Mercury thermometer + school = LOCKDOWN!
 

Holy fucking stupid Batman.

:withstupid:

Bloody idiots would faint dead-away if they knew what we did with UNCONTAINED mercury, back when I was in high school.

Uh.. batteries? Salt?

It's just pathetic they pull stunts like this..

No doubt, if someone messed with mercury today like back when I was in school they would close the building permanently and declare it a superfund site.

Stupid, and sad.

I used to have a baby food jar full of mercury. We would take the bulbs out of thermostats break them and put the mercury in the jar.

Pure sodium (not table salt) explodes when it comes in contact with water.

Lithium also reacts pretty vigorously with water.

Exothermic reaction that liberates hydrogen from water, because it's stripping the oxygen out of it. Makes for nice fireworks. A one gram cube will paint the ceiling.

I had that discussion with my Earth Science teacher freshman year of high school.
We were studying the alkali metals and she was going to show us the ever-popular water reaction. This would have been great, but she got the reactions of potassium and lithium mixed up. She was saying potassium would just skitter along the surface of the water, but the lithium would burn.
I had read ahead in the text and remembered potassium having the more violent reaction.
She insisted she was right so we just let it go. About 10 seconds into the demonstration, the potassium had gone from fizzing to burning and then *POP*... painted ceiling, as you say.
Getting an "I told you so" on a science teacher is sooo gratifying. :lol: