Experimenting with mercury. Or the most reckless video on youtube. (I gasped at 1:58)
Posted Mar 26, 2009, 6:15 AM UTC
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I used to do that as a kid... I loved rolling it around in my hands.
It made dimes really shiny too!
I sometimes wonder how much smarted I would have been had I not done that.
EDIT: no edit. I'm leaving the typo in there! I didn't intend it and it's much funnier that way.
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i play murcoory lots to- i ant not smarted.
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+1 for using the wrong word to describe how much smarted you might have been.
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So did I. I should get tested. I wonder if I have more mercury in my system than most people.
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I think all of us of a certain age did that in science class. 6th grade or so if I remember right.
Edit - Forgot to add, from Cornell.edu, I thought it could be absorbed transdermally:
Mercury, the only common metal that is a liquid at room temperature, has been known and used since ancient times (1500 BC). The simple answer to your question is no, you will not be poisoned if you touch mercury bare handed.
BUT . . ..
Mercury-containing materials are usually extremely toxic. The most toxic forms of mercury are: the vapor created when liquid mercury is heated and most of the compounds formed when mercury combines with other elements. Elemental (liquid) mercury, however, is quite inert; it does not react with many other materials. One possible complication of touching mercury would be that it comes into contact with an open wound, introducing the mercury into the blood stream. This could create severe health problems.
A major source of mercury contamination 'in the wild' results from the use of mercury to remove metallic gold from the ores that contain it. Mercury forms an amalgam with gold (very similar to the mercury-silver amalgams used in dental fillings). This dissolves the gold out of the mixture of rock and soil it is found with in nature. The gold is then removed from the amalgam by boiling away the mercury. The mercury is recovered for reuse when this is done in an enclosed apparatus; in the wild, however, prospectors simply allow the extremely toxic mercury vapors to escape into the atmosphere, poisoning themselves and the surrounding environment.
Two compounds containing mercury, mercurochrome and merthiolate, have long been used as antibacterial agents. I remember my parents applying these medications to my cuts and scratches when I was a child to prevent infections.
Mercury, like most things in nature, is neither all bad nor all good; the bad far outweighs the good for mercury. It is important when working with mercury or any other potentially hazardous material that you understand the hazards involved before handling it. It is also wise to consider both the risks and the benefits of your actions. Although the chances of being poisoned by touching liquid mercury are very low, how would this action benefit you? My recommendation would be to wear thin gloves if you want to get the "feel" of this material.
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From the mercury MSDS and also see here:
Skin: May be absorbed through the skin in harmful amounts. May cause skin sensitization, an allergic reaction, which becomes evident upon re-exposure to this material. Causes skin irritation and possible burns. May cause skin rash (in milder cases), and cold and clammy skin with cyanosis or pale color.
By far the more significant hazard in the video is the vapour he's generating.
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Warning: Mercury is a virulent poison. Short-term or long-term exposures to mercury can lead to serious health problems, including death. Human exposure to mercury occurs primarily from breathing contaminated air. Mercury is also readily absorbed though the gastrointestinal tract and through the skin. Even though symptoms do not appear, serious damage can be done to the human body. Never use a vacuum cleaner to clean up a mercury spill. Children and pregnant women should not be exposed to mercury. In the case of a large spill, all occupants should evacuate the area.
Handling. If mercury escapes into the environment, evacuate children and pregnant women. Remove all jewelry, especially gold. Handle the mercury carefully. Wear rubber gloves and scoop it onto a sheet of paper or suck it up with an eyedropper. Place the mercury in a medicine vial or similar airtight container. The scoop, paper or eyedropper should also be bagged and disposed properly according to guidance provided by environmental officials or your local health department. Ventilate the room to the outside and close off the rest of the home. Use fans for a minimum of one hour to speed the ventilation. Do not simply throw the mercury away. Seek professional guidance from local recycling, solid waste or hazardous waste agencies. Large retailers and building centers may accept glass-encapsulated mercury, as in thermostats, for recycling.
Keep any objects containing mercury out of the reach of children. Children found to be playing with liquid mercury or broken fluorescent lamps should be referred to a physician or poison control center immediately. Mercury contaminated gold jewelry must be taken to a jeweler to have them professionally cleaned. While handling mercury, or any other hazardous substance, one should always wear protective gloves. If mercury contacts with the skin, wash the area(s) thoroughly and immediately with soap and warm water. If you believe that you have absorbed mercury though your skin or inhaled mercury vapors, you should contact your physician or poison control center immediately.
For additional information, contact the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality at (225) 219-3266 or (800) 305-6621.
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I chewed on lead pellets.
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Not to be too picky, but when did sloshing a liquid (albeit metal) around in a petri dish constitute an experiment?
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I suppose people who experiment with pot should also have some sort of hypothesis they're testing? Consider the colloquial uses of the term. Whether or not an experiment has technically taken place here, it certainly does fit a use of the term.
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Sure it does. The control group is the same person with no pot.
They can test different amounts, different types, the cheeto effect, etc...
The mercury thing is STILL not an experiment.
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"the person with no pot"? Who says anyone else is involved in this individual's experiment? No matter how much you can warp circumstances to make trying a new drug seem like a legitimate experiment, most people have no such thoughts of any sort of rigorous independent variable changes. When people say 'experimenting' with drugs, they don't mean an actual experiment. It's colloquial use.
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I am not discussing pot use, you brought that in.
All I said was that you can legitimately 'experiment' with pot using the Scientific Method and a well designed scientific experiment.
I was not defending someone else's usage.
