Please reconsider
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
820 points (99.0% liked)
Science Memes
15572 readers
4538 users here now
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Research Committee
Other Mander Communities
Science and Research
Biology and Life Sciences
- !abiogenesis@mander.xyz
- !animal-behavior@mander.xyz
- !anthropology@mander.xyz
- !arachnology@mander.xyz
- !balconygardening@slrpnk.net
- !biodiversity@mander.xyz
- !biology@mander.xyz
- !biophysics@mander.xyz
- !botany@mander.xyz
- !ecology@mander.xyz
- !entomology@mander.xyz
- !fermentation@mander.xyz
- !herpetology@mander.xyz
- !houseplants@mander.xyz
- !medicine@mander.xyz
- !microscopy@mander.xyz
- !mycology@mander.xyz
- !nudibranchs@mander.xyz
- !nutrition@mander.xyz
- !palaeoecology@mander.xyz
- !palaeontology@mander.xyz
- !photosynthesis@mander.xyz
- !plantid@mander.xyz
- !plants@mander.xyz
- !reptiles and amphibians@mander.xyz
Physical Sciences
- !astronomy@mander.xyz
- !chemistry@mander.xyz
- !earthscience@mander.xyz
- !geography@mander.xyz
- !geospatial@mander.xyz
- !nuclear@mander.xyz
- !physics@mander.xyz
- !quantum-computing@mander.xyz
- !spectroscopy@mander.xyz
Humanities and Social Sciences
Practical and Applied Sciences
- !exercise-and sports-science@mander.xyz
- !gardening@mander.xyz
- !self sufficiency@mander.xyz
- !soilscience@slrpnk.net
- !terrariums@mander.xyz
- !timelapse@mander.xyz
Memes
Miscellaneous
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Yeah. That looks like something Codyslab will do...
Wtf, no, you should not lick boron, fucking ever. Go lick a piece of lead, it's better for your health
Wish we had this in chemistry
In order to lick something at the very least it needs to be liquid, or better yet, solid.
Trying to kick hydrogen, with this in mind, will be the last lick you ever do in your life
According to your table, it's not as bad as that, just not a good idea. E: Wait, missread that as thorium.
The fact that Thorium and Uranium are just "probably not a good idea" makes me think that the scale is based on licking like an ore that contains them rather than the pure element
I’m pretty sure I could get away with licking my uranium ore sample. Not going to test it apropos of nothing though.
A lot of those trans-uranium (and astatine) aren’t going to exist in lick-able quantities anyway.
Forbidden gum drop
It'll kill ya in loads of inventive and horrible ways, but sure, you can give it a try!
I mean, you can heat any old rock & make it look like that ... what I'm saying is that every rock, when heated to 500+°C, will gain delicious orange flavour, but scientists don't want you to know that!!
I wanna taste that blue Cherenkov tang
...blue raspberry gatorade...
I wanted to say the same - that blue color reminds me of blueberry with some mint for freshness!
Evidently plutonium just tastes metallic. And radium is flavorless.
What I'm saying is people have tasted these things.
What about butt-chugging them?
Demon core has entered the chat?
Demon buttplug
load more comments
(8 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Given that lead acetate is sweet, would plutonium acetate do the same?
anyone wants to help me set up a charity where we give "last meals" to terminal patients using toxic ingredients just for them to describe how they taste?
I was about to say that in the 40s and 50s someone ~~probably~~ taste it.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Fun fact: a gram of plutonium contains about 20 billion calories. Yum.
Not dietal calories.
The calorie numbers we assign to food, measure how much energy our body extracts from them when eaten.
In this context, plutonium is closer to 0
If we instead want to measure the actual total physical energy content of materia, we would turn to E=mc^2, telling us that a gram of anything has about 20 million kcal, no matter if its plutonium or diet coke. which is a slightly less useful value on food labels :D
Technically it measures how much you can heat up a known volume of water if you burn the food. We have no way of measuring how much of that energy released by combustion actually gets absorbed and translated to ATP in the body, but it’s the best estimation we have of the relative energy content of foods.
There’s some carbohydrates, proteins, and fats that our bodies don’t seem to convert to energy (or only partially convert) but still technically contain “calories” because they’re combustible. Sugar alcohols, fiber, etc.
Plutonium doesn’t combust, but it would heat up water in a calorimeter. Really the test method’s applicability kind of falls apart when you start testing undigestible materials.
Plutonium actually does combust^1^. Even worse, it's pyrophoric^2^. I couldn't easily find kcal/g though.
- ^1^ Whoopie
- ^2^ Not a great source
I did a little digging. The heat of decay (so plutonium 238 just sitting around, not burning) is about .48 kcal/hr per gram. So if we were able to convert that energy to ATP like we do carbohydrates, eating about 300g of plutonium would be like eating a twinkie (150kcal) every hour. In about 88 years the energy output of that plutonium would have reduced to about a half-twinkie per hour.
Assuming you need 2000 kcal per day to maintain weight, that’s only 83 kcal per hour needed. So, if you could survive eating it and actually utilize the energy generated, you’d be set for life on food after eating less than 300g. We’d have to come up with a dosing schedule or you’d have to work out pretty hard as a young person to keep from getting fat.
The heat of combustion for plutonium based on a very cursory search (take it with a grain of salt) is about 1 kcal/g. So assuming your body could oxidize it, you’d get a one-time burst of about 2 twinkies worth of energy immediately upon eating that 300g.
Oh no!
This is actually an issue with food calories as well. Wood shavings give a high reading in a bomb calorimeter but you can't process them into energy. Same with lots of fiber. And ethanol, in some cases.
And it goes straight to my hips. By which I mean the bone marrow in my pelvis.
Why the pelvis specifically? How did it get there? What were you doing with it?
load more comments
(2 replies)
This is a commonly quoted fun fact that is not really true. There are 2 different definitions of calorie. One means the absolute amount of energy in an object, the other means the bioavailable amount of energy that a human can extract from it using their digestive system.
So every physical object that exists has some amount of potential energy contained within it which we can express in calories, but that doesn't mean it has any bioavailable calories. For example glass has some significant amount of energy contained within it, but it has 0 bioavailable calories.
This "fun fact" mixes up the two definitions, making the statement meaningless.
(Nothing against you OP, this is a commonly repeated falsehood)
Thank you for the clarification. I wanted to go along with the joke of it looking “edible”, but context is appreciated :)
load more comments
(4 replies)
If you eat just one bite you'll never have to eat again for the rest of your life!
load more comments
(3 replies)
The highest calorie last meal
Happy cake day!
they got cake day on lemmy too?
Yep, my client(voyager) showed a cake next to their username.
Technically, this is processed cake. Yellow cake that is.
We need a cosmological law dictating harmful to humans = boring-looking. I mean, it isn't just plutonium, look at uranium yellowcake! It's lemon flavouring!
load more comments
(8 replies)
view more: next ›