• Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.eeEnglish
    193·
    1 day ago

    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!!

      • SippyCup@feddit.nlEnglish
        53·
        24 hours ago

        Evidently plutonium just tastes metallic. And radium is flavorless.

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

        • baldingpudenda@lemmy.worldEnglish
          24·
          23 hours ago

          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”

          • untorquer@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            8 hours ago

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

          • SippyCup@feddit.nlEnglish
            15·
            23 hours ago

            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.

              • Dasus@lemmy.worldEnglish
                52·
                21 hours ago

                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.”)

      • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        The food colouring they add to the orange juice (from those pods) makes it actually taste better!

    • Anomalocaris@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      6 hours 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?

    • boydster@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      16·
      1 day ago

      The best way to tell precisely how spicy your rock is, is to taste it. That’s just basic science, if you ask me.

    • FiskFisk33@startrek.websiteEnglish
      191·
      17 hours ago

      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
        English
        16·
        16 hours ago

        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.

          • atomicorange@lemmy.world
            English
            2·
            4 hours 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.

      • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.eeEnglish
        6·
        1 day 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.)

    • Beacon@fedia.io
      613·
      1 day ago

      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.eeEnglish
        273·
        1 day ago

        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).

        • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          41·
          24 hours ago

          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.

          • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.eeEnglish
            5·
            12 hours 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.

      • razorcandy@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        2·
        18 hours ago

        Thank you for the clarification. I wanted to go along with the joke of it looking “edible”, but context is appreciated :)

    • frank@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      40·
      1 day ago

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

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzEnglish
    39·
    1 day ago

    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!

  • logicbomb@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    1 day ago

    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?

  • Zerush@lemmy.mlEnglish
    10·
    23 hours ago

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

  • VerilyFemme@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    18·
    1 day ago

    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.

  • expatriado@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    1 day ago

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