Top 10 Most Extreme Substances

Originally posted by AnteBellum
My idea was to intentionally suspend poison/medication into the liquid for covert topical use.

If your poison is smaller than about 500 Daltons, you could always use DMSO...seems like there's another good transdermal solvent as well but I can't remember it at the moment. At any rate, the solute has to be fairly small to pass through the skin well.

ETA:

I have limited knowledge as to the practical uses of antimatter as a weapon, due to the fact it is probably a super black project right now, if it does exist. But from a theoretical standpoint it makes sense and hopefully someone out there saw or read something I can't find.

It is the subject of more than one black project. An AF guy got his pants warmed for running an open "think tank" on how to use antimatter as a weapon - one of those damned with faint praise things - he got a lot of really usable info but when they came back and classified the seminar proceedings later it was sort of a giveaway.

Originally posted by KnightwhosaysNi
Most excellent thread and content! S&F! In regards to HMX and heptonitrocubane, they still stand as the most explosive SUBSTANCE(at least in the "man-made" context), because it's superior(anti-matter) is not man-made(it does occur naturally, even on earth...though in very small, inconspicuous amounts).

I'm not sure heptonitrocubane is the top of the heap any more, the Sandia "no maintenance" bomb uses the new metal/halogen nanocomposite explosives instead. They have unbelievably high energy/unit volume. And while some radioactive decay processes do produce antimatter naturally, you can also make some for your own, they do it at CERN all the time.

However, having said that, the reaction between anti-matter and matter is singley THE MOST VIOLENT reaction in the Universe. Just a couple atoms, followed by the ensuing chain reaction, will level a city.

Not at all. While it's got the biggest bang, a couple of atoms wouldn't be much of a bang. There's no "ensuing chain reaction", it's just MC^2 for the energy output, although you get most of it as gamma radiation.

ETA: if you were of the persuasion that they exist, nuclear isomer explosives would most definitely kick ass too - somewhere below matter-antimatter but above, say, any chemical reaction by about 4 orders of magnitude