{"id":90591,"date":"2026-03-01T12:02:24","date_gmt":"2026-03-01T06:32:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=90591"},"modified":"2026-03-01T15:07:36","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T09:37:36","slug":"carbon-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/carbon-14\/","title":{"rendered":"Carbon-14"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><b>Carbon-14 Latest News<\/b><\/h2>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Martin Kamen and Samuel Ruben&#8217;s discovery of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in 1940 helped usher in a new era of dating artifacts from past civilizations.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>About Carbon-14<\/b><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>Carbon <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">has three main<\/span><b> isotopes<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: <\/span><b>carbon-12, carbon-13, and carbon-14<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. The <\/span><b>first two are stable.<\/b><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>Carbon-14<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is a <\/span><b>radioactive isotope <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">of carbon.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It is <\/span><b>created in the atmosphere <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">through the <\/span><b>bombardment of nitrogen by cosmic rays.<\/b><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It has <\/span><b>six protons and eight neutrons <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">in its nucleus.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>By contrast, most of the carbon<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> in our bodies and in the outside world, known as <\/span><b>carbon-12, has six protons and six neutrons.\u00a0<\/b><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Crucially, those <\/span><b>two extra neutrons make the nucleus<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of a carbon-14 atom <\/span><b>unstable <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">so that it <\/span><b>decays radioactively into an atom of nitrogen.<\/b><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It is<\/span><b> used in radiocarbon dating <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">to determine the age of organic substances by measuring its decay over time.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2><b>What is Radiocarbon Dating, or Carbon-14 Dating?<\/b><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It is a method that provides <\/span><b>objective age estimates for carbon-based materials<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> that <\/span><b>originated from living organisms.<\/b><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It is based on the fact that <\/span><b>living organisms<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u2014like trees, plants, people, and animals\u2014<\/span><b>absorb carbon-14 <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">into their tissue.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>When they die,<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> the <\/span><b>carbon-14 starts to change into other atoms<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> over time.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Carbon-14 has a <\/span><b>half-life of approximately 5,730 years<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (i.e., half the amount of the isotope present at any instant will undergo spontaneous disintegration during the succeeding 5,730 years).<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Because <\/span><b>carbon-14 decays at <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">this <\/span><b>constant rate,<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> an<\/span><b> estimate of the date at which an organism died can be made<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> by <\/span><b>measuring the amount of its residual carbon-14.\u00a0<\/b><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The technique was <\/span><b>developed in the late 1940s<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> at the University of Chicago by a team led by chemistry professor <\/span><b>Willard Libby,<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> who would later r<\/span><b>eceive the Nobel Prize <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">for the work.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It has proved to be a versatile technique of <\/span><b>dating archaeological specimens from 500 to 50,000 years old.<\/b><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Over the years, carbon-14 dating has <\/span><b>also found applications in geology, hydrology<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, <\/span><b>geophysics, atmospheric science, oceanography,<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> paleoclimatology, and even biomedicine.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Source: <\/b><a href=\"https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/chemistry\/science-history-carbon-14-is-discovered-opening-a-window-into-past-civilizations-feb-27-1940\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">LS<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope formed when cosmic rays strike nitrogen, unlike stable carbon-12 and carbon-13. Read more about Carbon-14, Radiocarbon Dating, Latest News<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":90630,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5821,21,22,23],"class_list":{"0":"post-90591","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","8":"tag-carbon-14","9":"tag-prelims-pointers","10":"tag-upsc-current-affairs","11":"tag-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","12":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90591"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90631,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90591\/revisions\/90631"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}