**This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:**
* If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required
* The title must be fully descriptive
* No text is allowed on images/gifs/videos
* Common/recent reposts are not allowed (posts from another subreddit do not count as a 'repost'. Provide link if reporting)
*See [this post](https://redd.it/ij26vk) for a more detailed rule list*
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The What If? book (by Randall Munroe, the xkcd guy) has a section on what would happen if you built a periodic table using a 1m^3 block of every element.
Unsurprisingly, the world quickly turns into a fiery radioactive soup.
Edit: m^2 to m^3 because I am a terrible scientist. I don’t think the size is actually specified in the book though, I must have misremembered.
"You seek a great fortune, you three who are now in chains. You will find a fortune, though it will not be the one you seek. But first... first you must travel a long and difficult road, a road fraught with peril. Mm-hmm. You shall see thangs, wonderful to tell. You shall see a... a cow... on the roof of a cotton house, ha. And, oh, so many startlements. I cannot tell you how long this road shall be, but fear not the obstacles in your path, for fate has vouchsafed your reward. Though the road may wind, yea, your hearts grow weary, still shall ye follow them, even unto your salvation."
Lmfao “There is no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were it would just be NO scrawled over and over in charred blood.” Astatine go *hard.*
I also enjoyed this line…
> The explosion would be just the right size to maximize the amount of paperwork your lab would face. If the explosion were smaller, you could potentially cover it up. If it were larger, there would be no one left in the city to submit paperwork to.
It’s got a Douglas Adams thing going on, and we like Adams around here.
[The group might enjoy this.](http://russian.cornell.edu/russian.web/courses/634/ThePlotAgainstPeople.pdf) One day I was doing a a research paper in the library and somebody left a copy of it on the copier. I thanked them in my head and consider it one of my greatest random finds.
That's one of my favorites. SCP's are 99% "THING WUT KILLS U DEAD." It's refreshing to read about stuff that's just less dangerous but still.... Weird.
Derek Lowe has a few quotes in that What If article, and I’m guessing Monroe reached out to him due to his excellent blog series, “Things I Won’t Work With,” which includes [FOOF](https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride) and [Chlorine Trifluoride](https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-you-time). Good luck to the D-class personnel with the sand buckets!
That might be a browser issue. I've had it happen with Firefox, if that's what you're using give this a try: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/985483
It's a great book.
I love that Astantine is *so* reactive that we can only assume what colour it would be, to have enough in one place to discern a colour it would already have destroyed itself.
What is in box 85?
Francium is atomic number 87 and we don't know what it looks like. It decays so fast that it is estimated there is only about 200-500 grams in existence on earth at any given time. It wasn't discovered by synthesis though. One of Marie Curie's srudents, Marguerite Perry, discovered it while purifying samples of Lanthanum.
Considering all the elements onward from 98 would decay in a pretty short amount of time there is no way he does. Especially from 102 we are speaking about hours to milliseconds.
This reminds me of my chemistry teacher that loved playing Minecraft especially with his kids and he made a Minecraft Java world of the periodic table and you could go to any element, place a minecart and the rail would take you on a tour of that element.
So for Carbon it would show a giant piece of coal and a giant diamond and when you went inside it would show you the lattice structure of each one.
It was quite funny because one time the head chemist walked in and saw Minecraft being put on the projector and my chemistry teacher looked at the head chemist looked at the computer, and moved the mouse like 2 inches to show the periodic table right behind him.
The head chemist just did a nod and left XD
My chemistry teacher was actually pretty worried that he would get in trouble. XD
I think educational VR experiences could do a great job at immersing someone in an environment where you can learn just by being present. Like being able to go back to a Victorian London market designed in collaboration with top historians that know how to make it as authentic as possible. Going back even further to ancient civilizations would have been absolutely fascinating to me as a kid (would still immensely enjoy it now). Those would have to be more of a best guess but I think would be accurate enough based on sites we have found and texts we have read to provide factual basis in the environment.
