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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine has a "mercury blob maze" [1] where you have a little blob of mercury trapped in a plastic container and you have to get it through the maze - it was fun to use at different temperatures, as the blob would want to break apart when hot, or not move at all when cold. Shaking it turns it into 300 blobs.

Upon seeing it, my science teacher dad had some cool stories about playing with Mercury 20-30 years ago in high school classes. They used to take it out and handle it, no big deal :)

[1] Like these https://www.google.com/search?q=mercury+blob+maze&source=lnm...

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Elemental Mercury isn't especially dangerous though. People freak out over the word "Mercury" but forms like that aren't bioavailable for the most part and are reasonably safe. I wouldn't go breathing the fumes for extended periods of time, but holding a pool in your hand in science class isn't going to kill you.

That's why it's a bit frustrating to read stories like this where the cleanup crew goes overboard and racks up tens of thousands of dollars worth of bills for a simple spill.

Breathing the fumes for an extended period of time? That's exactly what we would have had without the remediation.

Not necessarily, since there was nothing to vaporize it. He even shows an old picture he'd taken of it where the drops had sat undisturbed for so long that they had a chance to oxidize.

The techs measured vapor at 37,000 ng/m3 after the first day of cleanup, at which point there was no longer any easily visible mercury. Like water, mercury doesn't need something to vaporize it; you just end up with some vapor as long as there's liquid present.

(Post author here.)

Yup, we did that. Also, they gave us some freon in a baggie to play with phase change, and we used carbon tetrachloride and benzine in our o-chem class like it was nothing. That stuff's all off limits these days I guess, along with "real" chemistry sets for kids.

Our high school science teacher went to school in the late 1950s. He told us his science teacher used to demonstrate that you could plunge your hand into a container of mercury and swirl it around, just lovely stuff... until one day his gold wedding ring snapped in half, because the mercury had degraded it.

I used to play with those (mercury blob mazes) at electronic/junk shops when I was a little kid. Currently I've got a small collecting of mercury switches and rather large jar of mercury in the basement... It's neat stuff.

Oh. I had one of those that I played with for quite a while as a kid. I'm guessing it was from Edmund Scientific.

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