How Old Are You, Really?
My Twitter https://twitter.com/nessyhill | Instagram https://instagram.com/nessyhill Subscribe to BrainCraft! http://ow.ly/rt5IE I first heard about this story on RadioLab in their Elements...
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“Happy Birthday to you, happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear…” Jessica. She just turned 23 – well, so she thinks. Her birth certificate gives her age on paper, but physically her body parts are all different ages. Yours too. For example, the outer layer of your skin regenerates itself every two weeks. Even urban legend says the human body replaces itself every 7 years. So… how old are you, really? To work this out we need to travel back in time. It’s 1945 and the first atomic bomb is detonated at a test site in New Mexico. In the blast, something called Carbon-14 is emitted. Remember that the regular Carbon atom has 6 protons and 6 neutrons. It's sometimes called Carbon 12. Carbon-14 has 6 protons and 8 neutrons–it kind of takes two ...
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“Happy Birthday to you, happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear…” Jessica. She just turned 23 – well, so she thinks. Her birth certificate gives her age on paper, but physically her body parts are all different ages. Yours too. For example, the outer layer of your skin regenerates itself every two weeks. Even urban legend says the human body replaces itself every 7 years. So… how old are you, really? To work this out we need to travel back in time. It’s 1945 and the first atomic bomb is detonated at a test site in New Mexico. In the blast, something called Carbon-14 is emitted. Remember that the regular Carbon atom has 6 protons and 6 neutrons. It's sometimes called Carbon 12. Carbon-14 has 6 protons and 8 neutrons–it kind of takes two ...
