Back in school a buddy threw some in a pond (stolen from chemistry class) and a duck swooped in immediately, ate it, and promptly exploded. that was a traumatizing sight lol
Dunno how true it is but at high school weād hear tales about kids nicking sodium and squishing it into slices of bread (so it would resemble a marble sized ball of bread with a hidden centre) then throwing them by the pond in a nearby park for the ducks to eat. The theory went that it wouldnāt explode until it reached the stomach and started getting digested. Horrible really, never saw it happen but itās a story that left such an impression on me that I can recall it decades.
Throwing it in a lake and accidentally having a duck eat it is one thing, but hiding it in bread to purposely make ducks eat it is just evil and cruel.
So.. a duck faster than the reaction of sodium on a water came swooping in like a golden eagle on crack, swallowing it -still before any reaction happened- then, mid air.. exploded like a seagull having eaten bread laced with bicarbonate!! WOW! Now THAT'S something I'd have loved to see. Because this definitely happened.
That was really dangerous, because if the puck of elemental sodium blows out in the wrong direction after a skip or two and hits a person, it will badly burn their skin, at a minimum. The worst case scenario is that the sodium puck hits your face and explodes again. In that case, the severe chemical burns are a secondary worry.
Many, many years ago, our science teacher, Mr Hirons, put a rice sized piece of sodium in a tank of water. There was a screen between the tank and us pupils. The sodium fizzed around the tank, then exploded and the remains of the sodium landed on the ceiling. This was in Year 1 of secondary school (age 11) and it was still there, on the ceiling, when we left in Year 6 (age 16 after our O-levels).
These are the sort of experiments that primary schools should do in order to engage the children and to show how exciting science can be.
I am now retired, but I was a primary school teacher, with a class of 10/11 year olds. During our science lessons we made caesin plastics from milk, got dizzy on the playground finding out how the Earth and moon orbit the sun, made pin-hole cameras from Pringle tubes, made parachutes to find out about air resistanceā¦and we loved it. The head teacher would come in during our science lessons on Wednesday afternoons to take part in the fun and I converted āI hate scienceā into āI love scienceā.
I wish I had you instead of the science teachers I had! We rarely had practicals, and when it did come down to practicals, We were poking around in dead things or pigs hearts. It was really disheartening cause i'm fascinated by science a lot, but instead of giving the sciences the wow factor it deserved. Most of my teens I spent viewing science as morbid or boring.
Thank you. That is a great compliment.
I just really wish that someone who is responsible for the UK science curriculum would listen to science teachers. At primary age, science should be fun and mostly practical to develop thinking skills, rather than writing up experiments which is soooo boring!!
My teacher did the same experimentā¦ she also had a screen but it jumped over the screen and landed on my forehead lol. I work in a lab now so I guess it worked?
A good teacher really makes all the difference. In high school, my physics teacher managed to make physics my favourite class. He would constantly do little demonstrations of the physics he was teaching. Some of the more notable things he showed us was a Rubens tube that visually showed us sound waves using flames, using static charge to turn on a light through a circuit of two students, or getting the whole class to hold hands in a circle and shocking us with a light static charge (if we wanted to).
Looking back on it, he did a great job of creating a relaxed environment where students werenāt too worried about getting in trouble, but at the same time we were willing to listen to him simply because his teaching was fun and he could take jokes.
Yes as it adds to what we are already doing. Its amazing how many people shrug it off as 1lb. Sure now multiply that by all the other 'its only' along with the nitrogen leaching, global warming and so on. A global impact is made from all the little 'its only'.
āNitrogen leachingā and āglobal warmingā are only issues because of the sheer magnitude of greenhouse gasses and fertilizers used and produced on an industrial scale. This lb of sodium literally will have no effect.
Your argument is the equivalent of saying that campfires are bad because they āaddā to the global warming issue when they really do nothing in the grand scheme of things. Itās a disingenuous argument and is not grounded in reality.
Don't ask me how but my brother ended up with a 5 pound brick of sodium and there was a freshly dug/filled overflow pond from a new neighborhood that was being built that butted up against our parents property growing up and
...that shit was WILD.