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Since forever ago. Any time you cause a phenomenon to occur and observe it, gaining insights about how a material behaves, you are performing an experiment. Dropping a ball is an experiment with gravity and sloshing liquid around can be an experiment in surface tension.
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I should have stopped reading at "forever ago".
You are clearly confusing "experiment" with "observation".
An experiment is a method of investigating causal relationships among variables
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
This is SIXTH GRADE SCIENCE CURRICULUM.
YOU FAIL SIR.
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hmm... So when I drop a ball and observe it, can I not "investigate the casual relationships among variables" Like height and velocity? When I play with mercury can I not investigate the relationship between surface tension of a liquid and its tendency to take on a shape with the lowest surface area to volume ratio? Just because they aren't fancy complicated relationships, they are still experiments. And by golly, calm down, you don't need to get all worked up.
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I think the issue here is semantics. The video did not show an experiment. An experiment tests a hypothesis. There was no hypothesis. He didn't say beforehand that "Based on whatever, I think the mercury will do THIS when I slosh it around!" No real data was recorded during the "experiment" either, to test its nonexistent hypothesis. So I agree with mckirsch, the video showed some potentially hazardous foolings around, not an experiment.
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I wanted it to say "it also tastes great!" after it said it feels cool or whatever. I wanted to see this person eat it.
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I'm sure it had some help getting out.
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It probably got lost a few times.
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The most reckless video on Youtube? How many videos have you watched? Seriously. There are people that set themselves on fucking fire on Youtube just for the hell of it. Here's some guy giving himself a slightly elevated risk of impaired cognitive skills and you think that compares?
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Was that music, or do my earbuds have a short in them?
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nah you just have shitty taste and a drive to complain publicly.
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Back in 1982, I took mercury to my 7th grade science class as part of show-and-tell. I poured some into my hand first and then the "glob" was passed around from student to student while I presented my story. I always had easy access to mercury because my father owned a sign shop that made neon signs. I was rather intelligent and mature for my age and my father had instructed me in detail how to handle mercury. Mercury is vaporized for use in certain colors of neon signs. This was part of my story. Anyway, now when I hear about the dangers of mercury and how we're all going to die if we get near it, I just think back to my class and wonder if any the ones that haven't died yet from mercury poisoning still remember my name.
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It's not like he's rolling around in a bath of it. Have you ever seen some of the really dumb stuff people are doing on youtube? Like surfing off of rooftops and shooting each other in the eye with paintball guns and lighting themselves on fire?
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I like the one where the kid lights his crotch on fire and starts freaking out, so his buddies start trying to stomp it out. :D
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That was season two of "Ow, my Balls," wasn't it?
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Mercury isn't absorbed very well through the skin in liquid form. It's the vapor you gotta worry about.
Still seems like tempting fate though.
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Sounds like you're in love (or a stalker)
Either way you should go for it.
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If you melt some solder-tin with a candle, you can play with that instead of this awful Hg! Except you can't hold it in your hand. But who wants that anyway?
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The best part of it what right at the end when he drank the vial. Awesome!
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If only we could turn it back into Alex Mack.
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I did similar "experiments" as a kid.
I never had the opportunity to meet him but my grandfather was a notorious tinkerer and among the gadgets my dad inherited when he passed was a rather large, corked bottle of mercury. I was told that he used it to construct mercury switches in his projects.
My dad did take it out and show it to me one day but made sure I kept my distance. I found it a few years later hidden in our garage and proceeded to play with it for quite a while on our garage floor until my mom walked in a flipped out.
Good times.
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Are you really that silly? Playing with mercury for a few minutes in your hand wont kill you.
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oooo Shinny.
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When I was younger I had a pretty crazy neighbour. Well he had some mercury and we used to play with it. You can do some very cool things with it. We used to write on it. Anyway we also hold it in our hands. Big woo wanna fight about it?
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Experimenting or playing?
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I'm a chemist.
Metallic mercury is not an acute poison, so there's no need to gasp when someone sticks a finger into it. The biggest problem with the metal is that it has a small (but real) vapor pressure. If you mess around with it like this, you will likely scatter very small droplets of it around, which will sit there and release mercury vapor for months or years.
And that isn't good - that's about the only way to dose the pure metal where it becomes a real concern, and the kicker is, the damage comes on very slowly. You do not want to spend large amounts of time in a room where mercury is outgassing. Inhalation bypasses some of the normal clearance mechanisms of the body.
Now, mercury salts are a different thing. Those are more bioavailable, which you don't want. And organomercury compounds are another matter entirely. The larger ones get cleared out by normal metabolic processes, especially if they're present only in small amounts. (A lot of toxicology has to do with how much stuff your body can clear out before it gets overloaded). But the smaller ones - especially the volatile ones, and most especially something really tiny like dimethylmercury - are very, very dangerous indeed. But even that one takes some time to kill, as has been made clear in some notorious cases.
(I'm a chemist too)
You ever hear that story of the lady at dartmoth that got a single drop of diethyl mercury on her glove, it went through the glove, and then six months later she dies. The autopsy: mercury poisoning.
This was the story used to scare grad students into wearing the right type of gloves.
http://www.udel.edu/OHS/dartmouth/drtmtharticle.html
The saddest part was that it ended up that using dimethylmercury as the standard was unnecessary.
I remember reading an article here a year or so ago about the first scientist to find out how dangerous dimethylmercury was. She had rubber gloves on, but they did not realize that it would absorb right through them. She died 6 months later if I remember correctly. Sad.
My old physics teacher used to tell us it was poisonous and then he'd let us hold it. He used coat pennies in mercury as well and let us keep them. He wouldn't have done that if it was that poisonous.
Or he was a physics teacher and didn't know what he was talking about.