Marie Curie's notebooks remain radioactive more than a century later because they were contaminated with radium-226, an element with a half-life of around 1,600 years. As a result, the manuscripts require special handling, with researchers wearing protective equipment to access them. Marie and Pierre Curie worked under extremely challenging conditions to isolate radium, and their groundbreaking discoveries went on to transform science, medicine and our understanding

Marie Curie and her husband spent nearly four years boiling down seven tonnes of pitchblende in a leaky Paris shed with no ventilation to isolate one-tenth of a gram of radium…

Marie Curie's notebooks remain radioactive more than a century later because they were contaminated with radium-226, an element with a half-life of around 1,600 years. As a…