An interesting observation Golden and further looking for why it lasts so little time may be explained by it belonging to the halogen group along with elements such as fluorine which as I am sure you are aware is the most reactive element known to us. If yo look at the electron shells arrangements to they are quite odd amongst the elements.
As you can see from this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astatine the half life is frightening quick in some of the isotopes.
I've only just found this thread, but those who can listen to or download from the BBC website (not sure whether it's UK only), look out for the radio program series "In Our Time" with Melvyn Bragg. Although Melvyn is an author and playwright a fair proportion of these programs embrace science and are delivered with very high quality (in terms of the treatment of the topics and the expertise of the participants). Although an "arts" person Melvyn is extremely open minded about science and doesn't fall into the frequent trap of dumbing down.
It's carried by BBC Radio 4. The website archive goes back literally years.
Cool stuff mate wonder if the wobble has anything to do with that 11 year cycle of the sun?? Solar cycle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia would sort of make sense because of the change in the magnetic fields and solar wind perhaps??
Just a thought.
Scientists capture pitch drop on camera for first time (w/ Video)
SourceThe Pitch Drop experiment set up in 1944 at Trinity College Dublin's School of Physics is one of the world's oldest continuously running experiments.
The experiment was established to demonstrate that pitch is a material that flows, albeit with an incredibly high viscosity hence extremely slowly. Also known as asphalt or bitumen, pitch appears to be solid at room temperature.
Whilst pitch has been dropping from the funnel in Trinity since 1944, nobody had ever witnessed a drop fall. It happens roughly only once in a decade.
A Guy
Another take on this theme......how big is space.
BBC - Future - Science & Environment - How big is space?
... and how small the Earth is:
(Source: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news...lease20130722/)NASA Releases Images of Earth Taken by Distant Spacecraft
Color and black-and-white images of Earth taken by two NASA interplanetary spacecraft on July 19 show our planet and its moon as bright beacons from millions of miles away in space.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured the color images of Earth and the moon from its perch in the Saturn system nearly 900 million miles (1.5 billion kilometers) away. MESSENGER, the first probe to orbit Mercury, took a black-and-white image from a distance of 61 million miles (98 million kilometers) as part of a campaign to search for natural satellites of the planet.
Talking of space this has always fascinated me too Hydrogen Atom Scale Model that we are so full of nothing
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Like that Bill funny cos it is the same for glass it is strange to think of it as a liquid too but I wonder how long it would take to drop
