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Speaker 1: Get smarter in six brain stuff from house Stuff Works

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Speaker 1: dot com. Hi, Am Marshall Brain. When most people hear

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Speaker 1: the word radiation, it tends to cause fear. But the

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Speaker 1: fact is that we are all irradiated every day. How

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Speaker 1: much radiation do we get and where does it come from?

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Speaker 1: A good part of the radiation that we get every

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Speaker 1: day comes from the air and from the ground. Cosmic

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Speaker 1: rays from space bombard Earth twenty four hours a day

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Speaker 1: and give us a dose of radiation from above. Different

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Speaker 1: radioactive elements in the ground are doing the same thing

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Speaker 1: from below. Denver turns out to be not a great

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Speaker 1: place to live if you want to avoid radiation. The

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Speaker 1: altitude means more cosmic radiation, and the ground is about

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Speaker 1: twice as radioactive as the rest of the country. We

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Speaker 1: also get radiation from the food and water we consume,

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Speaker 1: and if you smoke cigarettes there's more radiation coming in.

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Speaker 1: Even something as simple as a brick can cause radiation.

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Speaker 1: People who live in a brick house are in a

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Speaker 1: brick building get more radiation than those who don't. Overall,

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Speaker 1: the average person in the US received something like three

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Speaker 1: hundred to four hundred milli rims of radiation per year

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Speaker 1: from all these different sources, then things like medical and

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Speaker 1: dental X rays add to the total. For comparison, a

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Speaker 1: chest X ray might give you ten milli rams. A

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Speaker 1: Torso cat scan might give you a hundred milli ram.

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Speaker 1: Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast?

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Speaker 1: If so, please send me an email at podcast at

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Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. For more on this and

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Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot com.