NPR: The Hardest Thing To Find In The Universe?

[Gravitycollapse]

What is rarer than a shooting star?

Rarer than a diamond?

Rarer than any metal, any mineral, so rare that if you scan the entire earth, all six million billion billion kilos or 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds of our planet, you would find only one ounce of it?

What is so rare it has never been seen directly, because if you could get enough of it together, it would self-vaporize from its own radioactive heat?

What is this stuff that can't be seen or found? Well, here's a hint. It's sitting modestly in a lower row in the Periodic Table, down on the lower right, in a box marked "At."

Rest at link:http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/07/12/201481293/the-hardest-thing-to-find-in-the-universe?utm_source=npr&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20130712

[sigmasix]

1. hardest to find fair and balanced news

and now that NPR is filled with right wing media agents, maybe the impossible thing to find is an NPR news report that isn't part of the right wing media echo chamber. NPR still reports on stories like this one because they are innocuous and ignore the serious trouble that Teabaggers in state senate and congressional positions are causing across America.
NPR=toothless media watchdog, nuetered by Fox "News"'s partisan media agent appoinments to NPR and their greedy criminally wealthy corporate overlords.

[Fumesucker]

2. "A mainstream news outlet that doesn't have a right wing slant"

Answer to the question in the OP.

[renie408]

3. That's really funny.

I live in the South, so I have a lot of conservative friends. They all think that NPR is a liberal media outlet because it doesn't say the things they want to hear all the time.

I think both sides have gotten spoiled by our access to slanted information. If what you are reading/watching/listening to doesn't suit you, you can change the channel or surf off to find something that does. I think that leaves us thinking that every time we hear something that doesn't gel with our world view, it's not that we may need to adjust our thinking...there must be something wrong with the information.

[cordelia]

8. + 1

Can't really think of anything to add.

Thanks.

[11 Bravo]

4. A sane teabagger?

[surrealAmerican]

5. How can that possibly be true?

Wouldn't larger, heavier elements, that can only be produced in the lab, and break down rapidly, be more rare? Even in that graphic, is astatine actually "rarer" than ununhexium?

[Igel]

11. C'mon.

One of the things about it is that At is naturally occurring.

The transuranics aren't.

Strictly speaking, if you wanted to scour the entire universe for something that we think is a problem to be solved--"African-American children who are lagging behind their white peers in reading an math", or "telephony metadata collected and stored by the NSA", or "American imperialism", let's say--you'd also find that this is even more rare than At.

(I can't use "mosquitos" as an example, or "fruit flies" or "fire ants". Both of those long since hitched rides on alien exploration ships that briefly visited Earth and are currently the target of a Medfly-like quarantine and eradication program in at least 1.3 x 10^18 different galactic clusters.)

[WinkyDink]

6. P.S. Diamonds really aren't rare; they are just hoarded by DeBeers for parceling out.

[Egalitarian Thug]

13. +1

I've often been surprised at how few people are aware of this fact.

[hobbit709]

7. a working republican brain.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

9. Squirrel poop.

[Scrignoli]

10. It has a half life of like 13 hours. Anything with six or seven electron rings is unstable.

[hootinholler]

12. I thought it was unobtainium n/t