When I was a grad student at UT Austin I ran the sophomore physics lab one year. Sometime in the past a liter of mercury had been spilled in the lab room. Of course they cleaned it up, but it was assumed that some had escaped into the cracks of the hardwood floor. Consequently the rule was that the windows were to remain open at all times. It gets pretty cold in Austin the winter. It was a little strange to see the students huddling over instruments dressed for an assault on Everest. I think the building has been passed to the journalism department now. I wonder if they know? Brent On 11/28/2017 6:49 AM, Henry Baker wrote:
At 01:39 PM 11/18/2017, Eugene Salamin wrote:
While metallic mercury is a fairly benign poison, the organometallic dimethylmercury is extremely nasty.
Lack of awareness that it can penetrate latex gloves has led to a very tragic, slow death, well documented on the internet. Slow death indeed!
When we were kids 65 years ago, we played with metallic mercury all the time. We used it to coat pennies (which used to be real copper or sometimes steel), and generally enjoy its weird properties. In addition to thermometers, you could also obtain mercury from *mercury* light switches, which were extremely *quiet*, and also *extremely reliable*. My mercury poisoning doesn't seem to have progressed very far in the last six decades...
A few years ago, some kid brought a little bit of mercury to one of the high schools in the San Fernando Valley (north of Los Angeles). The authorities *emptied the entire high school*, and sent in a *hazmat team*, complete with full hazmat suits, to retrieve the mercury.
To this day, I can't tell if the hazmat people just wanted to show off their brand new suits, or whether they wanted to send a signal to any businesses in the area that worked with metallic mercury.
BTW, more people contract mercury poisoning in Los Angeles each year from eating too much *sushi* then have been poisoned by metallic mercury in the last ten years.
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