-the-dark paint cannot be relegated to history. While radium-laced paint was banned in the United States and Europe in the 1950s, the product and practice has not been prohibited in all countries. 

Glow-in-the-dark paint, available at craft stores, or nail polish... 

Pour some of the glow-in-the-dark paint or nail polish on the waxed paper. If you are using nail polish, keep a window open. 

Spread your newspaper on a flat surface and paint your stones using the glow-in-the-dark paint or nail polish. Paint one side of each stone. Once the stones are dry, turn them over and paint the other side. Do this until you ve covered the stones with two or three coats. When you finish, let them dry for at least 24 hours before continuing. 

Promethium-147 can also be obtained from the decay of Nd (which in turn can be produced by bombarding a uranium carbide target with energetic protons from a particle accelerator). Mixed with ZnS (a well-known light emitting material), Pm(III) chloride was used in the glow-in-the-dark paint used in analogue watches the particles emitted by the decay of the Pm excite the ZnS, which displays its luminescence. 

Other uses are to produce phosphorescence and fluorescence in organic compounds and for scintillation screens on instruments used to detect radiation. Radium salts were used in the past to paint the dials of luminous clock faces that glow in the dark. 

In the 1920s, women working in a New Jersey factory painted watch faces with an element called radium that glowed in the dark. The women constantly straightened their paintbrush bristles between their lips to keep them pointed enough to draw the tiny numbers. A few years later, the women began to have strange sores, pains all... 

Figure 4.4 "The Radium Girls" were women in 1920s New Jersey who painted watch faces with radium, an element that glows in the dark. Because the women were in constant contact with the radioactive element, they experienced numerous health problems years later. Some even died because of radiation poisoning.

When she blew her nose, her handkerchief glowed in the dark. The woman who made this statement in the early 1900s was one of several factory workers who were hired to paint clock and watch dials with luminous paint. 

This paint glowed in the dark, because it contained radium (atomic number 88), which is... 

An awful fate befell many of the young women hired to paint radium onto the dials of watches, so that they would glow in the dark. The original luminous watches had been designed for soldiers fighting in the trenches during the First World War, but their novelty stimulated a... 

Lxiniinous paints, such as those used on watch dials, contain chemicals that absorb light and reemit it over an extended period. The phenomenon was first noted in the 1500s, when stones discovered near Bologna were found to glow after exposure to sunlight. Some would glow in the dark for years after they d been heated intensely in the presence of carbon black. 

The heaviest member of the alkaline earth metals is radium (Ra), a naturally radioactive element discovered by Pierre and Marie Cnrie in 1898. Radinm was initially isolated from the nraninm ore pitchblende, in which it is present as approximately 1.0 g per 7.0 metric tons of pitchblende. How many atoms of radinm can be isolated from 1.75 X 10 g pitchblende (1 metric ton = 1000 kg) One of the early uses of radium was as an additive to paint so that watch dials coated with this paint wonld glow in the dark. The longest-lived isotope of radinm has a half-life of 1.60 X 10 years. If an antique watch, manufactured in 1925, contains 15.0 mg radinm, how many atoms of radinm will remain in 2025 ... 

Radium is a white metal, but blackens on exposure to air. The chemical properties of the element are similar to those of barium. Like other heavy elements of group 2 radium salts impart a characteristic color (a carmine red) to a flame. Radium is radioactive, over a million times more radioactive than the same quantity of uranium. It emits a, 3 and y rays as well as radioactive radon gas. When a radium salt is mixed with a substance such as zinc sulfide, the substance glows in the dark. Small amounts of this mixture was used in the mid-1900s to paint the hands and numbers of watches. Exposure to radium can cause cancer. On the contrary ordinary cancerous cells may be killed by directed radium radiation. This treatment is nowadays utilized for only a few kinds of cancer. 

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