Welcome Citizensmith!

[Svartalf]

Curse you MiM, now I'll have to research all about cesium.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Welcome to the very last stand in a irrational world. There are few who find there way here. This is afterall The Nautilus and Papa is Captain Nemo.

Is this the novel, or a movie version? And if it's a movie are we looking at Michael Bay or some kind of Disney thing with singing ornaments?

It's a TV mini-series, based on the novelisation of the film of the original graphic novel (which was, in turn, based on accounts of an opium dream, serialised in Punch between 1842 and 1857.) It stars that bloke from Friends - not the tall, geeky one, the other one.

[Citizensmith]

Welcome Cs! You'll find that everyone's name gets shorted here. I'm Ff. Also with a geology degree or three. Northern California is my favorite bit of the US; the only bit I've visited twice. Well, welcome!

Nice Nick, that - Cs - Has a familiar ring to it, especially isotopes 137 and 134.

Welcome

There are worse elements to be, although really, anything with a mass above about 145 is a bit hipsterish.

[Citizensmith]

Welcome to the very last stand in a irrational world. There are few who find there way here. This is afterall The Nautilus and Papa is Captain Nemo.

Is this the novel, or a movie version? And if it's a movie are we looking at Michael Bay or some kind of Disney thing with singing ornaments?

It's a TV mini-series, based on the novelisation of the film of the original graphic novel (which was, in turn, based on accounts of an opium dream, serialised in Punch between 1842 and 1857.) It stars that bloke from Friends - not the tall, geeky one, the other one.

So Rachel then.

[Citizensmith]

Well, then, what's your take on bacon? Lovely, delicious, life-giving bacon...

I love bacon. Danish bacon, Canadian Bacon. Problem is I live in the US and here most bacon is strips or carbonized pig fat. I'm less keen on that variety.

[FBM]

I couldn't agree more about the American variety. Here in Korea, they make the strips thicker and much, much leaner. Sometimes I even go so far as to cook them.

[Hermit]

Last Saturday I bought half a kilo of short cut bacon. No stripes of pure fat at all. It was on special. 50% off made it 8 dollars per kilo.

[FBM]

Nice!

[MiM]

Welcome Cs! You'll find that everyone's name gets shorted here. I'm Ff. Also with a geology degree or three. Northern California is my favorite bit of the US; the only bit I've visited twice. Well, welcome!

Nice Nick, that - Cs - Has a familiar ring to it, especially isotopes 137 and 134.

Welcome

There are worse elements to be, although really, anything with a mass above about 145 is a bit hipsterish.

Well, Cs is stable as 133. Any Cs-145 would decay within seconds and through a chain of beta decays reach stability as Nd-145 within days.

[Svartalf]

Interesting, this decay without weight loss... implies loss of hydrogen and neutron capture... or something else far beyond my understanding of such matters.

[JimC]

Interesting, this decay without weight loss... implies loss of hydrogen and neutron capture... or something else far beyond my understanding of such matters.

The isotopic mass of Cs-145 is 144.94, whereas the isotopic mass of Nd-145 is 144.91, so there is indeed a mass loss over the decay chain.

[Svartalf]

Yeah, loss of electrons I guess, but I don't get what becomes of the then unpaired protons, do they turn to neutrons?

[JimC]

Yeah, loss of electrons I guess, but I don't get what becomes of the then unpaired protons, do they turn to neutrons?

Beta decay involve the conversion of neutrons into protons, with the emission of a beta particle, which is identical to an electron. The atomic number goes up with each decay, but the mass number remains the same. Beta decay is typical of unstable radioisotopes that have a comparative excess of neutrons. An anti-neutrino is also emitted...

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Yeah, loss of electrons I guess, but I don't get what becomes of the then unpaired protons, do they turn to neutrons?

Beta decay involve the conversion of neutrons into protons, with the emission of a beta particle, which is identical to an electron. The atomic number goes up with each decay, but the mass number remains the same. Beta decay is typical of unstable radioisotopes that have a comparative excess of neutrons. An anti-neutrino is also emitted...

There is also the much rarer beta+ decay, which results in a proton transmuting into a neutron, a positron and a neutrino. And the analogous "electron capture", in which a proton and an electron become a neutron and a neutrino.

All are mediated by the Weak Force and are actually the conversion between up and down quarks within nucleons via the emission of W bosons, which then decay into electron/neutrinos of various types.

But I'm sure you knew all that.

[Svartalf]

But I didn't