How poisoness is mercury?

Like most elements, it's not the proton count that matters, but rather the company it drags along with it. Metallic mercury is relatively harmless. Dimethyl mercury, as pointed out above is a very toxic neuropoison, and is responsible for most of the damage that mercury can do to an organism. On the ther hand, elemental chlorine is very dangerous (being a corrosive gas), but when tied to sodium (another very dangerous elemental, explosively in that case) it is not only quite harmless but vital. The mercury in fish is locked into compounds in the fish's tissues that are relatively harmless to the fish, both chemically and because the fish has a relatively simple neurosystem, but if digested can give rise to the dimethyl form.
 
h.g.Whiz said:
I handled it when I was a kid. I played with it til I noticed it vanishing in my hand.
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Vanishing to where? I doubt that mercury would soak into your hand. You have to put some pressure on it to get it to go through a handkerchief. I should know, because when I was a kid I tried to bring some home in a handkerchief.
 
Ziggurat said:
Probably evaporating.
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Hmm, according to Wikipedia it can be absorbed through the skin. That would surprise me since you can almost carry it in a handkerchief, but I guess pore size isn't everything.
 
Steelmage said:
I heard it will grant you super-human powers if you are lucky. ;)
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This is one of the things that legitimately pisses me off about the way our universe works.

What's the actual response to radiation, lightening strikes, poison, and all other manner of stimuli that create superheroes?

Tumor, then death. Or maybe just death.

It's a shame things work that way.
 
Ziggurat said:
Probably evaporating.
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Not in his hand. It has a 585 degrees F boiling point, about the same point at which pure lead melts, 200 degrees higher than vegetable oil flashes at. Does vegetable oil evaporate in your hand? (Actually, this is not a good comparison - better is a comparison of partial pressures at 32 degrees C and 1 atmosphere, which I'm not competent to perform.) It also has a high suface tension value, making an absorptive interface hard to create; see how it reacts to the iron cannonball above.

What was most likely happening is that the ball was being broken up and disbursing off the the edge of his palm onto the floor. If you've never handled it you have no idea how quick quicksilver can be.

Later: I should read before I post, I suppose. Doing some investigating: Mercury does have a high partial pressure, so my argument is quashed. However, if his droplet in his hand was diminishing over minutes time, I still think it is not evaporation doing it, but fragmentation.

See: http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~scintech/mercury/WhatBigDeal.htm (crappy HTML, but fairly good content, I think). The big point of this argument is that the allowable limits are so low that even low evaporation can give rise to toxic levels.

Another opinion:

dwb.unl.edu said:
In practice, mercury evaporates very slowly: experiments at CLEAPSS suggest that a drop of diameter 6mm loses only 0.01 g in seven months.
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shadron said:
Later: I should read before I post, I suppose. Doing some investigating: Mercury does have a high partial pressure, so my argument is quashed. However, if his droplet in his hand was diminishing over minutes time, I still think it is not evaporation doing it, but fragmentation.
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Could be.
 
Modified said:
Vanishing to where? I doubt that mercury would soak into your hand. You have to put some pressure on it to get it to go through a handkerchief. I should know, because when I was a kid I tried to bring some home in a handkerchief.
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I assumed my hand was absorbing it.
 
Miss_Kitt said:
On the other hand, you can push the little gobs from the broken old-fashioned thermometer around on your counter and then into a trashbag without apparent harm, as long as you vigorously wash afterward.
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In my state it's illegal to throw it in the trash like that. I still have an old thermostat I've been meaning to take to the county hazardous waste disposal site. I'll get around to it someday.
 
Mercury is a valuable metal. You ought to be able to sell it to a recycler.
 
In it's liquid form it's not to bad but, used in CF-globes is when it is dangerous. I found mercury in a WW2 oil tunnel at Darwin laying in the dry dirt where a sight gauge had been smashed, it had been there 60+years inert. It reacts to sea water. Once bullet primers were made from nitric acid and mercury, a simple process might be handy to know.
 
Third Eye Open said:
I'm always hearing about how pregnant women shouldn't eat too much fish because of the mercury, this never made much sense to me. Unless someone can confirm, is there really that much mercury in fish?
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Nobody has ever been harmed by eating commercial fish products in America. Or even non-commercial. There have been a couple instances of poisoning, but in small environments. Where the local industry severly poisoned the local fishery, (Japan) and another case where people ate wheat that was meant for seed (Iraq). Plus a couple locales where the people eat tons of the local fish. But so far as the usual sea food, you would need to eat LOTS (hundreds of pounds?) per day to suffer illness.
 
When my father died, at 95, he left behind quite a collection of chems.
We couldn't give it away. Tried contacting lots of colleges, etc, and no one would take it.
This included about 100 lbs of Hg. A haz-mat team finally came for his 'collection'.

Mercury is still fairly cheap.
 
madurobob said:
The Discovery Channel's gold show a while back followed gold prospectors in the Amazon. They'd find a likely spot on the river bank, spend a couple of days shoveling dirt into a sluice, and end up with about 30 gallons of gold-rich sludge. Then, they put this into a 55 gallon drum with some additional water and about a 1/2 cup of mercury. They mixed it by climbing in and stomping for a couple of hours. Then, they carefully poured out the sludge until they found the mercury - now heavy with whatever gold had been in the sludge. Now came the scary part: one guy took the mercury, put in on a metal dinner plate and heated it with a propane torch to evaporate the mercury and leave the gold behind. His unmasked face just a few inches from the plate as he carefully heated it.

He said something like "I've heard this can make you sick, but I feel fine".

Ugh.
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I remember it being that they squeezed out much of the mercury with a cloth, to get the gold mercury paste that they then burned off the mercury with a torch with.

He looked away as a safety precaution.
 
I played with the stuff as a kid, I don't ever remember 'absorbing' noticeable amounts through my skin, although I did loose some through the gaps in my fingers. I didn't think elemental mercury was too bad as long as you didn't ingest the stuff or inhale the fumes for long periods, however Organic mercury compounds like Methylmercury in your water supply can not be much fun.

Edit having read the wiki page it looks like it can be absorbed through the skin and mucus membranes. So I'm glad I only played with it a little bit as a child! I would suggest limiting your exposure to it!
 
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Just a word: for that last fact you only have wiki's word (and that of the unknown author) for it. It is in points like this that wiki tends to be somewhat unstable. Grain of salt time.

Still, if you don't need to mess with it then I wouldn't.
 
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