Half Life Decay

​If you have 100g of a radioactive isotope, how much would you have after two half-lives-

a) if the half life is 3 years?

b) if the half life is 3 hours?

​trendlines in science

Trendlines are used to make clear the trend in the data

You can have linear and non-linear trends

Non-Linear trends can be exponential, logarithmic, quadratic or trigonometric

Linear trends- well, they are just straight line!

Here is a non linear exponential decaying trend

​Here is one that seems to be periodic

Radioactive decay is an exponentially decaying function

It is a rapidly decreasing function

But a very useful function because we can determine the half life of these radioactive isotopes

Which experiment had a longer half life?

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Can we use half life to predict amounts?

Suppose we start with 120 atoms of a radioactive sample, how many will remain after three half lives?

What percentage is that?

The half life of Carbon-14 is 5730 years. You have a sample that has only 25% of the original amount. How many years has passed?