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In 1896, French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium salts emitted invisible rays that could penetrate opaque materials. Marie and Pierre Curie subsequently isolated two highly radioactive elements, polonium and radium. They realized that these elements emitted rays that could ionize gases and discharge electroscopes.
To describe this phenomenon, the Curies coined the term "radioactive" from the Latin words radius and activus, reflecting the fact that the rays emitted by these substances were active and had their origin in the elements' atomic structure. The term was first used in their paper "On a New Substance Containing a New Element, Which We Propose to Call Polonium," published in 1898.
The discovery of radioactivity by the Curies revolutionized the field of physics and led to the development of new technologies, including nuclear power and medicine. The term "radioactive" has since become widely used to describe substances that emit ionizing radiation, which is composed of particles or electromagnetic waves with enough energy to remove electrons from atoms.
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