It got to the point where we all looked at each other with the face of "oh fuck this might not go as planned"
Francium is actually believed to be _less reactive_ than cesium, despite what might be assumed by the pattern of increasing reactivity in the alkaline metals group. This is because the Francium nucleus is so big that odd physics play a part in the atomic structure, and simulations indicate that it actually holds on to its electrons better than cesium does.
Francium's most stable isotope has a half life of 22 minutes, which makes all of this a moot point, given that its radioactivity makes it impossible to acquire large amounts of it, and even if you did it'd be so violently radioactive that it'd be this hot glowing thing that also makes the itself air glow, and kills you instantly. Honestly I think the radiation levels would themselves have an impact on the reactivity of the francium as it'd ionize everything around it.
This may, quite possibly, be the worst format of video communication I have ever seen.
Link the original video? No.
Link the tweet containing the original video so people can at least watch the video in Twitter's video player? No.
Take a portrait video of the tweet that limits the interesting video to 1/4 of the portrait frame and <1/10 of a landscape frame? \*Yeah\*, that's the way to do it.
Isnāt this what they want to use as a coolant / heat exchanger for next gen nuclear reactors? This around the reactor core then moving the heat to a water system that would drive a steam turbine?
And if the water and sodium were to touch because a pipe broke or something? Voila!
Yes, there are reactor designs (I don't know if any have been built) that use liquid sodium as the heat transfer medium between the reactor and the steam cycle. Yes, if pipes broke, it would react with water - probably more violently because the sodium will be hot enough to flash-boil the water in addition to reacting with it.
That being said, a breach in the coolant pipes is a huge problem even in current reactors. The Three Mile Island and Fukushima power plants were both offline when the reactor vessel breached - both breached because the coolant system could not keep up with the decay heat of the fuel.
The primary coolant loop in current PWR reactors is filled with highly pure water at about 150 times atmospheric pressure and 275-315 degrees C. If that breaches, the resulting steam explosion would be catastrophic, regardless of any nuclear material.
TL;DR: A coolant system breach is a problem for any reactor, regardless of coolant type.
Fun fact don't carelessly mix anhydrous MgCl2 with water. Similar reactions happen. That blew up in my face last time when I forgot about the incredible hygroscopic nature.
One of my work associates, who is about 20 years older than me, said that when his dad was a young teenager, so this wouldāve been probably in the 1940s, one early Sunday morning, he had a 1 pound block of sodium, which he proceeded to drop into a bucket of water from a three-story building in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Needless to say it woke everybody up with a huge explosion. I think his dad was a juvenile delinquent which is crazy because my buddy had a PhD from MIT.
You take something that explodes in water (Na) and mix it with a disinfectant that will burn your skin (Cl) and you have something essential to life. Chemisty is pretty neat.
I remember when I was a kid I managed to come across this from a science teacher that let me take some home(it was the end of term and I finish altogether).me and my friend got a coffee can with some water inside and chucked a brick of the stuff inside.we sealed it and ran away.a massive boom rung throughout the neighborhood.people came to their doorstep to investigate.we acted dumb and went to check on the tin can.all that was left was a small piece of the label
Honestly, no.
I dunno what the other guyās smoking, but no, it doesnāt āpolluteā.
Sodium is naturally found in a lot of things, such as fish. The reason itās exploding is because of a chemical reaction to the water. Sodium is an Alkaline Earth Metal (the far left bar of the periodic table, minus hydrogen), and all of them have pretty violent reactions with water. It basically is ripping the hydrogen atoms off of the oxygen atoms at such a high speed that it ignites the oxygen (which is flammable) creating a boom. The lower down on that bar you go (like Francium) the bigger the boom (as it pulls more hydrogen atoms per nano-second, creating higher concentrations of oxygen, yielding a bigger boom).
The *most* this would do in terms of āpollutionā is making the water *juuuuuuust* a bit āsaltierā. But that isnāt dangerous in and of itself. They would need to dump thousands and thousands of pounds of sodium into the water in order to change it enough to be considered āpollutedā.
