1,200 Students Kept at School Overnight After Mercury Found

Mercury looks so frickin' cool. It's a metal, but it's a liquid. It's way more dense than water is (meaning it'd be tough to flush if you were stupid enough to try.)

But mercury's kind of...sort of...a little bit dangerous. Play with it too long, and you'll go mad as a hatter. You especially don't want to sit on a vat of it.

And we probably shouldn't expose kids to it in schools, even kids in Vegas.

I remember when we had mercury thermometers in schools. It wasn't all that long ago, maybe fifteen years. We've been using all digital thermometers for all those years since, but before that happened, I had a group of students - my first AP chemistry class at Princeton, 2001-2002, I think - break a mercury thermometer. They cleaned it up, put the mercury and the broken thermometer inside two Styrofoam cups taped together then into the trash, and went on about their business. They told me the next day, and I just sort of didn't tell anybody. Not much I could've done at that point, I thought, though I certainly should have told somebody above me and seen the hazmat team come in to decontaminate my room. Instead, I bought a mercury spill kit - that I never ended up using in my remaining decade in that building - and went on with my life.

If you ever spill any mercury, clean it up properly.