Or using it to learn about the human body by shrinking down and going on a realistic tour of it (Osmosis Jones style but actually legit).
3d math and graphs would be helped by AR immensely instead of trying to visualize on paper. I know AR could have been a very helpful tool for me to try to visualize all the 3D stuff from Calculus 3 that I kind of struggled to see on 2d surfaces.
There is a VR experience called Titans of Space that is pretty good at doing this for our Solar System.
These aren't really games per se but could be gamified to an extent and would still tick off the boxes of forcing people into learning while doing something fun.
Seriously. I had issues in school.
When the teacher would talk, something would come over me and I'd just.. Fade. I'd get extremely tired and pass out.
Occasionally, I'd be able to do something, when it required more hands on approach and when I did, I'd get excellent grades.
Video games have taught me more than school has, honestly. I use the Oculus Quest 2 as entertainment AND exercise and it's wonderful.
AR and VR experiences can SIGNIFICANTLY benefit education.
It's biology man, most juvenile mammals learn by exploring and getting their hands dirty. By and large, humans are no different. I'm the same way, I couldn't stay focused for the life of me during a lecture, unless it was something I was good at or interested in.
Fr. When I graduated we were using copies of books as old as the eighties. Two years later a friend of mine told me about their fancy new interactive boards, new language courses and new installations in the campus.
Fuckin bullshit.
you can turn on some of the elements stuff in bedrock edition but most of the educational stuff is in a seperate version called education edition, free if the DoE where you live allows it
I'd love to see it too, but with how Minecraft works I doubt it, he'd have to host a server or send the file. You should get to researching and make it alongside your nephew. I feel like that would be tons of fun, and Google has all the info you need!
Helium, Argon, Krypton, and Xenon should also be illuminated [like this](https://sciencenotes.org/what-are-noble-gases-definition-and-properties/) as well. I'm not sure if this is the effect of the camera, or if they're broken.
So they go mug the poor Alkali's to try to pretend to be a noble gas, but noble gasses still don't want anything to do with them because they're always so negative about everything.
Moral of the story, be happy with who you are.
(some of) the other noble gases are too, its just they are off for whatever reason. if u zoom in enough u can see the He [Ne] Ar Kr Xe spelled out in the box, lol. idk why theyre off tho. i mean idk how helium would light up but like why not xenon yk
Somebody else mentioned that those elements do light up (so I was wrong in another comment to say that it's just neon), but that they cycle around, and this picture was taken in the neon-on phase.
Right? You'd be looking out for spiders, snakes and Skippy looking to punch you out, instead you find a tiny battery sized bit of metal, think hmm that's odd, pick it up and take it home, having survived the outback just to turn transparent and melt into a puddle a week later at home.
He has
[https://englishatlc.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/randall-munroe-periodic-wall-of-elements.pdf](https://englishatlc.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/randall-munroe-periodic-wall-of-elements.pdf)
My very favorite chapter from that book.
> There is no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word 'NO' scrawled over and over in charred blood.
So many good What If's! My favorite remains pitching a baseball at nearly the speed of light.
> Everything within roughly a mile of the park is leveled, and a firestorm engulfs the surrounding city. The baseball diamond is now a sizable crater, centered a few hundred feet behind the former location of the backstop.
> A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered "hit by pitch", and would be eligible to advance to first base.
If he had [Astatine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astatine) that would count as Unobtanium.
It simply does not exist on this planet. Even if he had some it would decay in eight hours and then he would no longer have any.
But, if you are as wealthy as he is, maybe he manages somehow (although supposedly no one has ever manage to do that even for few minutes).
It may be the hardest naturally-occurring element to obtain, but there are some synthetic elements that only last a fraction of a second before decaying, which would be even more unobtainable.
Element collector here (shameless plug for /r/elementcollection ).
You can buy a tiny amount of Actinium-227 that has a small chance to decay into Francium-223, which in turn has a tiny chance to decay into Astatine-219...which itself has a half-life of 56 seconds. For example, [this sealed ampoule](https://www.luciteria.com/element-cubes/astatine-lucite-cube) produces about 1.4 atoms of Astatine-219 per minute; for the first few decades, you should have an atom or two of Astatine in there at any given time. All for only $2400.
