Ionizing radiation from medical imaging. Average man-made exposure is much higher in developed countries, mostly due to CT scans and nuclear medicine. Natural background radiation comes from five primary sources: cosmic radiation, solar radiation, external terrestrial sources, radiation in the human body, and radon. The background rate for natural radiation varies considerably with location, being as low as 1.5 mSv/a (1.5 mSv per year) in some areas and over 100 mSv/a in others. The highest level of purely natural radiation recorded on the Earth's surface is 90 µGy/h (0.8 Gy/a) on a Brazilian black beach composed of monazite. The highest background radiation
Rad (unit) in the latest NIST definition. Even where the standard medium is fully defined, the ionizing energy is often not precisely known. In 1940, British physicist Louis Harold Gray, who had been studying the effect of neutron damage on human tissue, together with William Valentine Mayneord and John Read published a paper in which a unit of measure, dubbed the ""gram roentgen"" (symbol: gr) defined as "that amount of neutron radiation which produces an increment in energy in unit volume of tissue equal to the increment of energy produced in unit volume of water by one roentgen of radiation" was proposed.