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The Lone Badger posted:It's also incredibly hydrophilic. That's how piranha works. The H2SO4 dehydrates the hell out of anything with water in it, including the H2O2, so you've got free oxygen floating around, and that leftover oxygen atom reacts with the carbon leftover from dehydrating organics to break up carbon chains and eventually form CO2.
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Jun 27, 2015 05:47
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Kinetica posted:
Nah, just wing it and put it in your will that your next of kin has to report back to us.
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Jun 27, 2015 06:09
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carborane_acid is my favourite superacid.
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Jun 27, 2015 13:25
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This isn't immediately dangerous, but it's scary on like, an existential level. Osmium, the densest naturally occurring element. To compare, water's density is 999.97 kg/m³. Iron's is 7850 kg/m³. Osmium's is 22590 kg/m³. Not a misprint. The same volume of water that would weigh a metric tonne would weigh TWENTY TWO METRIC TONNES in Osmium. In normal conditions it also resists attack from all acids and alkalis too, including nitro-hydrochloric acid. Someone should probably do a post about nitro-hydrochloric acid.
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Jul 2, 2015 19:06
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Hijo Del Helmsley posted:This isn't immediately dangerous, but it's scary on like, an existential level. drat and it looks like its about $900/oz too.
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Jul 2, 2015 19:34
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Hijo Del Helmsley posted:This isn't immediately dangerous, but it's scary on like, an existential level. So it's basically the (non?)polar opposite of a Klapotke chemical in that instead of wanting to no longer be what it is, osmium intensely wants to remain the same.
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Jul 2, 2015 19:57
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TheDon01 posted:drat and it looks like its about $900/oz too.
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Jul 2, 2015 20:06
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Alereon posted:Tungsten is 85% as dense and you can actually get samples pretty cheaply and easily. It's also not prone to spontaneously breaking down on contact with oxygen, into a highly poisonous compound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmium_tetroxide#Safety_considerations
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Jul 2, 2015 20:25
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Kalman posted:So it's basically the (non?)polar opposite of a Klapotke chemical in that instead of wanting to no longer be what it is, osmium intensely wants to remain the same. Eh, ~40% of it wants mildly to be something else. Either tungsten or platinum. It's radioactive with a half life greater than 9,800,000,000,000 years. KozmoNaut posted:It's also not prone to spontaneously breaking down on contact with oxygen, into a highly poisonous compound. If you want a safer ultra dense metal, try some iridium. It's 22.562 g/cm3 where as osmium is 22.587 g/cm3. For a long time it wasn't even certain which one was actually heaver, but X-ray diffraction work done in the late 1980s answered the question pretty definitively. Of course, iridium is quite a bit more expensive.
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Jul 2, 2015 20:37
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KozmoNaut posted:It's also not prone to spontaneously breaking down on contact with oxygen, into a highly poisonous compound. Yeah osmium is a nasty metal that belongs here regardless of density. Tungsten, on the other hand, is rough and tough. A real man's metal. Its melting point is second only to carbon. Totally getting a tungsten wedding band if I ever get around to proposing.
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Jul 2, 2015 20:38
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I once found some osmium tertoxide ampules on ebay. I was disturbed and hope the purchaser had an electron microscope that took OsO4 or had some alkenes they really wanted to stick some alcohols on. A good thread competition would be to find the most dangerous substance being casually sold on ebay or Amazon. I know you can still find some mercury salts on Amazon and Ebay but those aren't dangerous unless you eat them.
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Jul 2, 2015 21:19
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Gobbeldygook posted:I once found some osmium tertoxide ampules on ebay. I was disturbed and hope the purchaser had an electron microscope that took OsO4 or had some alkenes they really wanted to stick some alcohols on. Checkmate.
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Jul 2, 2015 21:26
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"Educate children on the benefits of having measles". I can't wait for the sequel, Tommy's Terrific Tumours, educating children on the benefits of beta radiation exposure.
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Jul 2, 2015 21:58
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Gobbeldygook posted:I once found some osmium tertoxide ampules on ebay. I was disturbed and hope the purchaser had an electron microscope that took OsO4 or had some alkenes they really wanted to stick some alcohols on. The "Things I won't work with' guy alleged that there's a chinese company you can buy FOOF from. It might have been one of the hexanitro compounds. Either way, it was something you wouldn't even want IN the mail, or in your mailbox, home, or in the general vicinity.
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Jul 2, 2015 23:07
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You can buy a drum of lube off amazon. That much lubes gotta be harmful to one's butt.
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Jul 2, 2015 23:12
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DemeaninDemon posted:Yeah osmium is a nasty metal that belongs here regardless of density. I had a tungsten wedding band.. loving ring of authority that is. I actually looked into osmium as well but the whole radioactive bit for a ring I was like nope.
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Jul 2, 2015 23:49
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SneakyFrog posted:I had a tungsten wedding band.. loving ring of authority that is. Your blood emits more radiation due to the potassium-40 in it than an osmium ring would. A half-life of 1015 years is barely measurable.
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Jul 3, 2015 00:14
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Watch out for bismuth. It has no stable isotopes. 
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Jul 3, 2015 00:33
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SneakyFrog posted:I had a tungsten wedding band.. loving ring of authority that is. I brought up the radioactivity in jest. The half life of Osmium is roughly 1000x as long as the universe has existed. 9.8x10^12 years vs 13.9x10^9. Don't get an Osmium ring though. It spontaneously produces osmium tetroxide in air, which is quite toxic and penetrates skin. It would be a slow process as there isn't that much surface area on a ring, but if you're constantly wearing it it could potentially be a problem. It's much more of a problem with osmium powders. There is some iridium jewelery, and a bunch more that's simply iridium plated. It has a great luster, and is nontoxic, and incredibly corrosion resistant. Oh, and all tungsten is radioactive as well. At least in theory. Only one of it's isotopes has been actually observed to break down. Their half lives are north of 1.8x10^18 years. So ~1,000,000,000x the age of the universe. Most is even more stable, with half lives10-100x of that.
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Jul 3, 2015 00:47
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I do love the isotopes that have those crazy long half-lives. Like Bismuth-209 with it's half-life of 1.9x1019 years. So it might put out, like, one alpha particle before the heat-death of the universe. Gyro Zeppeli has a new favorite as of 00:51 on Jul 3, 2015 |
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Jul 3, 2015 00:48
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Hijo Del Helmsley posted:I do love the isotopes that have those crazy long half-lives. Like Bismuth-209 with it's half-life of 1.9x1019 years. Some models of the universe propose proton decay. So to see if those models work, we've been looking for it. So far, we haven't found it, which means that the lower bound for it is currently: 5.9 × 10^33 years
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Jul 3, 2015 00:56
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Full Battle Rattle posted:The "Things I won't work with' guy alleged that there's a chinese company you can buy FOOF from. It might have been one of the hexanitro compounds. Either way, it was something you wouldn't even want IN the mail, or in your mailbox, home, or in the general vicinity.
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Jul 3, 2015 01:15
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I got a tungsten wedding band, It's boss. One thing to consider that might be a downside compared to softer things like gold is that if it has an edge (like mine does) it will scratch drat near anything. Tools, chrome, vehicle paint, device screens, etc... Something to consider, but on the other hand it also can't really get scratched up either.
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Jul 3, 2015 02:00
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Aurium posted:Of course, iridium is quite a bit more expensive. Still half the price of gold. It wouldn't be too horribly expensive to get the material to make a wedding band out of. Actually getting that material ring-shaped somehow is left as an exercise to the reader. TheDon01 posted:I got a tungsten wedding band, It's boss. One thing to consider that might be a downside compared to softer things like gold is that if it has an edge (like mine does) it will scratch drat near anything. Tools, chrome, vehicle paint, device screens, etc... I lost mine. Twice. The good thing about tungsten, is that it's cheap to replace. 
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Jul 3, 2015 02:06
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KillHour posted:Still half the price of gold. It wouldn't be too horribly expensive to get the material to make a wedding band out of. Actually getting that material ring-shaped somehow is left as an exercise to the reader. https://www.americanelements.com/irmwb.html 
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Jul 3, 2015 02:20
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Aurium posted:There is some iridium jewelery, and a bunch more that's simply iridium plated. It has a great luster, and is nontoxic, and incredibly corrosion resistant. Iridium is great. Really, really excellent for industrial and decorative uses. Like you, and other posters have pointed out, it's incredibly resistant to corrosion, or change of any sort. It has naturally occurring alloys - Osmiridium was used for the tips of fountain pens in preference to basically every other material, back when they were a thing. I had a chapter of my Master's dissertation devoted to it. Because, from an economic geology standpoint, iridium is a motherfucker. The way that the majority of economic minerals get emplaced is through hydrothermal transport and concentration. You get hot fluids, usually water but can be CO2 or methane, either acidic or saline or both, moving through massive sediment piles in basins and then being exhaled on the bottom of the sea that inevitably forms in these low-lying areas. Hot, metal-carrying fluids hit the cold (1-2°C water) at the bottom of the basin, and all of the delicious metals precipitate out, usually combining with sulphur in the waters to form sulphides. Then, a few hundred million years later, some geologists come along and find it and get very excited and show the project delivery guys their findings and then drink some beer, because turning it into an actual operating mine isn't my job goddammit. Iridium, on the other hand, has no known hydrothermal transport mechanism. The only chemical compounds it forms naturally are with other platinum group elements, which are almost all as immobile as it is. It's really really hard to find iridium deposits. The element is extracted as a by-product of copper and nickel mining, because those two elements have a type of deposit called a magmatic sulphide deposit, which means it was emplaced by magmatic means. Cu and Ni-rich lava flowing either underground or over the surface, eroding the substrate and stripping out sulphur to make sulphides. The really big Ni deposits (Sudbury, Mt Keith, Kambalda) all started out as fractionated melts, on the border of Archean-age cratons (2.5+ billion years old). The Earth is no longer hot enough inside to produce the magmas involved, called komatiites, so what we've got is what we're getting as far as terrestrial nickel is concerned. Another fun fact: Sudbury, Ontario, the world's largest nickel deposit, would have never had sufficient heat flow under the crust to form if it wasn't for the intercession of a 12km-wide comet or meteor smacking into it around 1.8 billion years ago. The impact melted a slice of crust about 15km thick and 40km wide, and because of the massive influx of heat so close to the surface, all of the different types of rock neatly separated out, with nickel and copper complexing with sulphur to make one of the largest $$$ deposits ever. Iridium also has really weirdly fluctuating supply and demand, and as such there's limited potential for investing in the metal from a futures point of view, because things that don't seem so bad can actually completely gently caress or flood the market. There's a nickel mine in Tanzania that used to have a fair bit of Ir/Os/Rh coming out of it, and then they moved on to another lens of the deposit after playing one out, and all of a sudden, no PGE at all, with no warning. This thread should be "PYF cool scientific poo poo", really, it seems to be a meeting place for a lot of scientific minds outside of SAL, where there seems to be less of "here's some cool poo poo" and more discipline-specific serioustalk. Memento has a new favorite as of 02:51 on Jul 3, 2015 |
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Jul 3, 2015 02:49
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Sounds like we need to start mining asteroids then.
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Jul 3, 2015 02:57
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Aurium posted:I brought up the radioactivity in jest. The half life of Osmium is roughly 1000x as long as the universe has existed. 9.8x10^12 years vs 13.9x10^9. Doesn't osmium also smell really funky? I seem to remember that's what its name comes from. E: Yeah, guess it's the tetroxide.
