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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • atomicorange@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzDots!
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    3 days 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.






  • atomicorange@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzDots!
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    4 days 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.








  • Sort of, assuming you don’t believe that God or magic are real. If I had premonitions of the future, and could demonstrate through testing that they come true, I’d be proving a phenomenon exists but not necessarily anything about the origins. They could be visions from God, making me a prophet. They could be something with a natural origin, like an energy or invisible spirits.

    It’s a term used by occultists, ghost hunters, and other people who want to discuss / legitimize spooky shit without the religious baggage of the word “supernatural”.



  • There’s a term for this idea, “preternatural”. It means a phenomenon that is the result of the natural world, not magic or divine, but still unexplainable with our current understanding.

    James Randi’s prize didn’t require proof of the supernatural, it was open to preternatural phenomena as well. Someone just had to prove it was a REAL phenomenon and not a hoax or random chance.