Fun With Highly Toxic Substances

I've written before about the website Boing Boing. I always find something there to delight and distract me from the woes of the world (or sometimes it helps me see something from an entirely new and different perspective.) Here is a link to a video about freezing mercury. Hmmm ... I'm looking for fun projects to occupy my kindergartners in the last week of school.

Seriously, I remember being in about 2nd grade when the scientist father of one of my classmates brought in mercury for us to play with. Yes, we handled it. It was cool how it broke up into many small blobs and then came together again into a big blob. Back in those days it was not known how toxic mercury was.

A few years ago when we were getting my parents' house ready to sell, I had the job of emptying the rusting metal shelf in the garage and disposing of the various tubes, cans, old mayonnaise jars, etc. of substances that my father had amassed over the years. (A physician by trade, he was a tinkerer by avocation, dabbling in chemistry, mechanics, physics, you name it.) So I loaded it all into the back of my station wagon and (a year or so later, after it sat piled in my driveway) hauled it over to the county "Clean Sweep" site for disposal. The woman working there was very efficient, sorting the stuff I could put out with the trash at home from the stuff they would dispose of. Then she picked up a little glass spice jar with a rubber stopper and said, "I wonder what this is? Oh! It's mercury!" I'm sure that was one she enjoyed telling at the dinner table that night!

Gosh, if I had only kept it, I could have made frozen mercury fish and turtles like in the video.

This explains a lot ...

... like, why I have to have pockets in my clothes.

Humans and kangaroos are close cousins on the evolutionary tree sharing a common ancestor 150 million years ago, according to Australian researchers.

Scientists have mapped the genetic code of the Australian marsupials for the first time and found large chunks of DNA are the same. (Read the rest.)

Cool.