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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

Wow, fascinating. I had no idea these hypernuclei even existed!

Interesting background read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypernucleus

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_atom this is also a supplementary fun read. I find it interesting that you could come up with many such combinations, and then answer to "could it exist?" becomes "why, yes!" more often than I would expect.

Everything not forbidden is compulsory.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian_principle

Unfortunately the lifetime of these hypernuclei is of the order of picoseconds. They will not revolutionize material sciences.

Material sciences are generally electromagnetic effects only. I'd be surprised when nuclear changes alters chemistry or engineering in any way that has significance outside of nuclear reactors.

Well, I suppose, radioactive decay is of negative use in chemistry and engineering.

One interesting counterexample to this is deuterium and water made from it. It is 11% denser than normal water, ice made from it sinks in normal water, it has a higher heat capacity, is more viscous and has a higher boiling point. It's also completely stable!

You can also drink it, though not a good idea to have more than a few sips due to the extra weight and different reactivity. You might feel dizzy if you drank a few glasses worth and it replaced the ordinary water in your inner ear.

Also, heavy water is typically slightly radioactive due to it usually containing tritiated water (T2O), though regular water can also contain that.

Apparently, swapping 20% of your cells' water with heavy water is survivable, but if you try this, don't blame me if you go sterile (cell mitosis will likely be affected).

Of course you can find videos of people on YouTube who drink deuterium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcO1yCAO-pI

Wow that's pretty interesting. I'm least surprised that deuterated chemistry is what's first mentioned, and I'm sure that there are some other good stuff in the category. I bet heavy gasoline (lol) has a lower octane number, for example.

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