• Question: if you were to give someone a ring what would be the worst metal to put on their finger and how quicly will they die

    Asked by danieldanieldaniel to Alexander, Josh, Serena, Simone, Stuart on 20 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Simone Sturniolo

      Simone Sturniolo answered on 20 Jun 2013:


      Honestly! I hope you don’t have any nefarious plans there. This sounds like a really really evil question, but for the sake of science, I’ll try to answer – without giving enough details to allow you to perpetrate any acts of villainy. Just to stay on the safe side.
      I’d say that the most dangerous thing to wear on your finger is surely some kind of radioactive metal. As far as stable, reasonably long-lived elements go (there are some radioactive elements that, while being very dangerous, are also so unstable that it’s unlikely you’d have time to use them to cast a ring without them decaying in the meantime or you blowing yourself up), plutonium is the first one that comes to my mind. Not only this nice guy is radioactive, it is toxic as well, the same way lead and mercury are! The problem is, just skin contact won’t do that much damage – except that on the skin, of course. I could see a person wearing a plutonium ring developing burns or possibly skin cancer – which of course is potentially lethal. Of course, if that person also happened to ingest some particles coming from the ring – which could very well happen, as the ring stays on our finger all day, and it’s not like we never take our hands to our mouth – well, then that would be a different matter. A few micrograms of plutonium inside our body are enough to cause really serious damage.
      On the other hand, you could go for a classic ring of gold. I’m not talking about normal gold though: I’m talking about 192-gold. That’s an isotope (which means a rarer “breed” of a certain element) which is wildly radioactive. Radioactivity happens when an atom ‘loses pieces’: it basically drops subatomic particles around. These particles are very fast and cause damage by hitting our organs like invisible bullets – the remaining atom, without some of its pieces, turns into a different atom. The speed of this process varies for different elements. For example, a ring of 192-gold will decay in the space of less than a day, emitting all the radioactivity it can. That means a lot! It will probably cause a lot of damage very quickly, enough perhaps to give acute radiation poisoning to the unlucky one who wears it – but at the end of the day, it will have turned into pure platinum, which is worth even more than gold! So if the wearer survives the ordeal he’ll be able to make a profit out of it. That would be very embarrassing for you as an evil mastermind.
      All in all, if you want to go for a career in super-villainy involving rings, I’d say you stick to the old methods: just forge your ring in the fires of Mount Doom and try to use it to ensnare the Three, the Seven and the Nine and bring a new darkness upon the Middle Earth. As we all know, that always works.

    • Photo: Alexander Munnoch

      Alexander Munnoch answered on 20 Jun 2013:


      Easy answer would be a radioactive one – particularly one that would decay quickly like francium-223 (think the half-life is about 20 minutes). If you were to be really technical (and as much as wikipedia can be trusted) a ring made of only lithium-5 would kill someone instantly as the half-life is approximately 7.6×10−23 seconds! Decaying to a proton and helium so if the radiation didn’t kill them instantly the resulting explosion of gas (over 10L if it heated up and was an average size of ring) probably would.

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