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2 Drops Of Spilled Mercury Destroyed This Scientist's Brain

MilkmanDan says...

Another thing to keep in mind is that different forms of elements and chemicals have very different properties.

Pure elemental liquid mercury is pretty cool stuff. Lots of people (myself included) can remember playing with elemental mercury in their bare hands in chemistry classes, etc., and even that sort of cavalier use basically never resulted in cases of mercury poisoning.

In sheer statistical terms, I gather that it is relatively safe to have pure liquid mercury directly on your skin -- cupped in your hands, say -- for short to medium periods of time. Open wounds, even small ones, can make that significantly worse. Even ingesting elemental mercury generally doesn't result in too much absorption into the body, but it remains a terrible idea. Evaporation of elemental mercury even at room temperature can lead to inhalation of mercury vapor, which is drastically more dangerous. So, ventilation and environmental controls are quite important.

This organic mercury sounds like terribly nasty stuff, but fortunately people are very unlikely to be exposed to it outside of a lab or if you are a scientist who is intentionally synthesizing it.

I think it is kind of a shame that those high school chemistry type sessions of messing around with elemental mercury are pretty much gone today. On the other hand, even though the risks are lower with elemental mercury like that, the rewards aren't really all that high either. I have fun memories of messing around with the stuff, but it wasn't by any means necessary or important outside of pure academic curiosity. Better safe that sorry I guess, particularly when the extreme end of "sorry" results in horror stories like this.

newtboy (Member Profile)

2 Drops Of Spilled Mercury Destroyed This Scientist's Brain

notarobot says...

Two drops. That was 1.44g of mercury exposure. That's as much as ~300 fluorescent light bulbs. A "safe" level of mercury is considered to be 1 ppm.

This is real life horror show stuff. Mercury is a deadly Neurotoxin.

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2 Drops Of Spilled Mercury Destroyed This Scientist's Brain

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RFlagg (Member Profile)

Buck (Member Profile)

Soundgarden - Spoonman

ChaosEngine says...

What a loss. I was lucky enough to see him play with Audioslave, but I was hoping to see Soundgarden some day. He's up there with Freddie Mercury as one of the most amazing vocal talents in rock.

Mordhaus (Member Profile)

The Truth About Popular Music

vil says...

Measurably less intelligent. Nice summary. Starts as a rant but gets deeper.

Mercury at 4:00 and 5:33. Gold.

Also appearing: Frank Zappa.

I could not care less about "pop music" as such, but why cant there be even just one radio station run by someone competent to pick music?

Disclaimer: I like the first Coldplay album.

Gorillaz - Hallelujah Money

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>250000000 Gal. Of Radioactive Water In Fl. Drinking Water

bcglorf says...

@newtboy
There's also absolutely no measure of the aquifer itself, how it moves, mixes, flows, etc. The system is mostly unmapped.

Fortunately that's not entirely true. If you go check out the wiki article, it has a lot of links on a lot of mapping that has been done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floridan_aquifer#Hydrology_and_Geology
Most relevant to trying to analyze things, the graphic below is a mapping of the normal water flow within the aquifer based off of testing from about 1,500 different locations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floridan_aquifer#/media/File:Estimated_transmissivity_of_the_Floridan_aquifer_sytem.png

The Mosaic leak occurred somewhere inland from Tampa as close as I can find, if you can narrow that down it'd help. On the map that looks like good news though because that region shows upwards of 100,000 m^3 of water flow per day. So very good mixing for the quantity of leak being discussed if it falls there.

And you didn't address the orange problem.
That's because there isn't one. Radon doesn't work like lead or mercury, it's a gas and doesn't build up in irrigation or the food chain. It bleeds off very fast, irrigation systems bleed it almost instantly into the atmosphere. In animals and meat bags like us, the references I've found suggest the average time from consumption to release is about an hour so we don't hold onto Radon long. Again reason for optimism imo.

With terrorism upon us, how do you get rid of a suspect car?

oblio70 says...

Ha Ha! I played this with my friends in Junior High for 2 semesters. All times on campus were fair play, and this was the reason we called all teachers the Gestapo throughout High School as well, so we would avoid getting caught. Most of our classmates not in-the-know thought we held some animosity toward "the Man".

Alas, no one was as clever enough to employ mercury switches in our games.

newtboy said:

Ha! In high school my brother played "gotcha", a spy game, and his best trick was an altoids box with a battery, a mercury switch, and a buzzer. Pick it up, it starts buzzing loudly with a note inside that said "boom, this was a bomb, you're dead". Not something to do now, but in the 80's, that was LARP. It was simple, easy, and worked every time. You're nuts if you think it's difficult to build, it's ridiculously simple.



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