razorcandy@discuss.tchncs.de
on 27 Jun 18:03
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Fun fact: a gram of plutonium contains about 20 billion calories. Yum.
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de
on 27 Jun 18:10
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And it goes straight to my hips. By which I mean the bone marrow in my pelvis.
Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
on 27 Jun 19:56
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Hey, sexy bone-marrow pelvis, shake them atomic gains!
(OK, but like, if I produced synthetic plutonium I would make the box look like a chocolate box. Those workers & engineers deserve to have a fun work environment, engage in some shenanigans, make an oopsie from time to time.)
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)
Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
on 27 Jun 19:29
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this is a commonly repeated falsehoodobvious joke
And, if I have to explain the joke: it’s just E=mc² (the Einstein thing … well, the Einstein’s thing’s approximation), the energy (E) is the same for all mass (m) since the c is a constant.
You get the same 21 billon kcal from 1g of apples as from 1g of plutonium.
And since it’s usually well known humans do not devour mass into pure energy that might trigger ppls sense of humour.
(Additionally the idea of eating metal to seek nutrition might be funny, but we do need some metals \m/.)
Also “potential energy” phrasing is weird in that context.
There are 2 different definitions of calorie.
This “fun fact” mixes up the two definitions
It’s not even two definitions, the kcal is absolutely the same, it’s just used to measure two different things (mass energy vs the sum of what an average human can extract via chemical processes). I see you def understand that, but it’s not a different definition of a calorie (in the same way as length vs width of an object isn’t a different definition of a metre).
It is a different definition, but it’s the same unit… it’s also more like saying “that ball of yarn is 10 metres” - the ball itself isn’t 10 metres long in any dimension, but the meaning is clear given the context, as it would if you said “it’s 0.05 metres”. By having two meanings distinguishable by context, it seems like two definitions to me.
(Different definition/pov of what is measured, yes, that is where the joke is.)
Hehe, look at this falsehood - there is no way this things can talk!
(However imho this is a more clear example of ‘two different definitions’ of the main concept/phrase intentionally mixed together for comedic effect, bcs words can explicitly have more than one meaning, and yes, usually you can tell from the context.)
FiskFisk33@startrek.website
on 28 Jun 05:12
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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
atomicorange@lemmy.world
on 28 Jun 06:01
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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.
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.
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.
PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org
on 27 Jun 18:08
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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?
logicbomb@lemmy.world
on 27 Jun 18:15
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Isn’t it just that color because it’s hot? Like, if you cooled those off to room temperature, wouldn’t they be metallic gray?
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!
groolthedemon@lemmy.world
on 27 Jun 19:13
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You only get one chance to find out!
Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
on 27 Jun 19:17
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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 believe the guy who tasted plutonium did so accidentally when the powder got in his mouth. The metallic taste probably has something to do with how radioactive it is.
CommissarVulpin@lemmy.world
on 28 Jun 00:53
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idk man. the tins I’m drinking out of don’t really ‘taste metallic’, whereas when I got shot up with radioactive elements, I definitely described it as “having a metallic taste in my mouth”.
(Oh and the answer is ‘radiology’ — shooting people up with radioactive elements is literally everyday stuff. There’s a whole branch of medicine about it; “nuclear medicine.”)
VerilyFemme@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 27 Jun 19:29
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Yes, it does look delicious.
But I can’t help but think about this being the consequences of dying everything we eat unholy colors. Maybe radioactive material wouldn’t be so tasty looking if we didn’t give kids candy that looks like radioactive material.
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
threaded - newest
Fun fact: a gram of plutonium contains about 20 billion calories. Yum.
And it goes straight to my hips. By which I mean the bone marrow in my pelvis.
Hey, sexy bone-marrow pelvis, shake them atomic gains!
(OK, but like, if I produced synthetic plutonium I would make the box look like a chocolate box. Those workers & engineers deserve to have a fun work environment, engage in some shenanigans, make an oopsie from time to time.)
These hips don’t lie : you got cancer
Why the pelvis specifically? How did it get there? What were you doing with it?
If you eat just one bite you’ll never have to eat again for the rest of your life!
.
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)
And, if I have to explain the joke: it’s just E=mc² (the Einstein thing … well, the Einstein’s thing’s approximation), the energy (E) is the same for all mass (m) since the c is a constant.
You get the same 21 billon kcal from 1g of apples as from 1g of plutonium.
And since it’s usually well known humans do not devour mass into pure energy that might trigger ppls sense of humour.
(Additionally the idea of eating metal to seek nutrition might be funny, but we do need some metals \m/.)
Also “potential energy” phrasing is weird in that context.
It’s not even two definitions, the kcal is absolutely the same, it’s just used to measure two different things (mass energy vs the sum of what an average human can extract via chemical processes). I see you def understand that, but it’s not a different definition of a calorie (in the same way as length vs width of an object isn’t a different definition of a metre).
It is a different definition, but it’s the same unit… it’s also more like saying “that ball of yarn is 10 metres” - the ball itself isn’t 10 metres long in any dimension, but the meaning is clear given the context, as it would if you said “it’s 0.05 metres”. By having two meanings distinguishable by context, it seems like two definitions to me.
