Friday, April 23, 2010

Alkali metals

Remember how I told you alkali metals were desperately reactive?



Direct link, in case embedding fails ...

Right around "let's try cesium" one knows things are about to get interesting.

(h/t, and more fun with chemistry)

8 comments:

  1. I could have a lot of fun with some of those metals......

    ReplyDelete
  2. I wish this was on facebook so I could click the "like" button.

    ReplyDelete
  3. You can now check 'like' instead of 'useful' and 'dislike' instead of 'not useful.' We are flexible ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. My old chem professor said that a colleague of his was cleaning out an old supply stash in a lab and found an unmarked jar that he couldn't open, so he submerged it underwater in the sink to try and loosen it a bit. Thankfully he left the room after that, because it turned out to be a bunch of sodium in the jar and when the water seeped into the jar it blew out the lab's windows.

    ReplyDelete
  5. "Let's try cesium." ~ Famous last words

    ReplyDelete
  6. When I was an undergrad, at the start of every fall semester a group of students dropped a big chunk of sodium into the Charles river from the bridge. Then everyone ran. Very spectacular -- both the sodium, and hundreds of MIT students attempting to run ;-)

    Citation.

    (Don't do this. This all happened back in the quasi-innocent days before mass hysteria. Such incidents are now the subject of criminal investigations. These days, even a few blinkenlights will cause trouble.)

    ReplyDelete
  7. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete