Pretty boy ❤️✨@/juanito04.bsky.social
Reblogged dyrdeer
cow commission on bluesky!
Reblogged athelind
sometimes when I'm bored, I go through the list of recent bad faith Wikipedia edits that have since been reverted. a lot of them are politically contentious/offensive topics that attract crazies and trolls in general, but sometimes there are completely innocent inoffensive articles that people attack for no reason. some guy yesterday vandalized the article on the chemical element francium
Francium IS a stupid element. It has a half life of 22 minutes and barely exists at all, only naturally occurring as a product of the extremely rare alpha decay series ²³⁵U ➝ ²³¹Th ➝ ²³¹Pa (𝜷 decay) ➝ ²²⁷Ac ➝ ²²³Fr (1.38% chance). There’s less than a gram of it on earth at any given moment. It has no uses to anybody and it isn’t even the most reactive group 1A element due to relativistic effects fucking up its electron binding energies. Stupid substance.
If you somehow asked a genie to get you a gram of Francium in a sealed vial so you could do an experiment with it, the genie would just give it to you because the enormous amount of radioactivity it produces would instantly vaporize the sample and cook you alive. Absolute dogshit isotope and its synthetic siblings are just the same but worse
found the guy
As a chemist, I agree that Francium is a stupid and useless element. Even the Royal Society of Chemistry agrees.
Reblog if you think Francium is a stupid element
Fuck France, and fuck its stupid element
hotleafbeverage-deactivated2024
I think this does a bit of a disservice to Marguerite Perey!
The awesome (albeit French) physicist who discovered Francium. She was a student of Marie Curie and did a lot to advance the study of radioactive materials. She is one of the most sadly (in my opinion) overlooked women in scientific history.
Seeing my addition to this post going around again and this comment has prompted me to clarify something:
Marguerite Perey is one of the greatest radiochemists to ever live, and Francium is such a bullshit element that only an absolute master could identify and analyze it.
The short-lived intermediate actinide chain isotopes are mostly bullshit elements for a lot of the same reasons Francium is. Five of them (Radium, Radon, Astatine, Actinium, and Protactinium) are so scarce in nature and so ferociously radioactive that all of their names literally mean “unstable or radioactive element” because at the time of their discovery that was the only thing known about them. Isolating and identifying these bullshit elements demanded a total technical mastery of the cutting edge chemical and radiological analysis techniques in their time, as well as performing a tremendous amount of brutal physical labor. Preparing these extreme trace elements for study required processing thousands of pounds of raw uranium and thorium ores, often exposing the researchers and their assistants to high doses of radiation, just to obtain the extremely radioactive milligram-scale quantities of the intermediate isotopes they wished to study.
To even have the skills to identify Francium, Perey had to first spend years mastering the separation of transactinide decay products from raw mixed ore at the Radium Institute with her mentor and another true master in the field, Marie Skłodowska-Curie. Her work in Curie’s lab focused on the isolation and analysis of another previously discovered bullshit decay product, the obviously-named Actinium. Actinium occurs in high-grade natural uranium ores at a rate of 0.2 mg Ac/1000 kg ore, a concentration of 0.0000002%wt, so isolating enough of it to study required the painstaking and precise process of dissolving and refining thousands of tons of increasingly radioactive metals in powerful and dangerous solvents.
Upon isolation of a sample of Actinium (specifically Actinium mixed into a Lanthanum carrier) , Perey and the Curies would frantically study the element as its already intense radioactivity multiplied while even shorter-lived isotopes of Thorium, Radium, Radon, Polonium, and others grew in to the sample, obscuring its characteristics and endangering the researchers.
The decay of Actinium should have only initially produced beta radiation from its decay into Thorium-227, which in turn undergoes alpha decay into Radium-223. The days-long lifetime of Thorium-227 means that after a fairly short period of time, the Actinium sample will develop a significant amount of alpha radiation on its own. But Perey was skilled enough and fast enough to isolate and measure her samples before this process could happen, and what she found was an unexplained early spike in alpha radiation from some other very scarce very active alpha source, something that must have been decaying directly from the Actinium in minuscule quantities.
