Why Does Everything Decay Into Lead
1,332,103
Published 2024-02-27
Hosted by: Reid Reimers
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All Comments (21)
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Everything turning into Lead is similar to Everything turning to crabs. It all comes down to Shells 07:17
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Ancient Romans didn't reduce wine in lead vessels because lead acetate was amazingly sweet. (It's about as sweet as sugar, but there's less than a gram of it per liter compared to the 200+ grams per liter of regular sugar.) Instead, it's because the other vessel they could have reduced wine in was made of copper, but copper acetate tastes awful.
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I love that the imagine chosen for "alchemists trying to turn lead into gold" you chose was Hennig Brand boiling urine until he discovered Phosphorus
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This video really feels like it needed that one extra anecdote about how Iron lies in the sweet spot between fission and fusion
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The future is nothing but Lead Crabs.
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Lead is the atomic version of Crabs
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"Now before we get to any magic we should start with some nuclear physics basics" That's some pretty hardcore magic.
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I have a lump of bismuth on my shelf. Obviously with that half life it's not going to irradiate me any time soon.
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"It's still magic even if you know how it's done" - Sir Terry Pratchett
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The Island of Stability is one of my favorite scientific predictions. I hope we discover one!
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The fact that Tin has Ten stable isotopes is pretty hilarious
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I like the fact that "magic numbers" was originally a derisive term but is now the accepted nomenclature, similar to the journey taken by "big bang"
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Somebody at Scishow has gotten into a chemistry obsession recently and I’m loving it
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I am a software engineer with nearly no education in chemistry. I learned more from this 14 minute video than I did throughout my entire education. SUBSCRIBED!!!
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I'm really enjoying all the chemistry videos lately! Keep them up :)
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Lead is such a great tool in science when you treat it with the respect that any neurotoxic chemical should be given, very underrated element IMO given all the justified fear over lead exposure now.
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Fun fact: Lead is one of the 7 classical metals, that have been known and in use during classical times. (There may have been more, but these 7 are the main ones.) They are: Lead, Tin, Copper, Iron, Mercury, Gold, and Silver. All these metals, except for Iron, have a very low melting point, but are fairly rare in the crust. Iron is the opposite, being super common, but high melting point.
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Because that's where all roads Leads
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All roads lead to lead.
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It would be an interesting video to explain why Technetium and Promethium don't have any stable isotopes despite being lighter than Lead. Maybe a reverse magic number situation.
