Well, -40 and 40 are really different. XD -40, you're frozen to death, since water freezes are 0. At 40, your cells are slowly dying, since body tempreature needs to be at 36.6.
But the liquid form is quite dangerous. Every liquid has some atoms that turn into a gas and gives off a vapor pressure. The atoms on the top leave and enter the air, so people around liquid mercury end up inhailing the gas, too.
And yeah, it's slow, and it can make you feel pretty sick, but it's more that it stays in your system and slowly kills of cells, and degenerates DNA a bit (So children can be born with defects). That's why if you break a mercury thermometer, it's really bad, even though it's liquid form.
I still think it was probably the ionic form of mercury. I really think showing anyone the pure form is really...bad. I think it's a biohazard if a thermometer breaks, so letting someone just touch it in its natural state can't be allowed outside a fume hood. But the ionic state shouldn't do much to you unless you do something like...eat it.
Ok, so I was off by 1.17 degrees C. Still -40C is damn close. As for the handeling of mercury. As long as it stays in it's liquid form, (Or it's sometimes call "quicksilver")and doesn't get into any cuts or get ingested you should be fine. (I hope you washed your hands after handeling it.)
But like Faithe said, it's when it's in it's gasious form is when it can be quite fatal.
I don't believe it kills like, *POW! INSTANT DEATH!!* I think it kills over time. (Faithe feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about this.)
Er, Mercury's liquid at room temp.^-^' That's why its in thermometers. The melting point is actually 234.32 K(-38.83 °C).
And in the solid form, Mercury is rather stable. As long as it's not liquidated let, the thing thast hurts you is gaseous mercury. As a solid, it has metalic bonding with delocalized elctrons, so the metal doesn't want to break, but as a gas(which is always there when Mercury is liquid due to lapor pressure) is alone and likes to exists as Hg2(2+), so it'd tear electrons from your lungs, which would end badly. And because it has random electron configutation states as a transition metal, it could go back and forth between electron states.
I think it was probably ionic Hg if anything, though. I don't think it's...legal in any way to give students normal mercury unless it's frozen or in a molecular compound, so that it's safe.
Okay then I have a problem. If it's highly toxic, why did my chemistry teacher let the entire class handle mercury with our ungloved hand and noone of got sick or died? (It was definitely mercury)
What's a Prince to do when the only way to stop the Light-Dark war is to either marry an -urg- ELF, or to find a stone that isn't supposed to even exist? Updates every eight days.
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