When you're selling a toy to kids, those warnings about not to remove something from its container are useless.
In high school, I was in summer biology when some slacker took up a vial of mercury and started monkeying around with it. It did not take long for the cap to come off and we had a mercury spill in the middle of the classroom. And then my classmates began trying to scoop it up with their hands and scraps of paper!
As the son of a scientist who worked in Environmental Health and Safety, I immediately recognized this as a hazard and sort of recused myself from the whole scene. It was embarrassing.
If you don't know what elemental mercury looks like, then playing with it is pretty much the obvious outcome.
Mercury is cool. Metallic, reflective, heavy, liquid, forms balls, and eats into (forms amalgams) other metals in really visually interesting ways. Sure, it'll poison you if you eat it, or if you combine it with some organic chemistry it will really quickly absorb at toxic levels, but it doesn't tell you that. It just sits there, looking really, really fun..
Not that I condone eating mercury in any way, shape, or form, but apparently some people did exactly that on a regular basis during the renaissance. The outcome was as expected. The surprising part was how long they seem to have lived eating mercury every day.
Elemental mercury really isn't as bad as people think when they hear "mercury". On its own, there's less interaction with biochemical processes. You can dip your hand in a bucket of the stuff and nothing will happen.
Once it does get bound up in an organic compound, however, everything changes. In particular, methyl and dimethylmercury are, in every way, the opposite. It readily absorbs through your skin, causes genetic mutations in cells, interferes with the immune system, and crosses the blood-brain barrier while acting as a neurotoxin.
Lest you think that is bad enough, it also happily passes through both latex and pvc gloves, and has a high enough vapor pressure that you don't ever want to open a jar of the stuff unless it is in an active fume hood. If you happen to notice that it has a sweet smell, you need to head straight to a hospital.
Should you get even as little as 0.1ml in your body, it will linger, slowly working its way around, potentially delaying symptoms for months, at which point it is too late for any treatment to be effective, and even that small of a dose will be fatal.
When I was in school, I recall another kid tried to steal a lump of sodium from the lab. It went exactly how you'd expect a child with a lump of sodium in their pocket would go.
Comments
When you're selling a toy to kids, those warnings about not to remove something from its container are useless.
In high school, I was in summer biology when some slacker took up a vial of mercury and started monkeying around with it. It did not take long for the cap to come off and we had a mercury spill in the middle of the classroom. And then my classmates began trying to scoop it up with their hands and scraps of paper!
As the son of a scientist who worked in Environmental Health and Safety, I immediately recognized this as a hazard and sort of recused myself from the whole scene. It was embarrassing.
If you don't know what elemental mercury looks like, then playing with it is pretty much the obvious outcome.
Mercury is cool. Metallic, reflective, heavy, liquid, forms balls, and eats into (forms amalgams) other metals in really visually interesting ways. Sure, it'll poison you if you eat it, or if you combine it with some organic chemistry it will really quickly absorb at toxic levels, but it doesn't tell you that. It just sits there, looking really, really fun..
Not that I condone eating mercury in any way, shape, or form, but apparently some people did exactly that on a regular basis during the renaissance. The outcome was as expected. The surprising part was how long they seem to have lived eating mercury every day.
Elemental mercury really isn't as bad as people think when they hear "mercury". On its own, there's less interaction with biochemical processes. You can dip your hand in a bucket of the stuff and nothing will happen.
Once it does get bound up in an organic compound, however, everything changes. In particular, methyl and dimethylmercury are, in every way, the opposite. It readily absorbs through your skin, causes genetic mutations in cells, interferes with the immune system, and crosses the blood-brain barrier while acting as a neurotoxin.
Lest you think that is bad enough, it also happily passes through both latex and pvc gloves, and has a high enough vapor pressure that you don't ever want to open a jar of the stuff unless it is in an active fume hood. If you happen to notice that it has a sweet smell, you need to head straight to a hospital.
Should you get even as little as 0.1ml in your body, it will linger, slowly working its way around, potentially delaying symptoms for months, at which point it is too late for any treatment to be effective, and even that small of a dose will be fatal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease
Well that's informative, if a little morbid. Duly noted, thanks.
So cool that it was deemed cool enough for the special effects on Terminator 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quUnYyJg5N0
When I was in school, I recall another kid tried to steal a lump of sodium from the lab. It went exactly how you'd expect a child with a lump of sodium in their pocket would go.
I imagine it would go up … in flames
Yeah it's something that was certainly burned into my memories.