Question: Wouldn't any noble gas be a no, because to get it to a liquid or solid state in order to make it feasible to lick it, it would be so cold that it would be injurious to make contact with it with bare skin?
Really anything that's a gas at room temperature would qualify.
for the super short half-life synthetics you need a category for "it is not physically possible to lick this because any visible amount will boil itself away with decay heat in a fraction of a second"
Mercury should be yellow IMHO. There are people who swallowed it and are still alive. You shouldn't breath while licking it though. The fumes are way more dangerous than the liquid state.
Those two both occur naturally in their predominantly barely-radioactive isotopes (U-238 and TH-232). They've got half-lives measured in billions of years.
Basically everything past that came out of a reactor and is a nuclear flaming hot cheeto.
Interesting. That does leave the question of why Technetium, which is also so unstable it can only come out of a reactor, doesn’t get the same rating as even the naturally occurring trans-bismuth isotopes?
Green: "Ew, but sure."
Yellow: "But why, tho?"
Red: "You might not survive, but YOLO I guess."
Purple: "I recommend doing it before you have kids so you can qualify for the Darwin Awards."
Elemental lead (the metal) wouldn’t leave much residue, and it’s relatively hard to absorb when it isn’t in a compound. Yellow is precautionary for sure
Yeah it's clearly inconsistent. Sometimes its "ate you inside a nuke?", sometimes "is it poison?", and whether it will corrode/melt one's tongue off is not even consistent...
From a few uncomfortable experiences *inhalling* a bit of sulfur when fumigating a grapevine, I can say for sure that it wouldn't be nice, but probably also wouldn't be dangerous.
Randall Munroe of xkcd fame has something similar and asks, if I wanted to collect a 1 kg sample cube of each element what would happen. The results are... uneven, ranging from it floats away up to continual nuclear explosion for many years.
It's not actually a criticality event, but spontaneous nuclear decay. They're just falling apart and releasing vast amounts of energy as heat and energetic particles. It's very little fun to be in the middle of!
Kind of. Otto Hahn won the 1944 Nobel prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission, but there never was a Physics prize awarded, although Lise Meitner probably deserved it for her work interpreting Hahn's experiments. Fermi won the 1938 Physics prize for transmutation experiments via neutron bombardment.
Also, Leo Szilard patented the concept of a neutron initiated self sustaining fission reaction for energy generation in 1934, but he immediately assigned it the British government to keep it secret because of the obvious potential use in building a bomb. He also didn't win a Nobel prize for it.
Incidentally, the fact the Szilard never won a Nobel prize is simply scandalous. Nobel prizes were awarded to several other physicists for discoveries that he had done pioneering work on, including electron microscopes, cyclotrons and nuclear fission. The man was an utter genius.
Okay, I can only hear this chart to the tune of A Tribe Called Quest/Lou Reed. And unfortunately that means the answer for all of them is “Yes you can!” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D-uV8TGjaGU
yeah, lead isn't that dangerous...like sure you might lose a little inteligence if you do it a lot but you're certain to survive without any significant injuries...
If you’re assuming elemental U with natural isotope ratios it’s really not that bad. I mean, don’t eat it, but most of that uranium is on the sloooooow decay train
Technetium? I inject it in people all the time. If it's free Tc, you quickly pee it out. It's not bad at all... tiny bit of radiation. I'd knock that down to yellow for sure.
Comments
Really anything that's a gas at room temperature would qualify.
"*May* I lick it?"
Minor criticism. Otherwise wonderful chart.
Basically everything past that came out of a reactor and is a nuclear flaming hot cheeto.
Yellow: "But why, tho?"
Red: "You might not survive, but YOLO I guess."
Purple: "I recommend doing it before you have kids so you can qualify for the Darwin Awards."
https://youtu.be/ODf_sPexS2Q?si=zsZ1hM7GIPbRfJYV
stable ions, gonna make you cry on (the way to the hospital)
A list of elements as compounds & their lickability!
Also has anyone attempted to stick their head inside the LHC & taste any really exotic particles?
As for sticking your head into a particle accelerator, I can't even joke about that.
https://youtu.be/mD4J5VUwiAs?si=pTFzrGjhwjXLz4-P
https://youtu.be/SJLlrg7r06I?si=996wNQicqP9cDgBe
Put. In. Deliberately. To. Poison. Babies. For. Profit.
(I wish I was making that up.)
*also, NEVER inhale when around PU**
**let’s face it, maybe PU should not be your first choice for purely elemental interactions of the physically intimate kind.
That needs its own NO FUCK NO category
I love how tobacco plants are like, let's store as much of this stuff as plantily possible!
I wasn't going to lick those but now I'm reconsidering.
jfc wtf does purple do
Can I lick it?
Yes you can!