Mercury—the element, not the planet—is pretty weird. It’s metallic yet liquid, and extremely toxic, which basically means that it looks really cool and that you probably shouldn’t touch it. Naturally, that doesn’t apply to people on YouTube, who should always be encouraged to do ridiculous and dangerous things for the benefit of their viewers. We’re talking about people like CodyDon Reeder of the YouTube channel Cody’sLab, who recently made a video in which he experimented with flushing mercury down a toilet:
Though he presumably did this in the name of science, we’re not entirely sure what sort of important data could be pulled from this experiment. Yes, a little bit of mercury can be flushed down the toilet, but no, you absolutely should not ever do it. Also, you can replace all of the water in a toilet with 240 pounds of mercury and then stick your hand into it to try and force the toilet to flush, but again, please don’t ever do that. Really, though, the most important lesson here is that doing this thing you definitely shouldn’t do actually looks pretty neat and seems like fun. In the end, isn’t that what science is all about?
[via Laughing Squid]