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Jul 3, 2015 02:58
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TheDon01 posted:Sounds like we need to start mining asteroids then. Depends on what you want to do with the metal you mine. If the answer is "mine asteroids to deliver raw materials to processing and industrial centers on Earth", then no. Whoever says we need to do that is wrong and bad and wrong. If the answer is "mine asteroids to deliver raw materials to processing plants in orbit for making spaceships etc to explore the solar system" then yes. The only thing better than doing that tomorrow would be doing it today. It's only just gone midday, I can get a ton more done before beer o'clock. Put me in coach!
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Jul 3, 2015 03:01
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Memento posted:Depends on what you want to do with the metal you mine. If the answer is "mine asteroids to deliver raw materials to processing and industrial centers on Earth", then no. Whoever says we need to do that is wrong and bad and wrong. Mine asteroids to drop them onto the people we hate.
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Jul 3, 2015 03:12
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The thing I'd be worried about if I had a tungsten wedding ring would be possible issues getting it off my finger if it got stuck. Cutting it off in some way must be drat difficult.
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Jul 3, 2015 03:17
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SneakyFrog posted:I had a tungsten wedding band.. loving ring of authority that is. Me, too. Wore it for two weeks until the skin sloughed off my finger thanks to an allergy. Now I've got boring old titanium.  Wanted beryllium steel to go all Destro on it, but some science friends said that was a bad idea.
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Jul 3, 2015 03:24
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Munin posted:The thing I'd be worried about if I had a tungsten wedding ring would be possible issues getting it off my finger if it got stuck. Cutting it off in some way must be drat difficult. Emergency room removal is a concern that has been raised, since they can't be cut off with the standard tools. Techniques and tools have since been developed, including simply cracking it off with vise grips. Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EehzzXsi3wk TerminalSaint has a new favorite as of 03:32 on Jul 3, 2015 |
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Jul 3, 2015 03:25
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Memento posted:Depends on what you want to do with the metal you mine. If the answer is "mine asteroids to deliver raw materials to processing and industrial centers on Earth", then no. Whoever says we need to do that is wrong and bad and wrong. Mine asteroids, ship the finished products back to Earth via safe and effective gravity drop. No sense polluting our planet any more than we need to.
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Jul 3, 2015 03:32
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Kalman posted:So it's basically the (non?)polar opposite of a Klapotke chemical in that instead of wanting to no longer be what it is, osmium intensely wants to remain the same. God, Klapotke has the best name. I know it's been said before, but it's not often you get someone with a name that just sounds like their work.
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Jul 3, 2015 03:33
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Mine the moon, turn it into the Solar System's biggest factory.
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Jul 3, 2015 03:34
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Reverend Jake posted:Me, too. Wore it for two weeks until the skin sloughed off my finger thanks to an allergy. Now I've got boring old titanium. If your skin was coming off from that, I don't want to imagine what would happen if you wore a known source of all kinds of skin nastiness in susceptible individuals.
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Jul 3, 2015 03:40
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Deteriorata posted:Your blood emits more radiation due to the potassium-40 in it than an osmium ring would. A half-life of 1015 years is barely measurable. The decay of that isotope has never been observed. It's theoretically predicted to occur but if you stuck a dosimeter next to a big sample of it you wouldn't see poo poo. It makes U238 look like astatine.
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Jul 3, 2015 04:06
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TheDon01 posted:I got a tungsten wedding band, It's boss. One thing to consider that might be a downside compared to softer things like gold is that if it has an edge (like mine does) it will scratch drat near anything. Tools, chrome, vehicle paint, device screens, My brother-in-law has one. The downside is that you can't really have it resized. He lost a bunch of weight and they can bring it down by tack-welding some little ball bearings to the inner circumference so that it stays snug on your finger, but if you fatten up they can't do much.
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Jul 3, 2015 04:10
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Aurium posted:Some models of the universe propose proton decay. So to see if those models work, we've been looking for it. So far, we haven't found it, which means that the lower bound for it is currently: I learned about proposed proton decay from an episode of Law & Order. It was neat.
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Jul 3, 2015 04:20
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