"you can chew on gallium like gum" is not true. itll melt from the heat of your mouth and you'll swallow it. i think they're thinking of indium, which is a soft metal that's solid at room and body temperature
Yeah, Indium is most likely what chatters thought of. It is a soft metal, and it makes a cool little crystal cracking sound when you deform it. It is used as a part of the formula for liquid metal heat interface (thermal paste alternative), which usually consists of gallium and indium. There is a combination of metals that I think are gallium and indium that you can rub together and they form a liquid alloy (because the alloy has a much lower melting temperature).
hihi! a nugget of information for you: spiff mentioned the element mendelevium (7:58), which is actually named after Dmitri Mendeleev, the chemist who created the layout for the periodic table that is widely used today. also, I was told by my chemistry teacher that during the period where people were discovering that elements could be man-made, there were students at the University of California, Berkeley that wanted to put their university on the periodic table. If I remember correctly, it was supposed to take up 4 slots for 'American' 'University' of 'Berkeley' 'California'. They managed to successfully take spots 95 (Americium), 97 (Berkelium), 98 (Californium). HOWEVER, another group found out what they were trying to do and managed to find the 96th element (Curium). I can't actually find any solid evidence that this is a true story, and may actually be very made up considering that the aforementioned elements were all discovered by roughly the same chemists who were all part of UC Berkeley and Americium and Curium were both discovered in 1944. BUT I think it's a silly little story and i'd like to imagine it's true :P
iirc the thing about naming the whole university on the periodic table was a joke by The New York Times or another Times, but beyond that what you said is true lmao
there's a really good book about the discovery and general things about the elements called "The disappearing spoon and Other true tales of madness, love, and the history of the world from the periodic table of elements"
Bobby broccoli made an incredible video exactly on this topic! It is one of the best documentaries on RU-vid and I highly recommend, it is called"The man who tried to fake an element"
If memory serves, the naming four Elements after their university Thing was actually a Joke by a newspaper after the university Had discovered four Elements in a row
For this exact reason, gallium is strictly forbidden to take on aircraft. The majority of airliners are made chiefly of aluminum, and you can imagine them getting brittle would be something of a problem.
The metal you can chew like gum is not gallium, gallium is too hard + melts in your mouth, and swallowing it is not a good idea, the metal you can actually chew like gum is indium, it is non-toxic and soft enough to chew with your teeth
@@the_phantom_cat7912 Any heavy metal can be toxic if it gets into your bloodstream in the right conformation and/or volume, including heavy metals that naturally occur in your body, like iron or zinc. Gallium's just got a higher required concentration than mercury to be toxic.
Indium is the element that you can chew, gallium is the less toxic metal with a low boiling point (the alternate being mercury). You still can't eat gallium or indium. But you can chew indium but now gallium.
Funnily enough most people who eat liquid mercury survive, cause the type of mercury that they have eaten is almost always the one used in old thermometers. This type of mercury isn't easily absorbed by the body due to its composition, so most of the time it doesn't result in anything serious (still not a good idea to eat it though). If you inhale it's fumes though... well you'll be lucky to escape with just lung damage...
7:43 the elements on the bottom don't last long, because they are unstable, as in they turn into something else or blow up very fast after becoming the element wanted. also they were elements made by SCIENCE (very complex) instead of actually being find-able in the wild (at least if my memory serves). and by very fast I mean if memory serves (which it does not) some elements on the bottom row can last less than a thousanth of a second before half of it is Thanos snapped. edit: bruh after I wrote this comment chat instantly responded to Spiff's question making this comment void. welp better say that unstable stuff follow Thanos's law (not a real law), basically saying 'after X time Y will be halfed' with X being a time amount (1 second, 3 years, 2 microseconds, etc) and Y being whatever is getting Thanos Snapped
From my understanding there is no reason to assume they couldn’t exist naturally but they are so unstable and the conditions that allow them to form are super extreme and it’s to the point that you basically can’t ever discover it naturally given they disappear so fast and would be nearly impossible to observe even without that given the conditions needed for them to exist
So I also bought some liquid metal stuff, but it was black, and it soaked into my skin when I touched it. Was a little weird, but then it started telling me to bite peoples' heads off, and kept rambling about the lights being so pretty. It likes chocolate though.
Mendelevium is named after Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, a russian scientist who designed the modern Periodic Table of Elements, which was quite the break-through at the time as it involved establishing a Connection between the mass of an atom and it's chemical properties
Thats true, he will love it... Then he might hate it because that stuff can not be cleaned up with conventional means. There is a perminent stain on the floor where I work because of the stuff.