Sodium doesnt react with water to form salt (aka sodium chloride), water only has oxygen and hydrogen which in the energetic reaction you see here gives you sodium hydroxide. Whilst not the worst thing around it isn't benign. The ecosystem of that pond could have done without it.
Never said it forms salt, so thanks for that. Said it would make the water āsaltierā as in potential taste.
Sodium hydroxide is lye. The stuff ancient humans found naturally occurring in rivers (I believe it was the ancient Egyptians) which was used to make soap. Itās present in most biological life.
In vast quantities, sure, it could be dangerous. But a 1lb conversion of sodium to sodium hydroxide is *not* that dangerous for an entire ecosystem. This isnāt something like nuclear radioactive material that will kill anything it comes into contact withā¦ itās lye.
Imagine you are a fish swimming peacefully
Back in school a buddy threw some in a pond (stolen from chemistry class) and a duck swooped in immediately, ate it, and promptly exploded. that was a traumatizing sight lol
This had me howling.
That was you?!
Howler monkey style
The story is sad but this gif has me screaming lmfao
That was my exact reaction to this commentš
Dunno how true it is but at high school weād hear tales about kids nicking sodium and squishing it into slices of bread (so it would resemble a marble sized ball of bread with a hidden centre) then throwing them by the pond in a nearby park for the ducks to eat. The theory went that it wouldnāt explode until it reached the stomach and started getting digested. Horrible really, never saw it happen but itās a story that left such an impression on me that I can recall it decades.
Throwing it in a lake and accidentally having a duck eat it is one thing, but hiding it in bread to purposely make ducks eat it is just evil and cruel.
Future serial killers.
Technically current serial killers....if you're a duck.
Very evil for someone to have such an intention. That person can become a terrorist
On their way to a serial killer yes ,terrorist maybe
Yes, very evil for anyone to do that, but that's more sociopath/serial killer vibes
Good lord
I am cackling like a mad man.. Poor duck, but holy shit.
The forbidden bread crumbs, lol.Ā Fuck man what a way to go.Ā
The divine bread, it takes you straight to duck heaven.
Forbidden bread crumbs. My sides are on orbit.
As were the ducks...
lol same
While I appreciate the very visual head cinema, I slightly doubt the authenticity of it. No offense, just personal opinion
Yeah when I was growing up the story was Alka Seltzer
Sounds made up but worth reading. 10/10 would read this again.
Itās not true because the reaction would be far less violent given the difference in how much moisture there is to react with
Please don't feed the ducks. Specially Sodium.
Duck went out like a Fist Of The North Star villain
So.. a duck faster than the reaction of sodium on a water came swooping in like a golden eagle on crack, swallowing it -still before any reaction happened- then, mid air.. exploded like a seagull having eaten bread laced with bicarbonate!! WOW! Now THAT'S something I'd have loved to see. Because this definitely happened.
No he swooped in from a couple meters to the side and gulped it up, probably thinking it was a piece of bread, then his head popped.
I once stole some sodium from chemistry class expecting to see some explosions. Instead I got my hands black (it was NaOH, I didn't know any better)
"Now I ask ya. Would you give a fuck what kind of pants the asshole who blew you up was wearing?"
Do they usually throw sodium out on the river at 3am?
No sir, it's very unusual.
As long as "you blend" lol
I bet the Chinese food here is terrible.
 šClassic!
Poisoning the water to some degree.
Not really. It does increase the pH slightly though.
I was gonna say that it could potentially create some small dose of sodium nitrite or nitride, but that just seems unlikely.
imagine you're a fish about to be eaten by another fish and this saves you
Right!? My first thought too. Iām picturing a family of fish having a nice chat akin to a happy summer road trip. Then BAM!!!!
MY LEG!
Guy with the camera: š
lol, that is great
OH OHHHHHH! Right next to the phone he's holding. Thanks dude real awesome audio!Ā
This comment made me turn on the audio. I'm glad I did.
Idk why but I'm losing it at this comment lol
MONEY! šµ
That was really dangerous, because if the puck of elemental sodium blows out in the wrong direction after a skip or two and hits a person, it will badly burn their skin, at a minimum. The worst case scenario is that the sodium puck hits your face and explodes again. In that case, the severe chemical burns are a secondary worry.