After analyzing several samples to make sure these results were reliable, Perey was confident she had discovered the elusive element 87, and asked Jean Perrin (her supervisor at the lab) to submit her findings for publication. At the time, she was a lab assistant and unable to publish papers, and did not get a degree until 1946, seven years later. She named the new element Francium, after her home country and the nation that sponsored her research.
While Perey was investigating the properties of Actinium, her mentor Marie Curie developed serious anemia and had to withdraw from lab work. She died of aplastic anemia in 1934, after years of continuous exposure to extreme radiation that destroyed her bone marrow and left her body unable to produce new blood cells. Perey discovered Francium five years later.
The dangers of working with highly radioactive elements were not well understood in the early era of radiochemistry, but the experiences of the early radiochemists left a huge impact on those that followed, and Perey championed studies of the effects of radiation and devised new protection methods for researchers throughout her long career. Though she was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize, she never won it, and her contributions and talent have been largely forgotten outside of the nuclear chemistry community.
The level of skill and care required to discover an element that is so immensely bullshit as Francium is staggering, and the numbers involved are unimaginable. The labs Perey and the Curies worked in were left unused for decades until their destruction in 1981, due to the intense radioactivity from sub-microgram quantities of these highly active elements contaminating the room. It’s likely that Perey never observed more than a nanogram of Francium during her lifetime studying it, and no quantity large enough to observe its bulk quantities has ever been assembled.
I will talk shit about the element because it’s a nightmare atom, but I will not tolerate any kind of slander of Marguerite Perey, one of the best to ever do it.
I enjoyed learning about this and started reading further; I was delighted to learn three earlier (incorrect) claims of discovery had suggested names of russium, virginium, and moldavium.
Reblogged g-oblincat
It was my honor to do the cover illustrations for Villainess. It’s live on kickstarter, please check it out!
Less than 48 hours left! If you want a copy, now is the time!
Reblogged nitewrighter
Reblogging with a link to the artist, Emily K., who's based in Philly and is firmly anti-AI! You can print this piece (and some others) for free for use at protests and such!
Reblogged dragongirltongue
there’s definitely a gulf between someone who knows how to play chess and someone who plays chess, but it’s nothing compared to scrabble
specifically, “uwu” is being added to the international english scrabble dictionary, which is apparently a big deal because uuw is a terrible tile combination otherwise
(via @airlock)
Reblogged
Alrighty after months of work, a lot of setbacks, and some breakneck effort the RABBIT MASK PATTERN IS FINISHED AND AVAILABLE! https://www.paleopanthera.com/masks/rabbit-low-poly-mask-pattern My patterns are designed for cardboard but play nice with EVA foam and occasionally leather. There was an immense effort put into this one to make precise fitting edges, minimal parts, accommodate glasses, and clear instructions. I even illustrated the angles certain edges use as an upgrade on previous patterns. And now. For this week. A well earned break from mask work. The next one will likely be either the raven skull instructions or a redo of an older pattern.
Reblogged 70sscifiart
There's this sort of anthropomorphizing that inherently happens in language that really gets me sometimes. I'm still not over the terminology of "gravity assist," the technique where we launch satellites into the orbit of other planets so that we can build momentum via the astounding and literally astronomical strength of their gravitational forces, to "slingshot" them into the direction we need with a speed that we could never, ever, ever create ourselves. I mean, some of these slingshots easily get probes hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Wikipedia has a handy diagram of the Voyager 1 satellite doing such a thing.
"Gravity assist." "Slingshot." Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We're getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a "slingshot," because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can't be sure about the exact physics).
Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. "Black hole?" Damn yeah it sure is. "Big bang?" It sure was. "Galactic cluster?" Buddy you're never gonna guess what this is. I think it's an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like... idk, botany.
But, like. "Gravity assist." I still can't get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.
We are assisted.
And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:
"... You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. ..."
Gravity assist.
For the painting especially there’s a beauty in depicting some of our most advanced technology as synonymous with the most ancient. Very few people throughout history have had the privilege of seeing the face of Jupiter but many would recognize the sling thrower immediately.
Reblogged jackalopescruff
demi beast - half off
Reblogged
gift for @harmaagriffin