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The radioactive isotope, Iodine-131, has been in the news recently because of the disaster at the Fukushima power plant in Japan. One term that keeps arising is ‘half-life’. At its most basic, the half-life of an isotope refers to the time it will take for half of that element to have decayed into its daughter element.  Atomic half-life is the specific form of decay that radioactive elements undergo. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, radioactivity is “the property possessed by some elements or isotopes of spontaneously emitting energetic particles by the d...