this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 92 points 2 months ago (1 children)

*The Periodic Table according to Michael Jackson

[–] [email protected] 56 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Does that decay into SHeMoNa?

Edit. Corrected my bad mixed up spelling

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Yup. Faster with a catalyst. Ma2Se, Ma2Sa are good examples.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I believe you're thinking of SHeMoNa

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Lol that's perfect. Yeah i mixed it up, dammit.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Ah yes, oxygen, my favourite metal

[–] [email protected] 67 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Can't make fire without oxygen. That's pretty metal 🤟

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Can’t make fire without oxygen

Fluorine fires have entered the chat.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Fluorine fires have entered the chat.

Oh shit, someone call the fluorine fire department to save the chat!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

call the fluorine fire department

Sometimes there is no such department, especially for the most vigorous fluorinating reagents like chlorine trifluoride: Sand Won't Save You This Time (Derek Lowe)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

it can potentially go on to “burn” things that you would normally consider already burnt to hell and gone, and a practical consequence of that is that it’ll start roaring reactions with things like bricks and asbestos tile.

Yeah, that's a big fat nope from me 😬

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Lmao I think that particular emoji is sign language for love, not that that isn't appropriate here

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Even apart from sign language, it's the hand sign for "hang loose" and not "throwing horns." But was as close as I could get.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Pretty sure that's the emoji for "thwip".

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

You think that's air you're breathing now?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Matrix missed a great chance at an awesome unrealistic underwater flight scene.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

It sticks to a magnet, that means metal right?

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

Do you know what happens to hydrogen when the temp drops below 14K?

Yeah. Metal.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Metallic hydrogen may also make up parts of Jupiter's core.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Metallic or solid? Those are two different things, and depending on the answer, i will be going down a knowledge rabbit hole

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Metals are crystal lattices with delocalized electrons.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

That's fucking badass

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Doesn't it also need to be under immense pressure? I don't think low temperature alone is enough.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Yeah, I think that may be the case.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

That's hard af

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I'm confused, that's just a normal periodic table.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago

Found the astronomer.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

what? no, a normal periodic table has oxygen and carbon too!

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago

i mean, i think most chemists are organic

few are free range though

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Physicists are notorious for approximating, and astronomers are even worse. But there are some subfields where they care about being more precise, and you maybe break the periodic table into a handful of elements plus alphas. And there's that one or two people getting exquisite spectral resolution and signal-to-noise on a few stars and measuring the abundance of Technetium or whatever.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago

It's why I fucking love astrophysics. There's so much handwaving because so much information is observed.

But without the handwaving you can't find crazy ass things like nuclear fusion being behind the power of stars. You find these really big numbers everywhere that make the "normal stuff" negligible.

It not that the precision isn't important, it's just not always relevant at particular scales, like the scale of space.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Plutonium is not a real element.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago

It's a dwarf element.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Plutonium can be on the periodic table but we do not grant it the rank of element.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (2 children)

What about metallic hydrogen in the core of planets?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

"Wait, they're ALL metals?"
"Always have been."

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Funnily enough, probably not a metal according to astronomers.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Iodine is a transition metal I will die on this hill.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Care to defend your position? Iodine is certainly not in the d-block...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The intended joke is that hypervalent iodine compounds like Dess-Martin periodinane flip between different oxidation states like you often see for transition metals. As an example, the mechanism usually drawn for oxidations by DMP is similar to those drawn for PCC/Jones reagent, where the electrons removed from the substrate are "banked" at the metal center. Obviously, redox chemistry is not at all limited to transition metals, but I am often surprised at iodine's propensity to engage in it. A lot of research over the past decade or two has also developed redox catalysis with these reagents, reactivity which is commonly (though again not always) the purview of transition metals.

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

yOu aRe MadE oF sTardUst

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Should also have iron on there too

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And if you ask a cosmologist what the universe is made of, they go "Well, there's a lot of dark matter, and even more dark energy. And then there's a tiny bit of some matter or something idk lol."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Read that as cosmetologist and was thoroughly confused.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

That's because these two account for something like 99% of all normal matter in the universe