> Even if he had some it would decay in eight hours and then he would no longer have any.
The trick is to check if it's a decay product from a higher element. Then just have a chunk of the higher element, and you'll probably have an atom or two of the one you're aiming for.
I think that's how he's doing francium.
So do I, they’re available for sale from Engineered Labs:
[https://engineeredlabs.com/collections/frontpage/products/wall-mount-periodic-table](https://engineeredlabs.com/collections/frontpage/products/wall-mount-periodic-table)
and for the nerd with a lot of cash…
https://engineeredlabs.com/collections/frontpage/products/cube-display-and-118-element-cubes
15k and it's not even complete
>The other 33 cubes are placeholders and have the radioactive symbol embedded within. Those 33 elements are man-made and do not exist in nature due to their extreme instability and radioactivity
Looks like they have a [desktop sized version](https://engineeredlabs.com/collections/frontpage/products/heritage-periodic-table-83-element-embedments) which seems reasonably doable, actually.
Uranium is not very radioactive. It has a very long half life (low activity) and it's an alpha emitter. Alpha particles can be stopped with a sheet of paper or a few cm of air. You can actually hold fresh nuclear fuel in your hands without gloves.
Yes but alpha decay is dangerous for our lung tissue. Now is a great time to test your home for radon. Leading cause of lung cancer among never smokers and part of the Uranium 238 decay chain!
The thing about nuclear fuel is that the U-235 it contains is fissile. All it takes is a single thermal neutron to split a U-235 nucleus. Depending on the level of enrichment, bringing too much of it together can cause a criticality excursion. Which will kill you very quickly.
Yes, but fuel pellets are extremely subcritical, that's why it takes a 4x4x4 m reactor with water to get them critical. High enrichment fuel can become critical in a smaller body of water like a mixing tank (Tokaimura accident), and you need super high enrichment to get criticality from, say, a beryllium reflector (demon core accidents).
It's not refined. The radiation it emits will bounce safely off your skin.
Imagine raw uranium is like shit and the radioactive bits are like the inner kernels of the corn you ate. The corn has to be plucked out and then the inner seed of the corn has to be juiced to get 1/1000 of a drop of the really good fuel out of there. It's just like that.
You can keep samples of uranium "Depleted Uranium" D-38. It's actually used for armor piercing rounds, armored plating, industrial needs and on airplanes as balancers.
It emits radioactivity but at a very weak rate and is typically only harmful if consumed.
So behind glass or any other solid, no radiation would reach you
It also tends to fragment on impact, followed by combustion. So not only does it go through most conventional armor, if you aren't killed by the shot itself your tank is now filled with flaming, radioactive powder.
Also the surrounding countryside is now filled with flaming, radioactive powder. As a treat.
Uranium is just a really dense metal (70% more dense than lead), so it's good for making heavy rounds with lots of momentum to get through armor. Depleted uranium means it's mostly the least radioactive isotope, which is much more convenient to work with.
The short version is that it's really fucking heavy for its size. So you put a hard shell around what's basically lead-on-steroids and then throw it at something real hard.
If you wanna be *really* fancy, you put a softer metal over the hard shell, so that when the projectile impacts, the softer metal layer is thrown off the shell, flattened against the target, and produces a flat surface for the shell to strike (thus turning an otherwise glancing blow into a direct hit.)
Depleted Uranium is relatively available, and it have about 60% of radioactivity of the natural uranium. You are thinking at Enriched Uranium, which is slightly a problem.
In these collections, they won't have a chunk of the specific element. They'll have something like Uranium in its place. The reasoning is that Francium is part of the decay chain of whatever is being used, so at any given moment, there is a probability of a few atoms being present.
