Marie Curie's Notebooks Are Still Radioactive: a Fun Fact in Easy English
Marie Curie's notebooks are over 100 years old and still radioactive. Learn this amazing fact, and two new English words, with Sonia.
1 November 2026 · 2 min read
Marie Curie’s notebooks are more than 100 years old, but they are still radioactive! Today, France’s national library in Paris keeps them in special lead-lined boxes, and visitors must sign a form before they can see them. Even her clothes, her furniture and her cookbooks are radioactive too.
What Sonia says
This notebook is over one hundred years old… and it’s still radioactive!
It’s Marie Curie’s notebook. She and her husband, Pierre, found a new element: radium. Radium glows in the dark! At night, Marie loved to watch her little bottles shine.
But radium got onto everything: her clothes, her desk, and her notebooks. Today, a library in Paris keeps them in special metal boxes. To read them, you sign a form first!
And they will stay radioactive for thousands of years! Want Marie’s full story? Tap the link, and learn English with her!
Why so long? The radium in her papers loses half of its radioactivity only about every 1,600 years.
Words to know
- radioactive (adjective)
- giving out invisible energy that can be dangerous
- “Her notebooks are still radioactive.”
- element (noun)
- a basic substance, like gold or iron
- “She and Pierre found a new element: radium.”
Sources
- Christian Science Monitor, “Marie Curie: Why her papers are still radioactive” (2011)
- Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)
