r/BeAmazed • u/himmokala • Dec 15 '24

Science Using red dye to demonstrate how Mercury cannot be absorbed by a towel

29.0k Upvotes

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316

u/Soisseshalt Dec 15 '24

And again I remember, that as a child I played with the funny pearls that came out of the broken thermometer.... I feel old....

161

u/TimoZNL Dec 15 '24

Mercury poisoning does that to a person 😂

8

u/Soisseshalt Dec 15 '24

That's the answer

73

u/BuddahSack Dec 15 '24

Probably ate the paint chips that fell off the wall too lol

40

u/roy_rogers_photos Dec 15 '24

I mean, not all of them. Just the tasty ones.

16

u/KatNipKip Dec 15 '24

4

u/AdditionalTomorrow33 Dec 15 '24

This scene lives in my head rent free

16

u/soggytoothpic Dec 15 '24

We did the same. Chased those little balls around the kitchen floor.

5

u/filbert13 Dec 15 '24

I was in high school 04-08. I had a teacher who was in their 60s tell us when he was in high school it was before they knew how toxic mercury was. They played round with it with their bare hands on a desk.

1

u/rapier999 Dec 15 '24

My mum was a dental nurse, she said she used to roll the mercury around with her hands regularly when preparing fillings. Shit is scary.

6

u/germy813 Dec 15 '24

You're lucky nothing serious happened to you lol

15

u/C4LLgirl Dec 15 '24

Elemental mercury isn’t that bad to play with once or twice. I’m a chemist and I’ve touched it 

3

u/unintentionalvampire Dec 15 '24

Every cat deserves sausage now and again, just like chemist deserves playing with dangerous chemicals with bare hands every now and again

3

u/anTWhine Dec 16 '24

I was in chem lab in college alongside a girl I had a major crush on. She said “hey have you ever played with this? It’s fun!”

I knew all the risks. I would never, ever under normal circumstances touch the stuff. But in that moment you bet your ass I played with mercury to impress a cute girl. Kinda fun. Got one date and that was the end of that.

2

u/EtTuBiggus Dec 15 '24

That kind of mercury isn’t readily absorbed through the skin. 

-49

u/[deleted] Dec 15 '24

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19

u/Bitter_Split5508 Dec 15 '24

Physician here. Mercury was never in vaccines, what was used is Thimerosal. Which isn't any more mercury than table salt is chlorine gas. It was used to prevent microbial growth in the vaccine solutions and was phased out not so much because of safety concerns, but rather because advances in infrastructure and ability to maintain a cooling chain had made it superfluous. 

12

u/HombreSinPais Dec 15 '24

You’re going to be busy explaining vaccines to people over the next god knows how many years.

1

u/sierracool33 Dec 15 '24

Broke my thermometer once in 4th Grade and I was so mortified that I may have had mercury in my room somehow. I didn't know where the droplets went, so I just cleaned the whole room and found nothing.