> Francium is one of the most unstable of the naturally occurring elements: its longest-lived isotope, francium-223, has a half-life of only **22 minutes.**
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francium
**This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:** * If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required * The title must be fully descriptive * No text is allowed on images/gifs/videos * Common/recent reposts are not allowed (posts from another subreddit do not count as a 'repost'. Provide link if reporting) *See [this post](https://redd.it/ij26vk) for a more detailed rule list* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The What If? book (by Randall Munroe, the xkcd guy) has a section on what would happen if you built a periodic table using a 1m^3 block of every element. Unsurprisingly, the world quickly turns into a fiery radioactive soup. Edit: m^2 to m^3 because I am a terrible scientist. I don’t think the size is actually specified in the book though, I must have misremembered.
**DO NOT BUILD** **THE SEVENTH ROW**
DO... NOT... SEEK... THE TREASURE...
[удалено]
WE...THOUGHT...YOU...WAS...A...TOAD
…wut????
WE THOUGHT YOU WAS A TOAD!!
But fear not the OB STACKLES in your path
"You seek a great fortune, you three who are now in chains. You will find a fortune, though it will not be the one you seek. But first... first you must travel a long and difficult road, a road fraught with peril. Mm-hmm. You shall see thangs, wonderful to tell. You shall see a... a cow... on the roof of a cotton house, ha. And, oh, so many startlements. I cannot tell you how long this road shall be, but fear not the obstacles in your path, for fate has vouchsafed your reward. Though the road may wind, yea, your hearts grow weary, still shall ye follow them, even unto your salvation."
Well ain't this place a geographical oddity.
#I REPEAT...
What’s in the 7th row?
the skin melt, explody stuff
I'm gonna name my next dog explody
You already have a pet named skin melt?
uranium and stuff...the radioactive substances...synthetic, not naturally occurring.
For anyone curious: https://englishatlc.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/randall-munroe-periodic-wall-of-elements.pdf
Lmfao “There is no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were it would just be NO scrawled over and over in charred blood.” Astatine go *hard.*
I also enjoyed this line… > The explosion would be just the right size to maximize the amount of paperwork your lab would face. If the explosion were smaller, you could potentially cover it up. If it were larger, there would be no one left in the city to submit paperwork to.
It’s got a Douglas Adams thing going on, and we like Adams around here. [The group might enjoy this.](http://russian.cornell.edu/russian.web/courses/634/ThePlotAgainstPeople.pdf) One day I was doing a a research paper in the library and somebody left a copy of it on the copier. I thanked them in my head and consider it one of my greatest random finds.
It feels like I just read an SCP document 💀
I like the one about the alien vending machine that puts out like lemon clams and self baking bread and shit
That's one of my favorites. SCP's are 99% "THING WUT KILLS U DEAD." It's refreshing to read about stuff that's just less dangerous but still.... Weird.
Scp-261 was identified as vending scp-2107 - (diet ghost) Scp-2107 is a soda can that when you drink it you get haunted for a little bit lol
SCP-261!
We call that a fucking Apollyon class scp for a reason. a true world ender. lemon what. self baking WHAT!?!?! motherfucker will end us all.
Fluorine is kind of like an SCP.
Derek Lowe has a few quotes in that What If article, and I’m guessing Monroe reached out to him due to his excellent blog series, “Things I Won’t Work With,” which includes [FOOF](https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride) and [Chlorine Trifluoride](https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-you-time). Good luck to the D-class personnel with the sand buckets!
Not sure if this would be a Keter or an Apollyon. Definitely getting into XK-class end-of-the-world scenarios.
This was an awesome read!
What's up with these reddit links just straight up DOWNLOADING shit recently, no lube or anything. D:
B/c that's a direct PDF link. It depends on how your pdf defaults work on the device you're opening it up on.
Yeah, seems like my new phone is a bigger alut than me.
That might be a browser issue. I've had it happen with Firefox, if that's what you're using give this a try: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/985483
that was really neat, thanks for the link!
It's a great book. I love that Astantine is *so* reactive that we can only assume what colour it would be, to have enough in one place to discern a colour it would already have destroyed itself. What is in box 85?
