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[–] 1 point 1 year ago

It'll kill ya in loads of inventive and horrible ways, but sure, you can give it a try!

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  • [–] 192 points 1 year ago* (15 children)

    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!!

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  • [–] 82 points 1 year ago (14 children)

    I wanna taste that blue Cherenkov tang

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  • [–] 58 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    Evidently plutonium just tastes metallic. And radium is flavorless.

    What I'm saying is people have tasted these things.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    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"

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Or the fact that it’s, y’know, a metal

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.")

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  • [+] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    I know you deleted the reply, but I could still see it on Sync in my notifications.

    I know tins have plastic liners, but like, normal forks and knives don't taste metallic. Something something interaction with the metal. I think coins wouldn't smell metallic if you wash them properly and then don't touch them with bare skin.

    Coins don't inherently smell; the "metallic" odor associated with them is actually a result of a chemical reaction between skin oils and the metal, particularly iron, when touched. This reaction breaks down skin lipids, producing volatile organic compounds like 1-octen-3-one, which is what our noses detect

    But I'm sure that's not what's happening when you're having a radioactive dye injected. It's a different metallic sensation.

    And yes, my taste buds are in my mouth. The radioactive dye is injected into my circulatory system, which also circulates the blood in my mouth, which has my tastebuds.

    I think some comedian has a bit sort of related? Holup I'll look for it,

    Can't find it. I was thinking maybe Jim Jefferies, or John Mulaney, then maybe Ali Siddiq or Theo Von. Nah. Just can't recall. Anyway a standup comedian is impressed by some really crusty junkie comments on the quality of the drugs they inject, because they can taste the fillers through.

    The point being it's surprising how you can taste things in your blood.

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  • [–] 147 points 1 year ago (4 children)
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    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?

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  • [–] 59 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    The highest calorie last meal

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [+] 101 points 1 year ago (18 children)
  • [–] 107 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    And it goes straight to my hips. By which I mean the bone marrow in my pelvis.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    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.)

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  • [–] 56 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    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)

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    this is a commonly repeated falsehood obvious 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).

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    (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.)

    This pic is def:

    This "fun fact" mixes up the two definitions, making the statement meaningless.

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  • [–] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

    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

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Plutonium actually does combust^1^. Even worse, it's pyrophoric^2^. I couldn't easily find kcal/g though.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [+] 39 points 1 year ago* (8 children)
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    [–] 32 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Cooling down means it's breaking down and no longer plutonium.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (8 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    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

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    According to your table, it's not as bad as that, just not a good idea. E: Wait, missread that as thorium.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    And here I thought plutonium looked like this:

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    if you can wait a few million years, after few decay steps it turns into lead, which is known to be sweet

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago

    This whole image is metal as fuck \m/

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    What would happen if you played hockey with that?

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago*

    It is for sure delicious, but those who tested, never said it

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    Deliciously ever-hot orange pie

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Forbidden gum drop

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    What do the dots taste like?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    You only get one chance to find out!

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