Why Pee is Cool - entry #4 - "PeePee Portal to Phosphorus" or "What the Alchemists Did Right"

Travel with me back in time, when humans were first beginning to wonder things like "What the hell is the world around me made of anyhow!?"  Picture yourself as an ancient alchemist, repeatedly trying in vain to figure out a way to turn anything into gold.  You pretty much suck at doing science, but as a result of all your fool-hearty work you do know how to do things like mix, heat, and distill stuff.  The first problem you face as an alchemist is that you need some substance to do experiments on.

Pee

"Barely Bad Bananas" or "Where Does Background Radiation Come From???"

The totally normal banana that this totally normal monkey is eating is radioactive, but so is the monkey!

Radioactive Monkey Eating Radioactive Banana, from Arne Bevaart

Why Fire is Cool - entry #1 - What are Flames Made Of?

If I were to start a "why fire is cool" list, it would probably reach a length to rival my "ultimate band name" list.  For the sake of brevity however, I will just share the 4 best entries on the fire list, beginning today with entry #1, a blazing introduction into the nature of fire.

Maybe you've had the experience of sitting around a campfire and being unable to peel your eyes away from the smoldering coals.  When this happens to me I have often found myself wondering what the hell IS fire?

Hot coals for staring at.

A question mark made of fire.

The Rise and Fall of William "Aluminum" Frishmuth

A man named William Frishmuth, a close acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln, was once the only person in the united states capable of producing the metal aluminum.  Perhaps the height of his metallic prestige came when Frishmuth was commissioned in 1884 to forge an aluminum pyramid to be placed on top of the Washington monument.  At the time, it was the largest chunk of pure aluminum ever cast.  Here is what it looks like:

But why aluminum?  Why would the US government honor its first leader by making this pyramid out of the metal in which I wrap my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?  The answer

we are the byproducts of exploding stars

Today I am going to tell you where the atoms in your body came from.

Below you will find the periodic table of the elements. Stick with me, cuz this will melt your mind. Each of these elements has a different size nucleus. The nucleus is the very tiny very heavy part of the atom. Nuclei are made of these things called protons and neutrons, and the more protons that the atom's nucleus has, the higher the atomic number (atomic # increases left to right, top to bottom, just like reading)(different atoms of a given element can have different number of neutrons). Those are the basics, now on to the really good stuff.