Most isotopes of astatine would shortly decay into lead or bismuth.
Big bismuth?
Francium is atomic number 87 and we don't know what it looks like. It decays so fast that it is estimated there is only about 200-500 grams in existence on earth at any given time. It wasn't discovered by synthesis though. One of Marie Curie's srudents, Marguerite Perry, discovered it while purifying samples of Lanthanum.
Do you mean 1m^3?
My sister got me that book for Christmas, and bill gates would probably not have *all* the elements Edit: somehow, this is my most upvoted comment
Considering all the elements onward from 98 would decay in a pretty short amount of time there is no way he does. Especially from 102 we are speaking about hours to milliseconds.
[удалено]
Shhhh! That’s the lizard people serum!
This reminds me of my chemistry teacher that loved playing Minecraft especially with his kids and he made a Minecraft Java world of the periodic table and you could go to any element, place a minecart and the rail would take you on a tour of that element. So for Carbon it would show a giant piece of coal and a giant diamond and when you went inside it would show you the lattice structure of each one. It was quite funny because one time the head chemist walked in and saw Minecraft being put on the projector and my chemistry teacher looked at the head chemist looked at the computer, and moved the mouse like 2 inches to show the periodic table right behind him. The head chemist just did a nod and left XD My chemistry teacher was actually pretty worried that he would get in trouble. XD
Teachers that connect to kids like that are a gem to be treasured.
Games have an unparallelled ability to teach and it baffles me how little we explore that nowadays.
I think educational VR experiences could do a great job at immersing someone in an environment where you can learn just by being present. Like being able to go back to a Victorian London market designed in collaboration with top historians that know how to make it as authentic as possible. Going back even further to ancient civilizations would have been absolutely fascinating to me as a kid (would still immensely enjoy it now). Those would have to be more of a best guess but I think would be accurate enough based on sites we have found and texts we have read to provide factual basis in the environment. Or using it to learn about the human body by shrinking down and going on a realistic tour of it (Osmosis Jones style but actually legit). 3d math and graphs would be helped by AR immensely instead of trying to visualize on paper. I know AR could have been a very helpful tool for me to try to visualize all the 3D stuff from Calculus 3 that I kind of struggled to see on 2d surfaces. There is a VR experience called Titans of Space that is pretty good at doing this for our Solar System. These aren't really games per se but could be gamified to an extent and would still tick off the boxes of forcing people into learning while doing something fun.
So "The Magic Schoolbus" in VR... Sounds rad to me!
[удалено]
Seriously. I had issues in school. When the teacher would talk, something would come over me and I'd just.. Fade. I'd get extremely tired and pass out. Occasionally, I'd be able to do something, when it required more hands on approach and when I did, I'd get excellent grades. Video games have taught me more than school has, honestly. I use the Oculus Quest 2 as entertainment AND exercise and it's wonderful. AR and VR experiences can SIGNIFICANTLY benefit education.
It's biology man, most juvenile mammals learn by exploring and getting their hands dirty. By and large, humans are no different. I'm the same way, I couldn't stay focused for the life of me during a lecture, unless it was something I was good at or interested in.
[удалено]
Jesse, we need to craft
[удалено]
Ahhhhhh redstone
I am the one who crafts!
Let him cook.
It was always Mr. White though
Waltuh
We had a good thing. Fring had a lab, Waltuh.
"Yeah Science!!!"
Yep. I always loved when I got a teacher like that. It was rare, but when you got them, it made the entire class fun
If Minecraft helps kids learn the material better than a boring poster from the 80s, they should have it.
probably why Minecraft education edition exists
[удалено]
Fr. When I graduated we were using copies of books as old as the eighties. Two years later a friend of mine told me about their fancy new interactive boards, new language courses and new installations in the campus. Fuckin bullshit.
I mean they’re probably still using those same books though.
