this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 days ago (5 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 days ago (1 children)

please reconsider again, some of them are tasty

from cody's lab

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

Yeah. That looks like something Codyslab will do...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

Wtf, no, you should not lick boron, fucking ever. Go lick a piece of lead, it's better for your health

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

Wish we had this in chemistry

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days 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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

Forbidden gum drop

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 213 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 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!!

[–] [email protected] 86 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I wanna taste that blue Cherenkov tang

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

...blue raspberry gatorade...

[–] a_wild_mimic_appears 4 points 6 days ago

I wanted to say the same - that blue color reminds me of blueberry with some mint for freshness!

[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Evidently plutonium just tastes metallic. And radium is flavorless.

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

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (7 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"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

It's coincidentally when we started getting radiation poisoning. Correlation? Causation? The younger generation is so weak smh.

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[–] [email protected] 162 points 1 week ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days 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?

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 week ago

I was about to say that in the 40s and 50s someone ~~probably~~ taste it.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago

Zomg, where are all the warning labels???

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[–] [email protected] 106 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Fun fact: a gram of plutonium contains about 20 billion calories. Yum.

[–] [email protected] 108 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 week ago (3 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)

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 week ago

If you eat just one bite you'll never have to eat again for the rest of your life!

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago
[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Equivalent-level of fun fact: 1 gram of hay contains that much calories too!

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The highest calorie last meal

[–] diffaldo 5 points 6 days ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

they got cake day on lemmy too?

[–] diffaldo 3 points 6 days ago

Yep, my client(voyager) showed a cake next to their username.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Technically, this is processed cake. Yellow cake that is.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)

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!

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago (7 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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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

And here I thought plutonium looked like this:

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

Kinda, in solution different oxidation states make pretty colors... 1000078594

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