#Bananas produce antimatter free
Living things contain a lot of free protons. They’re to explain the pictures that follow. No, those aren’t labels for weird cuts of meat. To explain, here’s a picture of a dragon: I may, however, have found a way around this. Whereas potassium-40 occurs in nature, carbon-11 is artificial, produced by bombarding boron atoms with 5-MeV protons from a particle accelerator. And its half-life is only 20 minutes, which means it’ll produce antimatter quickly. It decays into boron, which isn’t a problem for the body. It decays almost exclusively by positron emission.
It’s carbon, which the body is used to dealing with. Carbon-11 is just about perfect, as far as biological sources of antimatter go. One of the other nucleides used in PET scanning is carbon-11. By measuring the angles of these gamma rays and their timing, the machine can decide if they’re just stray gamma rays or if they, in fact, emerged from the annihilation of a positron. The positron annihilates with an electron, and very fancy cameras pick up the two resulting gamma rays. In PET, an ordinary molecule (like glucose) is treated so that it contains a positron-emitting atom (most often fluorine-18, in the case of glucose). For that, we use positron-emission tomography (PET) scanners. We can shoot radiation or sound waves through them to see what their insides look like, but that usually only gives us still pictures, and it doesn’t tell us, for instance, which organs are consuming a lot of blood, and therefore might contain tumors. As you may have noticed by the fact that you don’t vomit profusely every time you go outside, human beings are opaque. Nuclear medicine, specifically (which, by the way, is just about the coolest name for a profession). Luckily, modern medicine gives us another option. And, like I said, of that radiation, only 0.001% is in the form of usable positrons. For one thing, its half-life is over a billion years, meaning it doesn’t produce much radiation. Unfortunately, potassium-40 is about the worst antimatter source there is. What matters is that there are natural sources of antimatter. But that doesn’t matter, for our purposes. The positron probably won’t make it more than a few atoms before it attracts a stray electron and annihilates, producing a gamma ray. But about one time in 100,000, one of its protons will transform into a neutron, releasing a positron (the antimatter counterpart to the electron) and an electron neutrino. Potassium-40 almost always decays by emitting a beta particle (transforming itself into calcium-40) or by cannibalizing one of its own electrons (producing argon-40). And cream of tartar is the most radioactive thing in your kitchen, unless you’ve got a smoke detector in there.) It also means that oranges, potatoes, and soybeans are radioactive. (It’s the reason you always hear people talking about radioactive bananas.
The most common isotope of potassium is the stable potassium-39, with a few percent potassium-41 (also stable), and a trace of potassium-40, which is radioactive. An average human being contains about 140 milligrams of potassium, which we need to run important stuff like nerves and heart muscle. Antimatter does occur naturally in the human body, though.
There’s one catch: my solution required antimatter (and quite a bit of it). In a recent post, I decided that plasma-temperature dragonfire might be feasible, from a physics standpoint.
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