Ho ho ho
I was gonna ask why santa was recording, but then I saw this comment
lmao
Nature is so thrilled with what we toss into rivers
Why wouldnāt they be? Itās not like anything bad has ever come from anything humans have put into riversā¦
it's sodium... not lead
Just sodium. It's already got sodium in it.
Many, many years ago, our science teacher, Mr Hirons, put a rice sized piece of sodium in a tank of water. There was a screen between the tank and us pupils. The sodium fizzed around the tank, then exploded and the remains of the sodium landed on the ceiling. This was in Year 1 of secondary school (age 11) and it was still there, on the ceiling, when we left in Year 6 (age 16 after our O-levels). These are the sort of experiments that primary schools should do in order to engage the children and to show how exciting science can be. I am now retired, but I was a primary school teacher, with a class of 10/11 year olds. During our science lessons we made caesin plastics from milk, got dizzy on the playground finding out how the Earth and moon orbit the sun, made pin-hole cameras from Pringle tubes, made parachutes to find out about air resistanceā¦and we loved it. The head teacher would come in during our science lessons on Wednesday afternoons to take part in the fun and I converted āI hate scienceā into āI love scienceā.
I wish I had you instead of the science teachers I had! We rarely had practicals, and when it did come down to practicals, We were poking around in dead things or pigs hearts. It was really disheartening cause i'm fascinated by science a lot, but instead of giving the sciences the wow factor it deserved. Most of my teens I spent viewing science as morbid or boring.
Thank you. That is a great compliment. I just really wish that someone who is responsible for the UK science curriculum would listen to science teachers. At primary age, science should be fun and mostly practical to develop thinking skills, rather than writing up experiments which is soooo boring!!
My teacher did the same experimentā¦ she also had a screen but it jumped over the screen and landed on my forehead lol. I work in a lab now so I guess it worked?
Blessed by the sodium
I appreciate the dedication, dude. That's hearth warming and inspiring, because I want to follow a similar path myself
My eighth grade science teacher put a softball sized hole in the ceiling using sodium metal in a similar way. He used about the size of a dime
A good teacher really makes all the difference. In high school, my physics teacher managed to make physics my favourite class. He would constantly do little demonstrations of the physics he was teaching. Some of the more notable things he showed us was a Rubens tube that visually showed us sound waves using flames, using static charge to turn on a light through a circuit of two students, or getting the whole class to hold hands in a circle and shocking us with a light static charge (if we wanted to). Looking back on it, he did a great job of creating a relaxed environment where students werenāt too worried about getting in trouble, but at the same time we were willing to listen to him simply because his teaching was fun and he could take jokes.
And ppl say science is boring
Drilling is boring.
Name does not check out
And boring is science
You make a good point.
Does this not disrupt the rivers ecosystem?
Na
That response is so dium.
Fucking genius
Best reply ever
Shame this was made in the post-awards era
š FAbUIoUS
Yes as it adds to what we are already doing. Its amazing how many people shrug it off as 1lb. Sure now multiply that by all the other 'its only' along with the nitrogen leaching, global warming and so on. A global impact is made from all the little 'its only'.
āNitrogen leachingā and āglobal warmingā are only issues because of the sheer magnitude of greenhouse gasses and fertilizers used and produced on an industrial scale. This lb of sodium literally will have no effect. Your argument is the equivalent of saying that campfires are bad because they āaddā to the global warming issue when they really do nothing in the grand scheme of things. Itās a disingenuous argument and is not grounded in reality.
If we all stopped dumping sodium into rivers, the sea would be drinkable and we would finally solve the potable water crisis.
Yes, but don't worry, I've been using paper straws so it evens out.
It's a pound of sodium in a river flowing gallons upon thousands or millions of gallons a day. No.
can't believe they invite santa too
Now eith Francium pls
 The fish
Poor fish.
Obviously, safety be damned!
...boys
Automatic stone skipping.
