Final Post

Ok, here we go, final post:

My type of electromagnetic wave: Gamma rays
Range of frequencies for Gamma rays: > 10^19 Hz.
Range of wavelengths for Gamma rays: < 10^(-11) m

Application of Gamma Rays: Cancer treatment (radiation therapy)

How are Gamma Rays used to treat cancer: Gamma rays are created by colliding fast-moving electrons into a metal plate using a linear accelerator (also called a LinAc for short). The Gamma rays are then directed towards the cancer in the patient. The Gamma rays damage the DNA of the cancer cells, which can cause the cells to die.

Features of Gamma Rays that make them useful for cancer treatment: In order to do damage to DNA, radiation must be ionising. Ionising radiation is radiation that has a lot of energy in its photons. Since Gamma Rays have the most energy of any electromagnetic radiation, they are therefore highly ionising. X-rays and Gamma rays are the only types of radiation used for cancer treatment because they are the ionising ones.
So the feature of Gamma rays that make them useful for cancer treatment is their high energy in their photons.

That's it!

Giant book of physics

So I borrowed this book off a friend of mine who does physics. It's his first year Uni text book.

It's huge, it's got heaps of stuff and a lot of it is beyond what we do, but there's also good stuff for us as well.

I looked in the index for Electromagnetic and found the entry for electromagnetic spectrum. It has a similar image to what I've already posted.

It also has a section covering radiation therapy for treating cancers:

If anyone else wants to borrow this book I can bring it in and loan it to you and you can take some photos of it if you want, no problem.

I think I now have enough information from several different sources to complete this assignment so I think this'll be my last entry before the final one with the summary in it.

Uses of Gamma Rays

So from the links I found before I decided that I'd use cancer treatment as a use of gamma rays because that's pretty cool.

So this time I started searching "how do gamma rays kill cancer cells" and I came across a couple of useful websites,

http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/radiation-therapy/radiation-fact-sheet

This explains pretty well some of the problems of treating cancer with gamma radiation. It does seem to focus on a lot of the medical stuff into a lot of depth.

http://www.cancer.org/treatment/treatmentsandsideeffects/treatmenttypes/radiation/radiationtherapyprinciples/radiation-therapy-principles-types-of-radiation

This site is better at explaining that gamma rays are ionizing because they have a lot of energy, and that other types of waves don't ionize because they have less energy. It is the ionizing that damages DNA and caused the cells to die.

I also found this cool YouTube video that was really useful at helping me understand cancer treatment a bit better.

An overview

So I also found this website that gives a good overview of the whole spectrum. I found this one by doing a web search for "types of electromagnetic radiation" instead of an image search like I did before.

http://cmb.physics.wisc.edu/pub/tutorial/spectrum.html

A useful image

So I tried searching "Types of electromagnetic waves" and did an image search. There's heaps of images and they are all pretty similar. Here's one that I thought was pretty good:

It's not really precise enough to actually use to answer the questions, but it does give you a good overall idea of what's happening.

First findings! A set of useful links.

Hey guys,

So I started off by simply searching on Google for "Gamma Rays" and found a bunch of useful sites:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_ray
Yeah I know Wikipedia can be unreliable, but it has a lot of good information. It describes a bunch of different uses, and gives the frequencies and wavelengths for them.

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/gamma.html
This is from the US encironmental protection agency. It mostly focuses on the health impacts but provides useful information I can use to confirm the information I got from other websites.

http://www.livescience.com/50215-gamma-rays.html
This site has a lot of information that confirms what I found out from Wikipedia. It discusses using  rays to treat cancer so that can be my use!

http://www.britannica.com/science/gamma-ray
This site also talks about gamma rays for PET scans, apparently they are used for that as well.