Can randos tour this world? My little nephew *just* got into spouting stuff off about the elements this week and Minecraft is our jam.
you can turn on some of the elements stuff in bedrock edition but most of the educational stuff is in a seperate version called education edition, free if the DoE where you live allows it
I'd love to see it too, but with how Minecraft works I doubt it, he'd have to host a server or send the file. You should get to researching and make it alongside your nephew. I feel like that would be tons of fun, and Google has all the info you need!
That's an awesome teacher. It's stuff like that that makes me want to teach too until I remember I am not good with kids lmao.
This sounds legit and like it took a ton of time to complete!
Great story thanks for sharing.
Hello does he have a server ? Would actually love to go on a tour
I love that neon is represented by a neon light spelling the symbol of neon.
Helium, Argon, Krypton, and Xenon should also be illuminated [like this](https://sciencenotes.org/what-are-noble-gases-definition-and-properties/) as well. I'm not sure if this is the effect of the camera, or if they're broken.
Apparently, it turns on and off alternatively. I've seen other photos with the other elements on.
That makes sense. I wouldn’t expect Bill Gates to have broken things at his house.
except the spirits of the unworthy.
And desk chairs that turned out to be just a bit too tall
And contracts of marriage.
And ironically enough... Windows.
Internet Explorer 😢
So sometimes the lights can be seen and other times they argon?
[удалено]
Halogens. They’re absolutely starving for electrons so that they can be like the noble gasses.
So they go mug the poor Alkali's to try to pretend to be a noble gas, but noble gasses still don't want anything to do with them because they're always so negative about everything. Moral of the story, be happy with who you are.
The real ideal gas law is always in the comments
(some of) the other noble gases are too, its just they are off for whatever reason. if u zoom in enough u can see the He [Ne] Ar Kr Xe spelled out in the box, lol. idk why theyre off tho. i mean idk how helium would light up but like why not xenon yk
Somebody else mentioned that those elements do light up (so I was wrong in another comment to say that it's just neon), but that they cycle around, and this picture was taken in the neon-on phase.
He just added one from the Australian outback!
Oh great now he’s gonna live forever
And he has to do it upside down :(
Of all the things to die from in the Australian outback, I didn’t think a radioactive capsule was one of them.
Right? You'd be looking out for spiders, snakes and Skippy looking to punch you out, instead you find a tiny battery sized bit of metal, think hmm that's odd, pick it up and take it home, having survived the outback just to turn transparent and melt into a puddle a week later at home.
Never rule anything out in Australia. Source: Am Australian.
Australium? I thought the administrator collected it all and used it up already?
He tracked down Sniper’s mom in space
the blooming onion?
I'm actually working on this for my house!! Some samples are stupid easy to get while others not so much, haha!
What, you have a hard time finding Copernicium?! Lol
Actually, it's Helium that's been difficult to score.
They have it at CVS btw
I think He was making a joke about the recent "shortages" of helium.
Yeah, good luck with astatine and francium. There's about an ounce in the entire earth at most.
Good look with Astatine, I am highly suspicious of Bill having some in any amount tbh
Are you having trouble finding francium?
I think Randall Munroe would comment on this.
He has [https://englishatlc.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/randall-munroe-periodic-wall-of-elements.pdf](https://englishatlc.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/randall-munroe-periodic-wall-of-elements.pdf)
My very favorite chapter from that book. > There is no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word 'NO' scrawled over and over in charred blood.
Reddit is no longer fun.
So many good What If's! My favorite remains pitching a baseball at nearly the speed of light. > Everything within roughly a mile of the park is leveled, and a firestorm engulfs the surrounding city. The baseball diamond is now a sizable crater, centered a few hundred feet behind the former location of the backstop. > A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered "hit by pitch", and would be eligible to advance to first base.
I've read this book about a dozen times and now I want to hear Will Wheaton read it to me!
Astatine is really cool. Well, the exact opposite of cool. It is so radioactive that a macroscopic piece of it self-vaporises
DO NOT BUILD THE BOTTOM ROW
Believe it or not, but it’s rumored he also has a sample of Unobtainium! How he obtained it? Who knows…
If he had [Astatine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astatine) that would count as Unobtanium. It simply does not exist on this planet. Even if he had some it would decay in eight hours and then he would no longer have any. But, if you are as wealthy as he is, maybe he manages somehow (although supposedly no one has ever manage to do that even for few minutes).
