Ok I saw the video… now I want to try it. My ex-wife called me over last year because she broke a thermometer and she was freaking out. I had gathered a little clump of it and I was tempted to try to keep it, but decided not to. It was really heavy.
Hmm - I wonder if you could do the same thing warming up gallium in your mouth? Though I know that tends to stain skin grey.
i believe the majority of gold compounds are cyano complexes, where you can neglect the gold toxiticy compared to the free cyanides.
Sounds like the sequel to Jupiter Ascending.
Well, reading Boing Boing, for one.
This really depends on temperature, because it’s set by vapor pressure. At room temperature, there’s really not much. Above 100F? That might be a concern, especially with repeated exposure.
I usually like Cory’s stuff, but this is a click-bait video in the extreme. I’ve seen enough of his vids to know that he’s smarter than this.
It is clickbaity in a lot of ways, that said it’s not entirely coming out of nowhere considering he’s got many videos where he works directly with mercury. Him making this video probably came from people telling him mercury is very dangerous to work with, in that context he’s showing that no… as long as its pure its reactivity is not as big of an issue if you take appropriate precautions.
However I don’t want to speak for him, maybe it is just him wanting to get more views but the way I look at seems pretty plausible
But when it’s in your mouth, what vapor there is goes directly into the body.
The vapor pressure of mercury at 20 C is 0.002 torr. I can have one of my students do the Clausius-Clapeyron Equation to solve it to 35 C. The LD50 is 29-50 mg/kg in humans. I’d imagine the absorption kinetics for something that big would be pretty slow.
But the TLDR is you’re not going to damage yourself doing a one off spit (and maybe accidental swallow) of mercury.
As for gold…totally safe. I will gladly eat a kilogram of gold dust, if you provide the materials. (The solid I’d imagine being rather “al dente”)
I can’t remember who, Pepys or Boswell, or one of those types of guys who analogized those who received mercury treatment for various “diseases of Venus” to snails, leaving a shining trail wherever they went. (if anyone one could primary source that for me, it would be swell).
@freshacconci, “A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury”
If y’all’ve had amalgam fillings in your lifetime (they are the silver-black ones that damage the surrounding tooth) you’ve already had more mercury exposure than you’d get from swallowing elemental mercury a few times.
And of course mercury has been popular in medicines for a thousand years or more - and still is among the vaccination outrage crowd, despite the existence of safe and effective mercury-free vaccines.
@Grey_Devil, people have been eating gold from at least ancient Egyptian times to the present, and gold recovered from feces was apparently an income source for India’s Dalits at one time. I have eaten both gold and silver as part of pastry decorations at weddings. I have no idea why Cory would say it’s toxic 
@Cunk, lead tastes sweet, although that may have been the oxides on the surface. Lead poisoning is not fun, it’s impossible to ignore the white moths even though you know they aren’t real.
@fuzzyfungus, entering a chamber that had just been flushed of beryllium vapor I recall a faint odor of sweets, but if you get enough beryllium inhaled to measure, you die. (Or at least that’s what the chemical engineers told us test engineers anyway.)
But I really just posted in homage to Leon Redbone.
I went down to St. James Infirmary
I saw my baby there
laid out on that long white table
so fine, so cool, so fair
Let 'er go, let 'er go, God rest her
where e’er she may be
You can search this wild world over
you’ll never find another lovin’ man like me
Give me six gamblers to carry my coffin
Six dancing girls to dice on my tomb
and pills and salts of white mercury
for all the women I have known
Early chemists would identify the presence of beryllium by tasting compounds to see if they exhibited its distinctive sweetness. This caused many of them to become late chemists.
He does mention that in rare instances its possible to get gold toxicity. I’m sure its very hard to do, with other presumed safe metals it can happen though even if uncommon. Stuff like copper, silver, and others. His point in bringing it up is to point out that mercury is unsafe but it wont readily be absorbed into your body. It needs to meet specific criteria.
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