From Marie Curie to the Demon Core: When Radiation Kills

When we hear the word "radiation," we tend to think of atomic bombs (like the ones that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), or environmental mishaps like the three-eyed fish living outside Springfield's nuclear power plant on The Simpsons. But radiation - a term that refers to the transmission of energy through waves and particles - is not always a destructive force. "The word radiation is a lot broader than people realize," says Johnathan M. Links, a medical physicist and professor at Johns