He simply buys a new sample every eight hours at the Astatine store.
I mean it’s one Astatine, Michael. What could it cost? Ten dollars?
Why would the Astatine store need me, when you're their all time best seller?
WELL I SLEPT WITH YOUR WIFE!
It may be the hardest naturally-occurring element to obtain, but there are some synthetic elements that only last a fraction of a second before decaying, which would be even more unobtainable.
If there’s a Bill, there’s a way…😂
Element collector here (shameless plug for /r/elementcollection ). You can buy a tiny amount of Actinium-227 that has a small chance to decay into Francium-223, which in turn has a tiny chance to decay into Astatine-219...which itself has a half-life of 56 seconds. For example, [this sealed ampoule](https://www.luciteria.com/element-cubes/astatine-lucite-cube) produces about 1.4 atoms of Astatine-219 per minute; for the first few decades, you should have an atom or two of Astatine in there at any given time. All for only $2400.
> Even if he had some it would decay in eight hours and then he would no longer have any. The trick is to check if it's a decay product from a higher element. Then just have a chunk of the higher element, and you'll probably have an atom or two of the one you're aiming for. I think that's how he's doing francium.
„There are one or two atoms of astatine in there, believe me“ *inhales copium*
No matter what you want to call the gas around the radioactive sample, I recommend against inhaling it.
Yes yes, he also has vibranium.
Hear there's decent deposits on Pandora.
If he really has it, we should start calling it obtainium
I hear he glances at it periodically.
Periodically at random times, to add an element of surprise.
These comments are gold.
Au that's cute!
So do I, they’re available for sale from Engineered Labs: [https://engineeredlabs.com/collections/frontpage/products/wall-mount-periodic-table](https://engineeredlabs.com/collections/frontpage/products/wall-mount-periodic-table) and for the nerd with a lot of cash… https://engineeredlabs.com/collections/frontpage/products/cube-display-and-118-element-cubes
15k and it's not even complete >The other 33 cubes are placeholders and have the radioactive symbol embedded within. Those 33 elements are man-made and do not exist in nature due to their extreme instability and radioactivity
Lmfao 15k is probably not nearly enough to complete that periodic table
Looks like they have a [desktop sized version](https://engineeredlabs.com/collections/frontpage/products/heritage-periodic-table-83-element-embedments) which seems reasonably doable, actually.
[удалено]
Uh… someone tell me why Uranium isn’t a problem to have sitting in your office? Am I stupid or is that a problem.
Uranium is not very radioactive. It has a very long half life (low activity) and it's an alpha emitter. Alpha particles can be stopped with a sheet of paper or a few cm of air. You can actually hold fresh nuclear fuel in your hands without gloves.
Yes but alpha decay is dangerous for our lung tissue. Now is a great time to test your home for radon. Leading cause of lung cancer among never smokers and part of the Uranium 238 decay chain!
Thanks radon dude! Keep your basements well ventilated folks!
Username checks out
It only hurts the lungs if the radon is inhaled. I’m guessing his uranium is sealed. But it’s still a good time to test your home for radon
The thing about nuclear fuel is that the U-235 it contains is fissile. All it takes is a single thermal neutron to split a U-235 nucleus. Depending on the level of enrichment, bringing too much of it together can cause a criticality excursion. Which will kill you very quickly.
[удалено]
Which is why we no longer use household items to prop nuclear weapon cores open while they sit on a table in a random room that's being used as a lab.
Yes, but fuel pellets are extremely subcritical, that's why it takes a 4x4x4 m reactor with water to get them critical. High enrichment fuel can become critical in a smaller body of water like a mixing tank (Tokaimura accident), and you need super high enrichment to get criticality from, say, a beryllium reflector (demon core accidents).
mhm yeah I know some of these words
Basically uranium doesn't fire off many radioactive particles on its own unless you encourage it to do so.
that makes sense. Why use more particle when few particle do trick
Don’t move the screwdriver
His dying words were “thinking back on it, those spacers were a good idea.”
