The big idea: polonium, radon and cigarettes

Polonium-210 budget in cigarettes.

Due to the relatively high activity concentrations of (210)Po and (210)Pb that are found in tobacco and its products, cigarette smoking highly increases the internal intake of both radionuclides and their concentrations in the lung tissues. That might contribute significantly to an increase in the internal radiation dose and in the number of instances of lung cancer observed among smokers. Samp...

children’s idea about cigarettes and smoking

conclusions since parents’ behaviors affect their children, it is advisable to implement effective interventional programs to increase parents’ awareness about smoking and its harmful environmental effects. results results of the study showed that 76.4% of children knew what a cigarette is; 41.2% had talked about smoking with their parents; 1.4% had asked to buy one due to the attractive appear...

Ecology's Big, Hot Idea

L ife is complicated. It comes in all sorts of shapes, sizes, places, and combinations, and has evolved a dizzying variety of solutions to the problem of carrying on living. Yet look inside a cell and life takes on, if not simplicity, then at least a certain uniformity—a genetic system based around nucleic acids, for example, and a common set of chemical reactions for turning food into fuel. An...

What's the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power

A key to understanding why School is what it is lies in recognizing a systematic tendency to deform ideas in specific ways in order to make them fit into a pedagogical framework. One of these deformations is described here as " disempowering ideas. " The insight leads to a new direction for innovation in education: re-empowering the disempowered ideas. Doing so is not easy: it needs a new epist...

THE BIG IDEA Beware the Next Big Thing