Kidney stones form when salts in the urine begin crystallizing. They can eventually move through one's ureter, or get stuck trying to, which may require surgery. Usually, the patient doesn't know they have a kidney stone before it causes pain, but it could have been forming over many years. Doctors can estimate when a kidney stone began to form by counting its growth rings like a tree, but that isn't reliably accurate.
In 2011, Vladimir Levchenko underwent surgery to remove a kidney stone, and requested that he be given the stone. See, Levchenko is a scientist with the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. He specializes in carbon dating, and he wanted to carbon date the stone to see how long it had been forming in his body.
We are familiar with carbon dating telling us how many millions of years ago dinosaurs roamed the earth. But the accuracy of the method becomes more precise in more recent samples. Specimens that formed after 1950 can be tagged down to the month, thanks to nuclear tests that doubled the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere. Read what Levchenko found and what it means for kidney stone research, plus how to prevent your own kidney stones. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Vladimir Levchenko/ANSTO)
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