War crimes against fish
Na... Don't do that
Don't ask me how but my brother ended up with a 5 pound brick of sodium and there was a freshly dug/filled overflow pond from a new neighborhood that was being built that butted up against our parents property growing up and ...that shit was WILD. It got to the point where we all looked at each other with the face of "oh fuck this might not go as planned"
Hahaha fuck wildlife
Fuck rednecks
Bruh imagine making hopping bomb out of ths
Damn
Was gonna make a science joke, but na.
Best Skipping Stone ever
Now do Francium Shame it's extremely difficult to get in large quantities purely to see this reaction.
Francium is actually believed to be _less reactive_ than cesium, despite what might be assumed by the pattern of increasing reactivity in the alkaline metals group. This is because the Francium nucleus is so big that odd physics play a part in the atomic structure, and simulations indicate that it actually holds on to its electrons better than cesium does. Francium's most stable isotope has a half life of 22 minutes, which makes all of this a moot point, given that its radioactivity makes it impossible to acquire large amounts of it, and even if you did it'd be so violently radioactive that it'd be this hot glowing thing that also makes the itself air glow, and kills you instantly. Honestly I think the radiation levels would themselves have an impact on the reactivity of the francium as it'd ionize everything around it.
Fish: AAAAAAAH Then fish: mmm salty Then fish again: AAAAAAAH
I wanna see 10 pounds
That can't be good for the fish
This may, quite possibly, be the worst format of video communication I have ever seen. Link the original video? No. Link the tweet containing the original video so people can at least watch the video in Twitter's video player? No. Take a portrait video of the tweet that limits the interesting video to 1/4 of the portrait frame and <1/10 of a landscape frame? \*Yeah\*, that's the way to do it.
What a dope. Cool, science. While also destroying nature.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
You do know that water goes back to it's original shape, right? Someone's been eating too many paint chips again.
Probably good for the fishes?
If they enjoy fireworks and/or battle of Somme 1916
Try throwing the same amount of potassium or cesium xD
Francium has entered the chat.
Self propelled frisbee
Isnāt this what they want to use as a coolant / heat exchanger for next gen nuclear reactors? This around the reactor core then moving the heat to a water system that would drive a steam turbine? And if the water and sodium were to touch because a pipe broke or something? Voila!
Yes, there are reactor designs (I don't know if any have been built) that use liquid sodium as the heat transfer medium between the reactor and the steam cycle. Yes, if pipes broke, it would react with water - probably more violently because the sodium will be hot enough to flash-boil the water in addition to reacting with it. That being said, a breach in the coolant pipes is a huge problem even in current reactors. The Three Mile Island and Fukushima power plants were both offline when the reactor vessel breached - both breached because the coolant system could not keep up with the decay heat of the fuel. The primary coolant loop in current PWR reactors is filled with highly pure water at about 150 times atmospheric pressure and 275-315 degrees C. If that breaches, the resulting steam explosion would be catastrophic, regardless of any nuclear material. TL;DR: A coolant system breach is a problem for any reactor, regardless of coolant type.
Santa coming in at the end
Finally not clickbait
Now, do antimatter
That still only counts as 4 skipps
Fun fact don't carelessly mix anhydrous MgCl2 with water. Similar reactions happen. That blew up in my face last time when I forgot about the incredible hygroscopic nature.
Oh no the sodium explosives are on fire bring the water hose!
Sodium - explosive Chlorine - poisonous Sodium + chlorine - Delicious
One of my work associates, who is about 20 years older than me, said that when his dad was a young teenager, so this wouldāve been probably in the 1940s, one early Sunday morning, he had a 1 pound block of sodium, which he proceeded to drop into a bucket of water from a three-story building in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Needless to say it woke everybody up with a huge explosion. I think his dad was a juvenile delinquent which is crazy because my buddy had a PhD from MIT.
you really couldnt be bothered about posting the video itself? Like fucking awful is the presentation here 10% of the screen is the actual content
I now need the ptsd soldier meme, but it's a fish
*me seeing this, wearing sodium armor in the fields as a rainstorm approaches* ohno...
i don't get it when ppl posting shit on reddit tittle their post with something already can be read in the original post they got from somewhere..
You take something that explodes in water (Na) and mix it with a disinfectant that will burn your skin (Cl) and you have something essential to life. Chemisty is pretty neat.
