{"id":5822,"date":"2015-05-10T16:50:55","date_gmt":"2015-05-10T21:50:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=5822"},"modified":"2023-12-14T19:24:42","modified_gmt":"2023-12-15T01:24:42","slug":"morbid-fact-du-jour-for-may-10-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=5822","title":{"rendered":"Morbid Fact Du Jour for May 10, 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s Subatomic Yet Truly Morbid Fact!<\/h3>\n

Ir\u00e8ne\u00a0Joliot-Curie was Marie Curie’s slender, sad-eyed daughter. A birlliant scientist herself, Ir\u00e8ne\u00a0and her husband, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot-Curie, picked up on Marie’s work and soon one-upped her. Rather than just finding radioactive elements, Irene figured out a method for converting tame elements into artificially radioactive atoms by bombarding them with subatomic particles. This work led to her own Nobel Prize in 1935. Unfortunately, Joliot-Curie relied on polonium as her atomic bombardier. And one day in 1946, not long after Poland had been wrested from Nazi Germany, only to be taken over as a puppet of the Soviet Union, a capsule of polonium exploded in her laboratory, and she inhaled Marie’s beloved element. Joliot-Curie died of leukemia in 1956, just as her mother had twenty-two years before.<\/p>\n

Culled from:\u00a0The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements<\/a><\/p>\n

Marie Curie and her daughter\u00a0Ir\u00e8ne \u00a0in the lab:
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 <\/p>\n

Weegee Photo Du Jour<\/h3>\n

Weegee\u00a0was the\u00a0pseudonym\u00a0of\u00a0Arthur Fellig\u00a0(June 12, 1899 \u2013 December 26, 1968), a\u00a0photographer\u00a0and\u00a0photojournalist, known for his stark black and white\u00a0street photography. Weegee worked in\u00a0Manhattan,\u00a0New York City’s\u00a0Lower East Side\u00a0as a press photographer during the 1930s and ’40s, and he developed his signature style by following the city’s emergency services and documenting their activity. Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death.<\/p>\n

Here’s a photo from the book\u00a0Weegee’s New York: Photographs, 1935-1960<\/a>\"\":<\/p>\n

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Firefighters carrying a body to the morgue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s Subatomic Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Ir\u00e8ne\u00a0Joliot-Curie was Marie Curie’s slender, sad-eyed daughter. A birlliant scientist herself, Ir\u00e8ne\u00a0and her husband, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot-Curie, picked up on Marie’s work and soon one-upped her. Rather than just finding radioactive elements, Irene figured out a method for converting tame elements into artificially radioactive atoms by bombarding them with subatomic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-facts","category-sundry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5822"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11601,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5822\/revisions\/11601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}