Introducing the Wolfram Isotopes & Radiation Protection Reference Apps

If you’re a chemist, a student, a mad scientist bent on destroying the earth for irrational reasons, an enlightened scientist bent on saving the population from the mad one, or as understandably enthused about isotopes and radiation as we are at Wolfram, then you’ll love the new Wolfram Isotopes Reference App and Wolfram Radiation Protection Reference App. Released for $4.99 and $9.99, respectively, for the iPod touch, iPhone, iPad, and PC, the apps are arguably the most comprehensive set of tools for the topics so far.

Since we understand we’re making a bold claim, allow us to demonstrate why the apps are so powerful.

The Wolfram Isotopes Reference App lets you refer to isotopes by name, atomic number or mass (or a combination of the two), and proton and neutron count. You can also refer to isotopic properties by their amount of volume, moles, or radioactivity.

To show you what this can do, let’s open up “Properties by Amount” and compute with “Properties of isotope” set at Er 144 (on the premise that to err is to be one for forgiveness) with 0.25 as our molar amount. We can see that erbium-144 at 0.25 mol has a mass of 36 grams, a half-life of 200 nanoseconds, and a binding energy per nucleon of 7.958 MeV, among other results.

That’s pretty cool, but suppose you’re a medical doctor sporting a stylish jacket. The Wolfram Isotopes Reference App also has a complete list of medical isotopes, so you can quickly refer to the isotopes you need information on. Because we think yttrium-86 is the most exciting medical isotope, let’s compute it.

Powered by Wolfram|Alpha, the app gives you all of the decay properties, decay mode, a visualization of the decay chain and nearby isotopes, mass properties, quantum properties, excitations, and finally, a list of medical applications. We can see that yttrium-86 is used to treat cancer of the trachea, bronchus, and lung, as well as malignant melanoma of the skin and kidney cancer. Do you see why we think it’s clearly one of the best isotopes? It even has a nice name.

For a pleasing thematic consistency, we’ve also released the Wolfram Radiation Protection Reference App. Let’s look at that.

Ionizing radiation and radioactive isotopes is best dealt with while taking proper safety precautions. The Wolfram Radiation Protection Reference App lets you calculate the requirement for shielding different types of radiation and compute the CSDA range and absorptance. Discover equivalent doses of radiation or the decay chain for a radioactive isotope. You can convert units of the absorbed and/or equivalent dose, look at stopping power, exposure dose, and more.

So let’s look at a bit of what the app can do. We’ll load up Radiation Shielding and type in “U-238.” Lead radiation shielding comes in at 12.3 micrometers and water at 29.8 micrometers. We can also look at the various decay modes. If we look at spontaneous fission—perhaps the best kind of fission—we see the branching ratio is 5.45 X 10^-7.

Now we’ll look at the Unit Converter, because units demand conversion. Let’s check out Specific Source Radioactivity.

We’ll convert 42 mCi per gram to PBq per milligram, because that sounds like something a scientist would do.

We see we get a result of 1.554 X 10^-9 petabecquerels per milligram, but because computational knowledge makes us happy, we supply you with all sorts of additional conversions, too. We can also see the results for gigabecquerels per gram, becquerels per gram, becquerels per kilogram, and curies per kilogram.

As you can see, the Wolfram Isotopes Reference App and Wolfram Radiation Protection Reference App offer a deep level of computation on the subjects and can assist your work, research, or interests in a meaningful way. But are you looking for an app in a different field, or do you have any comments, criticisms, or concerns to share? As our goal is the democratization of knowledge and an app for every course, and more, we’d appreciate any feedback or suggestions you might have. Leave us a comment and let us know what you think.