What is a Pico Curie?

Madame Marie Sklodowska Curie discovered radium.  The Curie is a unit of measurement named in her honor. The American Institute of Physics has a very informative web site about the Curie family.  You can access it here.

If you take one gram of radium and it disintegrates at 37 billion nuclear disintegrations per second you will have one Curie. One Pico Curie equals one trillionth of a Curie and we place that in the volume of one liter for measurement purposes.

What is astonishing is that we can read such a small measurement as a Pico Curie per liter. We can thank the technology of modern society for the equipment that has provided us the ability to measure such a small particle.