OK, i’ve done a search and couldn’t find a thread related to this one, but if I did miss it, my apologies…administrator, please delete. I know there are a few a few cerebral bullies around here who love to slap people down in a nasty way…anyway, onto the topic.
A friend of mine is a biochemist and he ordered a chemical (from Sigma), arachidonic acid, for the princely sum of $13-60 per 10 milligrams…i thought it was hugely expensive until he showed me a list of others which have astronomical prices. The most expensive i found was Leukptriene B5, costing over $100 for 10 MICROGRAMS…that’s (obviously?) over $10 million per gram!! Maybe you could get a bulk discount, i don’t know. So, my question is this, is there a more valuable substance available which one can actually purchase? I doubt even rocks from Mars could be this expensive. Am I wrong?
I just want to take this opportunity to mention…
Gallon jugs of my urine…
Still only ten dollars (plus two dollars shipping and handling)!!
Wow, your saying! How can Inky afford sell gallon jugs of his own golden amber urine for the low, low price of ten dollars (plus two dollars shipping and handling)!?
I’ll tell you…
Volume, volume, volume!!
My urine is produced in small quantities (usually only a cup or two at a time, more on pitcher beer night), collected, fermented in huge glass-lined vats, bottled by illegal Ukranian immigrants who never stop muttering in a threatening manner, stored in declassified governmant fallout shelters, and best of all, I pass the savings on to you!!
Just send twelve dollars (heck, make it an even thirteen)in unmarked, nonsequential bills to:
Inky
Not an illegal urine repository
Shelter 15
Livermore California
While supplies last!
Damn typos, should be ‘Leukotrienes’…and just one ‘a few’…
Cecil comes to the rescue:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_329a.html
Californium-252, $350 billion per pound.
You can also buy antimatter, which I recommend for its pure coolness value. I read in some quantum physics book that we can now produce it, but I don’t remember how much it said it goes for.
“Eppur, si muove!” - Galileo Galilei
Antimatter salesmen only stick around long enough to annihilate your bank account.
Does buying antimatter add money to your bank account?
Only if you have a negative balance in your cheching account.
if you want non-chemical items, saffron is pretty expensive
Just add water, it makes it’s own sauce!
Radioactives are sort of cheating. Joe Schmoe can’t buy Cf-252. For that matter, most chemical suppliers won’t sell Joe HIMSELF anything, but they’ll happily sell Joe Schmoe Inc. or Schmoe College pretty much whatever unregulated substances those legal fictions want to buy. I don’t think the AEC/NRC/whatever is quite so open.
Biochemicals and isotopically enriched materials are the most expensive substances I know of that an average guy/company can get their hands on.
Oh, about antimatter…
I think so far humans have managed to produce on the order of a dozen ATOMS of anti-hydrogen. I’m not sure what it cost to do so, but if it was a penny each (a ridiculously low figure) that’s something like 13,000,000 trillion dollars a pound.
That’s pretty darn expensive…maybe antimoney is the answer.
I hate to quibble with torq, who is so often right, but larger quantities of antimatter are routinely produced in the larger particle accelerators. Some operate with counter-rotating beams of protons and anti-protons or electrons and anti-electrons. While the (anti-)particle density is very low, it is significantly larger than dozens of particles.
Still, I would hate to have to pay for them.
I will, however, sell you a matchbox full of anti-neutrinos for $100.00. Send me your address and a crisp C-note and I will send you your prize by return mail.
Strangers have the best candy.
Don’t take Pluto’s offer!!
I’ll send them to you for free. In fact, I’m shipping them out right now!
Of course, you do have to catch them…
pluto is right: physicists have been making antiparticles for at least thirty years.
In the course of trying to figure out just how many antiatoms (as opposed to elementary antiparticles) have been made I discovered several things:
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I thought antiatoms were a recent (i.e. this year) development, but it turns out that they were announced by a team working at CERN back in January 1996, when they made nine antihydrogen atoms.
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Fermilab had made some antiH by November 1996.
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Fermilab was planning to make about five antiH atoms per day, according to their press release announcing 2) above.
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If they’ve actually done so and issued a press release about it I can’t find it on their web site.
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Fermilab’s web site is a maze.
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Assuming they CAN make 5 per day, that gives us a cost: we figure out how much it costs to run the accelerator at Fermilab for a day and divide by five.
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It’s going to be significantly more than a penny.
And then you’d have to buy a Klein bottle to keep them in.
Strangers have the best candy.
android209
Good trade. Refined (99.65% pure) antimony trades at around $1220/metric ton, near its recent lows. If you could arrange a mass for anti-mass trade, you’d have enough stuff (anti-stuff?) to prove all those annoying Relativists wrong. Or at least enough to annihilate them.
Livin’ on Tums, Vitamin E and Rogaine
Sblendid Idea!
Why bother buying it? Just keep your stuff in it anyway. If the owner doesn’t like it, let him empty it out…
You can get your Klein Bottle here:
www.kleinbottle.com
“You can’t run away forever; but there’s nothing wrong with getting a good head start.” — Jim Steinman
Dennis Matheson — Dennis@mountaindiver.com
Hike, Dive, Ski, Climb — www.mountaindiver.com