this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
783 points (98.9% liked)

Science Memes

15411 readers
1494 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 104 points 1 day ago (19 children)

Fun fact: a gram of plutonium contains about 20 billion calories. Yum.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 day ago (5 children)

This is a commonly quoted fun fact that is not really true. There are 2 different definitions of calorie. One means the absolute amount of energy in an object, the other means the bioavailable amount of energy that a human can extract from it using their digestive system.

So every physical object that exists has some amount of potential energy contained within it which we can express in calories, but that doesn't mean it has any bioavailable calories. For example glass has some significant amount of energy contained within it, but it has 0 bioavailable calories.

This "fun fact" mixes up the two definitions, making the statement meaningless.

(Nothing against you OP, this is a commonly repeated falsehood)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Thank you for the clarification. I wanted to go along with the joke of it looking “edible”, but context is appreciated :)

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (17 replies)