3 ms·

The first thought that occurred to me was, I wonder if the radioactivity changes as the banana ripens. The starch converts to sugar, but of course that has noth

The first thought that occurred to me was, I wonder if the radioactivity changes as the banana ripens. The starch converts to sugar, but of course that has nothing to do with the amount of potassium in the banana... or does it? Perhaps geiger counters in the hands of hobbyists could perform experiments confirming or disproving the theory of biological transmutation - the possibility that life can transmute sodium to potassium or potassium to calcium has been totally written off by modern physics, but only declared impossible, not proven to be bunk. The talk page on Corentin Louis Kervran's wiki [0] is more interesting than most psuedoscience, and a book review [1] describes some compelling experiments: > Everything they ate and drank was measured and everything they excreted was measured, weighed and reported. The balance sheet showed that during great heat the potassium excreted through perspiration greatly increased. The workers were given salt tablets to suck on during the day to increase their sodium. More potassium was excreted than the workers were consuming. > Hens without calcium in their diets can transmute mica which contains some silicate of potassium to calcium in less than a day going from soft shells to hard, complete shells in 20 hours. Should be pretty easy to prove with some geiger readings over time, no? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Corentin_Louis_Kervran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Corentin_Louis_Kervran [1] https://bionutrient.net/site/library/reviews/biological-transmutations https://bionutrient.net/site/library/reviews/biological-tran...

tsimionescu 4y ago
> More potassium was excreted than the workers were consuming. This part is not necessarily surprising - K and Na perform similar roles in the organism in certain areas, so it's possible that the body was shedding its reserves of K preferring to replace them with the Na it was receiving. That seems just a little bit more likely than expecting the body was actually fusing Na with ? to produce K. > Hens without calcium in their diets can transmute mica which contains some silicate of potassium to calcium in less than a day going from soft shells to hard, complete shells in 20 hours. Again, the most plausible explanation by far (well, except for experimental error) is that the potassium supplements enabled the hen's bodies to replace some amount of Ca with K in one process where they work similarly, freeing up the Ca for another place where they don't. This is even easier to imagine, as the body has enormous reserves of Ca in the forms of bones, which it can and does occasionally dissolve and re-use (that is why severe malnutrition can lead to bone brittleness even in adults with fully formed bones). > only declared impossible, not proven to be bunk This is a misunderstanding. The modern understanding of the structure of the atomic nucleus (based on quantum chromodynamics) proves that any change in the atomic number must be accompanied by a gigantic amount of energy, as the bonds holding protons together are extraordinarily strong (they are held together by strong force interactions between their constituent quarks).

tsimionescu 4y ago

> More potassium was excreted than the workers were consuming. This part is not necessarily surprising - K and Na perform similar roles in the organism in certain areas, so it's possible that the body was shedding its reserves of K preferring to replace them with the Na it was receiving. That seems just a little bit more likely than expecting the body was actually fusing Na with ? to produce K. > Hens without calcium in their diets can transmute mica which contains some silicate of potassium to calcium in less than a day going from soft shells to hard, complete shells in 20 hours. Again, the most plausible explanation by far (well, except for experimental error) is that the potassium supplements enabled the hen's bodies to replace some amount of Ca with K in one process where they work similarly, freeing up the Ca for another place where they don't. This is even easier to imagine, as the body has enormous reserves of Ca in the forms of bones, which it can and does occasionally dissolve and re-use (that is why severe malnutrition can lead to bone brittleness even in adults with fully formed bones). > only declared impossible, not proven to be bunk This is a misunderstanding. The modern understanding of the structure of the atomic nucleus (based on quantum chromodynamics) proves that any change in the atomic number must be accompanied by a gigantic amount of energy, as the bonds holding protons together are extraordinarily strong (they are held together by strong force interactions between their constituent quarks).