Marie curie?

Question

What type of work does Marie curie do? Description please. I kinda already searched the net

Answer 1

Maria Skłodowska-Curie (born Maria Skłodowska; known in France and most other countries as Marie Curie; November 7, 1867 – July 4, 1934) was a Polish-French physicist and chemist. She was a pioneer in the field of radioactivity, the first twice-honored Nobel laureate (and still today the only laureate in two different sciences), and the first female professor at the Sorbonne.

She was born in Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire, the youngest to Polish parents and lived there until she was 24. In 1891 she went to Paris, France, to study science. She obtained her higher degrees and conducted nearly all her scientific work there, and became a naturalized French citizen. She founded the Curie Institutes in Paris, France, and in her home town, Warsaw. She was the wife of Pierre Curie.

At the Sorbonne, she met and married Pierre Curie, a fellow-instructor. Skłodowska had begun her scientific career in Paris with an investigation of the magnetic properties of different kinds of steel; it was their mutual interest in magnetism that had drawn her and Curie together. Eventually they studied radioactive materials, particularly pitchblende — the ore from which uranium was extracted — which had the curious property of being more radioactive than the uranium extracted from it. By 1898 they had deduced that the pitchblende must contain traces of an unknown radioactive substance far more radioactive than uranium. On December 26, 1898, Skłodowska-Curie announced the existence of this substance.

Through several years' unceasing work in the most difficult physical conditions, they processed several tons of pitchblende, progressively concentrating the radioactive substances and eventually isolating the chloride salts (refining radium chloride on April 20, 1902) and identifying two previously unknown chemical elements. The first, they named "polonium," in honor of Skłodowska-Curie's native country, Poland, then still partitioned among three empires, and the other "radium," for its intense "radioactivity" — a word coined by Skłodowska-Curie.

In 1903, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Pierre Curie, Marie Curie, and Henri Becquerel the Nobel Prize in Physics, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel."

Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize. Eight years later, she received the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, "in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element".

In an unusual decision, Skłodowska-Curie intentionally refrained from patenting the radium-isolation process, leaving it open so that the scientific community could do research unhindered.

A month after accepting her 1911 Nobel Prize, she was hospitalized with depression and a kidney ailment.

Skłodowska-Curie was the first person to win or share two Nobel Prizes. She is one of only two people who have been awarded a Nobel Prize in two different fields, the other being Linus Pauling (Chemistry, Peace). She remains the only woman to have won two Nobel Prizes, and the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different science fields. Nevertheless, the French Academy of Sciences refused to abandon its prejudice against women, and she failed by one vote to be elected to membership.

During World War I, Skłodowska-Curie pushed for the use of mobile radiography units, which came to be popularly known as "Little Curies" (petites Curies), for the treatment of wounded soldiers. These units were powered using tubes of radium emanation, a colorless, radioactive gas given off by radium, later identified as radon. Skłodowska-Curie personally provided the tubes, derived from the radium she purified. Also, promptly after the war started, she donated her and her husband's gold Nobel Prize medals for the war effort.

After World War I, in 1921 and again in 1929, Skłodowska-Curie toured the United States, where she was welcomed triumphantly, to raise funds for research on radium. These distractions from her scientific labors, and the attendant publicity, caused her much discomfort but provided many resources for her work. Her second American tour succeeded in equipping the Warsaw Radium Institute, founded in 1925 with her sister Bronisława as director.

In her later years, Skłodowska-Curie headed the Pasteur Institute and a radioactivity laboratory created for her by the University of Paris.

Her death near Sallanches, Savoy, in 1934 was from aplastic anemia, almost certainly due to exposure to radiation, as the damaging effects of hard radiation were not yet known, and much of her work had been carried out in a shed with no safety measures. She had carried test tubes containing radioactive isotopes in her pocket and stored them in her desk drawer, remarking on the pretty blue-green light the substances gave off in the dark.

She was interred at the cemetery in Sceaux, where Pierre lay, but sixty years later, in 1995, in honor of their work, the remains of both were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris.

The Curies' elder daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 for discovering that aluminium could be radioactive and emit neutrons when bombarded with alpha rays. The younger daughter, Ève Curie, wrote the biography, Madame Curie, after her mother's death.

Answer 2

Marie Curie worked in both chemistry and physics. She received a Nobel Prize in Physics, along with husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel, for work on the radioactivity of certain elements like Uranium. She won a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of Radium.

She is the only person to have won two Nobel Prizes in the sciences. Linus Pauling's second prize was the Nobel Peace Prize.

Roentgen, not Curie, was the first to take a medical x-ray.

Answer 3

She (with Pierre) discovered the radium, radon and polonium elements, and got radiation poisoning of it. The lab notebooks used by the Curies are too highly contaminated to be safely handled today.

She introduced the word radioactivity.