Oh yeah just lick the carbon. It’s probably fine.
It is. Activated carbon is used to treat diarrhoea, you basically swallow a chunk of carbon that absorbs any moisture it comes across
Activated carbon is also used in water treatment to remove taste/odours and many organic pollutants.
“organic pollutants” are made of carbon too
Don’t lick carbon nano tubes or buckyball. Also in general carbon powder can be a particulate inhalation issue.
The table is about licking specifically. It’s not a breathability table. Just so that is clear.
I assume if it’s getting anywhere near your mouth you’d also be breathing it but aside from that, ingestion is also a nogo.
Not moisture but reactive molecules. (I mean, many forms probably do still absorb a good bit but) I forgot the exact chemistry but “activated” means chemically reactive. It binds with all sorts of reactive molecules, like toxins and many other things.
Diarrhea is also mostly carbon.
By that logic you could argue that you’re always licking carbon since your tongue has a lot of carbon in it. But I think the carbon has to be pure for it to count. If it’s in a compound molecule it’s void
Have you never licked a diamond before? You’re missing out.
Tastes like a campfire.
Elemental mercury isn’t very bioavailable so licking the surface of a pool of mercury isn’t going to hurt you much if at all. (Assuming you just do it once). Plus the density of mercury is going make it hard for you to slurp up a significant quantity the stuff anyway.
If you want to know about the horrible potential for mercury to mess you up look for stories about dimethyl mercury exposure. Its the fat soluble varieties that give mercury it’s reputation.
The story of the professor who was studying dimethyl mercury is terrifying
:( oh no now I must search for it
Chubbyemus take on it was pretty good
Ahh good old chubbyemu. I did read it from Wikipedia though, I found it really sad and tragic
Licking bismuth would be very very very very very bad
Listen to this guy. He’s serious bismuth
Mfer I’ll go lick my rainbow Lovecraftian City looking rocks right now to spite you
Bismuth bangers 4 lyfe
Why? Bismuth is pretty harmless from what I can find. It’s not great but it’s way better than lead (which it replaced in a lot of applications). Based on what I read, bismuth probably wouldn’t hurt you if you gave it a lick.
Are you thinking of benzene?
What’s wrong with licking osmium? I know if heated in oxygen it will form osmium tetraoxide which is toxic, but a solid chunk of elemental osmium I thought was inert and I could keep it in my mouth all day if I wanted ( I do).
Mid at best. There’s a lot of stuff you don’t want anywhere near your mouth on there.
lol You don’t need a table to tell you whether or not you should like an element. Like ‘em all! Also, whoever made the pic misspelled “like” as “lick”. jsyk.
that yellow and that green are problematically close
No they arent
Lead should be red
lead’s bad for you, sure, but when some of the other metals on this scale’s red might literally explode your tongue/face/head depending on sample size and saliva accumulation, i’d say yellow fits it pretty well.
Idk, just licking it once shouldn’t do much harm, right?
Given the choice between licking mercury and licking lead, 96% of respondents answered with lead.
Apologies for the random percentage and quoting fictional data.
look at this shill from the big metal licking industry
There is no identified threshold or safe level of lead in blood” [AAP 2016]
https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/csem/leadtoxicity/physiological_effects.html
I’d call that “you really shouldn’t” for an adult, and for a baby I’d tell them to “please reconsider” for sure
It isn’t safe at any dose but the amount of harm from licking it once is definitely rather small. Probably safer than having a couple of alcoholic drinks or a single cigarette.
I have a toddler and I hope to dear god there’s no lead about. She will lick anything.
Nah, metallic lead is pretty solid. Licking it doesn’t really do much. You shouldn’t ingest lead, but you don’t really ingest it by licking a piece of metal.
Same with metallic mercury. But once it evaporates…
Well, when you lick mercury, you’re actually going to swallow a lot of it. Thankfully, you’ll poop most of it out, and as long as you do it once, it won’t kill you.
But if I had to pick between licking lead or mercury, I’d go with lead.
Oh yeah. I am om team lead. The problem with Mercury is the vapor that ridiculously easy methylates when heated, and then you have a nerve toxin that quite easily crosses the blood-brain barrier.
From my elementary knowledge of chemistry:
I had to go looking for Mercury and Lead and sure enough they look about right.
Column 1 reacts with water so you bet that’ll hurt. Hydrogen needs a boost to start reacting with water so no naked flame is recommended.
Anything in column 7 are desperate to rip electrons away from molecules so yes, permanent damage to your tongue and mouth.
Uranium is alright if you lick it once. A guy ate uranium cake once on TV.
The ‘Please reconsider’ lot seem to be a good way to die a horrible death by radiation.
Tc I believe is technetium which is radioactive and emits gamma rays, perhaps not soluable so stays in your body and you become gamma-man.
Beryllium is mostly only toxic when you breathe it in (there’s even a special disease you get from it), but as a solid, it’s pretty safe afaik.
Not that I recommend it.
Metallic Mercury is absolutely no problem. They used it to treat congestion back in the day.
Too distracted by the misspelling in the title
you can always answer how likable they are?
i’m not a chemist but is this licking the most common molecule form or the atomic variety
O₂ is safe but i don’t think O is
I think it’s framed in the context of: “How dangerous would a single molecule be to a human?”. In that context, I would say
O
is safe, only because our body naturally destroys the radical oxygen molecules every day that we create with our anti-oxidants.True, in a larger quantity than our body can handle, it’s extremely toxic; but a single molecule would probably not be too bad.
But I do agree, it shouldn’t be Green. It should be Yellow at least.
O would completely destroy you in lickable quantities. I think you underestimate how extremely reactive it is. Just remember that it is so reactive that it reacts with oxygen to form ozone. This is not a little byproduct in extremely small quantities all throughout the body, which is also not the O radical anyway.
I mean, technically you can lick any of them…
Can you, though? Can you lick a gas? Am I licking the atmosphere when I stick my tongue out?
Plenty of them are also so rare that there isn’t enough of them to form any lickable matter; solid, liquid or gaseous.
Some have such an incredibly short half-life, you cannot lick it before it decays into something else.
This really feels like we’re going to descend into an “is water wet”-style debate. Those are always fun.
I think I’d still consider it a lick even if you just contact one atom of a substance to your tongue. You could even fire it at your tongue with the LHC and I’d still be willing to go along with calling that a lick, using the term very loosely.
I’m less sure on the gas, but fuck it, sure, sticking your tongue into a gas can be a lick between friends. Alternately you could condense/freeze it and lick that form, but that might be worse.
There’s no getting away from the idea that it would be very difficult to lick an atom with sub-millisecond half life. Unless… you create it already inside your tongue! I’m sure we could do that somehow. Probably involving magnets.
(Once)
Since the green isn’t labelled “yes you can” I stopped reading…