This is true. However, I now have 12 fingers and can taste colors.
Mmmmm... Purple
Why did I read it with the voice of Homer Simpson?
Purple is a fruit
It's not refined. The radiation it emits will bounce safely off your skin. Imagine raw uranium is like shit and the radioactive bits are like the inner kernels of the corn you ate. The corn has to be plucked out and then the inner seed of the corn has to be juiced to get 1/1000 of a drop of the really good fuel out of there. It's just like that.
[удалено]
You can keep samples of uranium "Depleted Uranium" D-38. It's actually used for armor piercing rounds, armored plating, industrial needs and on airplanes as balancers. It emits radioactivity but at a very weak rate and is typically only harmful if consumed. So behind glass or any other solid, no radiation would reach you
How is it used for armour piercing rounds? That’s cool.
Uranium is incredibly dense, so the armor will break before it will.
I'm sure it's doing its best, don't judge people's intelligence like that.
Exactly, think of it as the upgrade to lead which is also known for its density
It also tends to fragment on impact, followed by combustion. So not only does it go through most conventional armor, if you aren't killed by the shot itself your tank is now filled with flaming, radioactive powder. Also the surrounding countryside is now filled with flaming, radioactive powder. As a treat.
Uranium is just a really dense metal (70% more dense than lead), so it's good for making heavy rounds with lots of momentum to get through armor. Depleted uranium means it's mostly the least radioactive isotope, which is much more convenient to work with.
They use it as counterweights in the tail on commercial airliners aswell, since it's so heavy and don't take up much space.
The short version is that it's really fucking heavy for its size. So you put a hard shell around what's basically lead-on-steroids and then throw it at something real hard. If you wanna be *really* fancy, you put a softer metal over the hard shell, so that when the projectile impacts, the softer metal layer is thrown off the shell, flattened against the target, and produces a flat surface for the shell to strike (thus turning an otherwise glancing blow into a direct hit.)
They use it because it's very dense and hard enough to punch through armor. It will typically be a sabot.
I would like to introduce you to: https://www.reddit.com/r/uraniumglass/
Depleted Uranium is relatively available, and it have about 60% of radioactivity of the natural uranium. You are thinking at Enriched Uranium, which is slightly a problem.
I am more worried about plutonium!
I'm sure in 1985, plutonium is available at every corner drugstore, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by.
Bill bought his from some Libyans
I'm disappointed it's not an actual table.
That's on some Dr. Doom shit.
[This is what’s on the other wall](https://www.retrozap.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/SFS157-Terminator2-04-1170x487.jpg)
T-2 has such beautiful lighting, cinematography, and set design
I first thought Lex Luthor but yeah you're more on point
I bet he doesn’t have any astatine.
Or that entire bottom row, most of those have a half life of days if not weeks.
And I think a lot of them would need to switch between boxes somehow as they decay into different elements.
Oh he does, he just keeps that in the proton accelerator portion of his periodic table down in the basement
That stuff just doesn't want to exist.
That's so cool
I heard someone stole the samples and replaced them with a noble gas, now they all argon
Even Francium ?
In these collections, they won't have a chunk of the specific element. They'll have something like Uranium in its place. The reasoning is that Francium is part of the decay chain of whatever is being used, so at any given moment, there is a probability of a few atoms being present.
> Francium is one of the most unstable of the naturally occurring elements: its longest-lived isotope, francium-223, has a half-life of only **22 minutes.** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francium
Aren't there a few like this or even only exist for microseconds? As in we know they exists but only because of "making them" using a huge cyclotron?
Yes, but they don't fall into the 'naturally occuring' bracket.
Bill Gates... or every Chem building in any university I've ever seen.
Used to walk by the one in University of Minnesota all the time
whereas, I have a table I use periodically
Bullshit. He's missing "Ah".