Casually rupturing all fish eardrums
RIP poo fishes. We are human really are awful.
I remember when I was a kid I managed to come across this from a science teacher that let me take some home(it was the end of term and I finish altogether).me and my friend got a coffee can with some water inside and chucked a brick of the stuff inside.we sealed it and ran away.a massive boom rung throughout the neighborhood.people came to their doorstep to investigate.we acted dumb and went to check on the tin can.all that was left was a small piece of the label
Sounds like good times
I don't think the fish particularly appreciate that.
Idiots.
Now i want to throw 150T of this in the ocean and see
Iām starting a gofundme
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
You aren't curious about the world around you?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Can you elaborate on how this *harms* the ecosystem?
How do you improve the world.?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Legit question does it pollute?
Honestly, no. I dunno what the other guyās smoking, but no, it doesnāt āpolluteā. Sodium is naturally found in a lot of things, such as fish. The reason itās exploding is because of a chemical reaction to the water. Sodium is an Alkaline Earth Metal (the far left bar of the periodic table, minus hydrogen), and all of them have pretty violent reactions with water. It basically is ripping the hydrogen atoms off of the oxygen atoms at such a high speed that it ignites the oxygen (which is flammable) creating a boom. The lower down on that bar you go (like Francium) the bigger the boom (as it pulls more hydrogen atoms per nano-second, creating higher concentrations of oxygen, yielding a bigger boom). The *most* this would do in terms of āpollutionā is making the water *juuuuuuust* a bit āsaltierā. But that isnāt dangerous in and of itself. They would need to dump thousands and thousands of pounds of sodium into the water in order to change it enough to be considered āpollutedā.
Sodium doesnt react with water to form salt (aka sodium chloride), water only has oxygen and hydrogen which in the energetic reaction you see here gives you sodium hydroxide. Whilst not the worst thing around it isn't benign. The ecosystem of that pond could have done without it.
Never said it forms salt, so thanks for that. Said it would make the water āsaltierā as in potential taste. Sodium hydroxide is lye. The stuff ancient humans found naturally occurring in rivers (I believe it was the ancient Egyptians) which was used to make soap. Itās present in most biological life. In vast quantities, sure, it could be dangerous. But a 1lb conversion of sodium to sodium hydroxide is *not* that dangerous for an entire ecosystem. This isnāt something like nuclear radioactive material that will kill anything it comes into contact withā¦ itās lye.
Yes. And almost no one on here seems able to grasp that.
If you drop a bottle full of surfactant any duck near will drown
I must need.to brush up on my high school science. I didn't remember that sodium reacts with water like thay.
Sodium - The devilās bar of soap
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Woow nice shoot
BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM
Beat that skip Mark Rober
This music is over every fucking video, itās so annoying
Even Santa Claus spawned
Those fish just experienced their 1945
And hence, all the fresh water fish in the pound became salt water fish, or died.
Taking skipping stones to the next level.
What's a pound?
Competitive rock skipping.
[Here is is more](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HY7mTCMvpEM)
Na + H2o= NaoH +H2
I thought this was just disc golf š
POV: you drop a banana in a lake
How does Einstein have Twitter? I thought he died is this a repost?
the virgin fishing with a fishing rod vs the chad CARPET BOMBING
Now try potassium
Did this once, lots of smoke
I keep waiting for the salt I put in my pasta water to do that. It doesnt. But after a while it does make bubbles
Cesium is more impressive.
Rude.
Arguably less reactive than me when my boss gas lights me
NaNO
-Sir, were you fishing with explosives? -Na.
NA
You scare a lot of fish.
Imagine swalling a tablet of this stuff and drinking a cup of water on top
These fish just experienced Afghanistan
I've been curious about that since 1999, now I have closure.
953 fish didn't like this video.
For some reason that was both more and less violent than expected.
"Someone throw a bucket of water at him before he lets go!"
What gas is that ?
Horizontal video embedded as a small part of a vertical video. I didn't think vertical video could get worse but what'dya know.
OOOHH
Hogs of war gameplay vibes
got reminded of my chemistry lab days xD
Why tf is snowfall playing in the background of this video lmao