(Different definition/pov of what is measured, yes, that is where the joke is.)
Hehe, look at this falsehood - there is no way this things can talk!
(However imho this is a more clear example of ‘two different definitions’ of the main concept/phrase intentionally mixed together for comedic effect, bcs words can explicitly have more than one meaning, and yes, usually you can tell from the context.)
<img alt="" src="https://i.redd.it/gx13qy30zv041.jpg">
This pic is def:
Which definition does full corn kernels fall into?
Thank you for the clarification. I wanted to go along with the joke of it looking “edible”, but context is appreciated :)
Equivalent-level of fun fact: 1 gram of hay contains that much calories too!
No wonder cows are so fat
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.
Oh no!
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.
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.
“From a purely chemical standpoint, (plutonium) is about as poisonous as lead and other heavy metals. Not surprisingly, it has a metallic taste.”
I was about to say that in the 40s and 50s someone
probablytaste it.Zomg, where are all the warning labels???
The best way to tell precisely how spicy your rock is, is to taste it. That’s just basic science, if you ask me.
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?
Isn’t it just that color because it’s hot? Like, if you cooled those off to room temperature, wouldn’t they be metallic gray?
Cooling down means it’s breaking down and no longer plutonium.
I’m talking about thermally cooling it down. If you put it in a freezer it will cool down, but the nuclear process will not change speed.
Good luck with cooling down unmoderated plutonium.
liquid nitrogen will do
That’s why they have it in a frying pan
.
just take a cheese grater to it to make smaller pieces smh
if you can wait a few million years, after few decay steps it turns into lead, which is known to be sweet
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5ac819c1-c150-457c-bff2-e6167b45c4e4.gif">
And here I thought plutonium looked like this:
<img alt="" src="https://dygtyjqp7pi0m.cloudfront.net/i/21084/22735747_9.jpg">
You mean plutonium doesn’t look like a vial of cherry flavored cough syrup suspended in a larger vial of water?
Kinda, in solution different oxidation states make pretty colors… <img alt="1000078594" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/76346871-961e-4c96-81b2-310a46211c43.jpeg">
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!
<img alt="" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Yellowcake.jpg">
that looks like a sponge x3
It looks like the underside of a microfiber towel
Yellowcake, sponge… lemon flavoured sponge cake?
SpongeBomb SpallatePants
I like how all these pictures include the radiation fucking up the photo.
Some Pu solutions for your viewing pleasure:
<img alt="" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/Plutonium_in_solution.jpg">
New Pride Flag for the irradiated wastelands just stopped!
Square pringles 😋
What do the dots taste like?
You only get one chance to find out!
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
The food colouring they add to the orange juice (from those pods) makes it actually taste better!
Evidently plutonium just tastes metallic. And radium is flavorless.
What I’m saying is people have tasted these things.
I think it was when we got to toxic metals and radioactive elements that chemists where forced to stop tasting their discoveries.
I hope it went: Safety person: Hey! Stop tasting any elements or new molecules. It’s been getting people severely sick or killed!
Chemist: “Ugh, fine, but ima bitch about it the whole time”
I believe the guy who tasted plutonium did so accidentally when the powder got in his mouth. The metallic taste probably has something to do with how radioactive it is.
Or the fact that it’s, y’know, a metal
idk man. the tins I’m drinking out of don’t really ‘taste metallic’, whereas when I got shot up with radioactive elements, I definitely described it as “having a metallic taste in my mouth”.
(Oh and the answer is ‘radiology’ — shooting people up with radioactive elements is literally everyday stuff. There’s a whole branch of medicine about it; “nuclear medicine.”)
.
I can still huff them though, right? How else will I know when my reaction is done?
It’s coincidentally when we started getting radiation poisoning. Correlation? Causation? The younger generation is so weak smh.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d5f1e0e9-d89e-4801-af65-cbfd422a484c.jpeg">
What about butt-chugging them?
Demon core has entered the chat?
Demon buttplug
I wanted to say the same - that blue color reminds me of blueberry with some mint for freshness!
…blue raspberry gatorade…
Yes, it does look delicious.
But I can’t help but think about this being the consequences of dying everything we eat unholy colors. Maybe radioactive material wouldn’t be so tasty looking if we didn’t give kids candy that looks like radioactive material.
Counterpoint: fruit
Even oranges aren’t neon orange
What would happen if you played hockey with that?
The ice melts.
And you get cancer
A lot of people get cancer already and ice also already melts all the time so I don’t see why this is so special
That’s plutonium. You would die of radiation poisoning long before you could ever even come close to developing cancer.
This whole image is metal as fuck \m/
It is for sure delicious, but those who tested, never said it
Deliciously ever-hot orange pie
The highest calorie last meal
nah, this is just the appetizer to a big bowl of pasta made out of antimatter.
Antipasti
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.
Please reconsider
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8cff6de2-4303-4da4-bbf8-aecc69857dcd.jpeg">
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.
please reconsider again, some of them are tasty
<img alt="" src="https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/224e6bd9-e3da-4c45-8e27-fa999903fb21.jpeg">
from cody’s lab
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
Forbidden gum drop
It’ll kill ya in loads of inventive and horrible ways, but sure, you can give it a try!