that’s reasonable.
bonus fun fact - the etymology is connected - “axle” comes from older words for “shoulder”, or “armpit”, which survives in some regional Englishes as “oxter” - the connection is apparently that you’d carry a person by putting their arms up and linking at the shoulders, much like an axle is how wheels carry a cart.
No, that’s what I meant by not an axle.
But, come to think of it, we can swing our arms round and round, more than 360°.
How about this insect with a pair toothed gears? Not an axle, but still amazing!
“The juvenile Issus - a plant-hopping insect found in gardens across Europe - has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing ‘teeth’ that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the animal’s legs when it launches into a jump.”
right, even trains don’t need diffs, the conic-slice wheels take care of turns fine without.
i believe there was some early speculation that the unprecedented temperature of the Trinity test might ignite the atmosphere, somehow making the nitrogen burn, but that would be a chemical reaction, not a nuclear reaction.
Alpha and beta decay are types of fission.
further, if you only want to look at fissions with similarly-sized daughter products, there are several micrograms of fissile atoms in each of us, so random fissions are indeed constantly happening.
no, there are lots of atoms splitting inside your body every second.
a single U-235 atom’s fission, releasing ~200MeV, (~30 picojoules), in ideal circumstances could maybe nudge a very small fine grain of sand (~ micrograms) enough to see movement (small fraction of a millimetre) under a microscope .
It takes months of refining to make nuclear fuel that’s suitable for sustaining a chain reaction.
it’s an interesting question, I’m glad I did the research checking that the orders of magnitude match!
Fabrice Bellard is ten Ronalds.