7:50 spiff! (or anyone else), if you're curious about the more whack sounding elements at the bottom and have some time to kill, Bobby Broccoli has a super interesting video essay called "the man who tried to fake an element". it talks about the discovery of some of these elements while also explaining a wild story about a guy who pretended to have found one. highly recommend!
IIRC making elements isn’t as easy as, like, pipetting in another proton/neutron to whatever highest number nucleus exists. It’s more akin to magnets: if you have 2 “north” sides, getting them to snap together is not a matter of just holding the norths side-by-side. The forces of nature or whatever are gonna fight to forever keep them apart. Those norths will never hold themselves together. You can’t just add a proton or neutron and expect it to STAY, because it won’t. It’ll slip into stable elements before you can even consider it as being integrated as your new single element (instead of being 2 separate things you’re holding together) and you’ll end up with uranium and argon or whatever. The trick is brute-forcing the right combination that WILL temporarily-forget-that-it’s-not-supposed-to-exist long enough that we can see that, for however short it was, a new cohesive whole held ITSELF together. It makes sense if you think about it because everything past iron (FE) exists only as a product of a supernova. Stars will generate the first 16, but the nuclear fusion isn’t strong enough to compress anything past iron, so when a star is fully iron and can’t make anything else it dies. The power of a supernova (to create, idk, EIGHTY?? more elements than a star can) in comparison to a LITERAL STAR in comparison to human-made particle accelerators is so laughable it’s usually not worth mentioning. If a supernova can’t make it stick through the test of time then the instability speaks for itself. It’s still unspeakably cool that we’re finding ways to create further than our forebears ever could have dreamed of!!! …Keep in mind that I was an arts major in uni and haven’t taken a science class in over a decade so,,,,,, blind leading the blind,,,,,, but the general concept there is probably correct enough for fellow doofuses 🫡
Btw before anyone tries to chew on gallium the chatter is wrong, you can chew on indium since it is non-toxic, and soft enough to be chewed, but won’t melt in your mouth. Gallium will melt and enter your stomach
Has Connor told you to turn the saturation down on the hand/loaf cam (he said he would at some point), because I think this is a clear example of it KEKW
Spiff should react to some of the crazy NileRed videos. Like "Turning styrofoam into cinnamon candy" or "Turning plastic gloves into grape soda". Some of the stuff NileRed makes is insane but cool, and it appears Spiff is on his alchemy arc.
Fun fact : metal coins have no smell, what you percieve, when sniffing them is smell of your sweaty palms. You can check it out by getting a clean coin and picking it up by nippers. So Probably galvanium smell is not a thing too, you jest smell your sweat again
WAIT HOLUP is that the Journey soundtrack? A man of culture I see! The kind of culture that goes on a petri dish, like this science experiment haha i am funni
Spigg, never ever wash gallium down the drain out in a metal sink. If it comes in contact with aluminum it will destroy it! Gallium is super fun tho :) Edit: oh good, we figured this out 😅
I played with mercury once. Back when I was little I accidentally dropped an old thermometer, the kind that works on mercury, and it broke. I tried to clean up and discovered mercury for myself. I didn't pick it up, but kind of rolled it around with a glass shard. Then dad came in and scolded me for that, saying that I shouldn't ever touch mercury, because it's dangerous. I don't think it affected me in any noticeable way, so maybe I wasn't exposed to it enough, or maybe just got lucky. Gallium looks cool, but it is different from mercury, it's too much like water when warm and becomes solid when not. Mercury does look like it's a piece of metal with a rounded shape, but it's a liquid piece and does not solidify.
Huge gallium fan here its actual a solid metal but its melting point is body temperature so it melt quickly in your hand. Its my absolute favorite element in the periodic table :)))).
spiff probs doesn't read his youtube comments since he's more of a twitch streamer, but from what little i understand from 2 weeks of a college chemistry course i dropped out of because the professor was a boomer who didn't know how to properly host online classes during the lockdown, elements have a few components, but the "number" tied to them is the number of little balls flying around the core of them. some of the smaller-numbered elements are like helium, carbon and maybe silicon? idk. that makes them more common, anyway. new elements are made when scientists can find a way to crash two things together to add another little ball orbiting the center- so it's not a matter of making something up, it's a matter of that we know it's theoretically possible, but it has yet to be done. then the person who discovers it gets to name it. it's like when a new game comes out and speedrunners try to find skips. there's absolutely going to be at least one of them, but until someone figures it out, it's only theoretical
