Our planet is far older than people had thought! Students can understand the mechanism of radioactive half-life and how it helps determine age by experimenting with pennies, dice, and sugar cubes ...

When unstable nuclei undergo change they give off radiation. Atoms which have unstable nuclei are radioactive and are called radioisotopes or radionuclides. The change that an unstable nucleus ...

In this lesson, students will simulate the randomness of decay in radioactive atoms and visualize the half-life of a sample radioactive element. This lesson can be completed in two (2) 45-minute class ...

Key fact Half-life is the time it takes for the activity of the source to fall to half its original value. The illustration below shows how a radioactive sample is decaying over time. From the ...

This rate of decay is constant for a given isotope, and the time it takes for one-half of a particular isotope to decay is its radioactive half-life. For example, about 1.5 percent of a quantity ...