But does this imply licking it in a "lickable" state? I have a hard time imagining licking a gas, and licking hydrogen as a liquid at -250 C or so sounds, not great.
I guess it's only implied but any liquid is inserted as a solid - e.i. below its melting point. It's assumed anything crumbly has a suitable binding agent.
A few of them are definitely wrong as has been pointed out to me but I'm glad we're all learning about science!
Lithium, Sodium etc. need to be upped to "please reconsider." Calcium and all the lanthanides are also metals I would not advise licking because theyre very reactive. Promethium is especially dangerous due to its radioactivity with its longest lived isotope having a half life of around 17 years. So not only is it reactive, youd die to the radiation too.
Lithium is just gonna be a little fizzy like pop rocks. No explosions, thankfully. The LiOH produced would not be fun for you, but probably won’t hurt anyone else.
Lithium salts are used to treat bipolar. The metal isnt just reacting with the water on your tongue to create a very strong base (and lots of heat), you are also going to be ingesting that Lithium (as a lithium soap as it reacts with oils and fats) which can have different (unpleasant) effects on you depending on how much was ingested. If your kidney function is impaired, it gets worse.
In the hypothetical, if one were able to lick elemental hydrogen in its atomic, rather than molecular form, it would have a few potential effects. The one that would concern me most would be its aggressive reactivity, ripping hydrogens away from anything that it could in order to achieve stability. This would potentially cause tissue damage both from the deprotonation and shift in pH.
Nothing, because you can have only one atom of it. Multiple will just form molecular hydrogen H2. That one hydrogen atom will aggressively rip of another hydrogen of a molecule of water for example, but it won't be noticeable.
I fully agree with it being yellow. By far, the most common isotope of uranium is uranium-238, which is indeed radioactive, but not dangerously radioactive. In this list, lead is listed as a yellow because it can give you heavy metal poisoning. In this scenario, the uranium would cause more damage to your body by damaging it as lead would (heavy metal poisoning affecting brain, kidneys, liver, etc) before the radiation would ever have an impact on your body.
It tastes like hot hydrogen gas (that will quickly mix with oxygen and taste like superheated steam).
If that doesn’t get ya, it would taste like sodium hydroxide, and also soap. (The soap is from the hydroxide turning the fats in your cells into soap.)
I think yellow is actually fine - a lick is 3 seconds of contact maximum and you're not sucking on it or ingesting it...
Lithium's the only one you'll ingest decent quantities of and it's just gonna taste fizzy and soapy with no real lasting damage, stuff like lead you won't even ingest and even if you did it'd probably be fine in such low quantities, even mercury is probably ok to lick if you're careful
That said, with the radioactive ones you need to be careful of what isotope and sample size you're licking, so licking a huge ingot of U235 would probably do some lasting damage just by being near it, but licking a small piece of U238 is more than likely fine so long as it's solid and not dust
I'd be careful with emitters that are primarily alpha radiation like U238. It's easy to dismiss them because they're fat diabeetus particles that are simple to stop, but the flip side of that is that they are nasty when they're not stopped. They're a big fat thing going really, really fast, and whatever they hit is going to take a lot of damage.
Maybe the saliva on your tongue will stop it? If your tongue is relatively dry, though, you could very easily get tongue cancer.
I think the assumption with the chlorine is that you end up inhaling it and dying fairly quickly. Licking uranium isn't a great idea, but you might not ever have noticable effects, even long term, if very little comes off onto your tongue. I know people who have accidently tasted plutonium in solution.
I did check thallium pretty toxic definitely don't want to lick that, but gallium on the other might be ok. Plus you could probably rob a a bank with gallium. Gallium is my favorite element