Russian chess player accused of trying to poison opponent by smearing pieces with mercury
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russian-chess-player-poison-opponent-pieces-mercury-rcna165727
@IrelandTorin @vozoto That story still doesn't make sense to me. People used to drink mercury for imagined health benefits. Negative effects take a while. Whatever caused the players' immediate illness was more toxic than a schmear of mercury
@sfleetucker @b4cks4w @vozoto I'm guessing it was probably a volatile organomercury compound.
Perhaps even the classic methylmercury itself - it's got a relatively low boiling point at 96C, and a vapor pressure not too far off that of water at ambient, but it's *ludicrously* toxic. I could see it putting off enough vapor to make someone seriously ill.
@IrelandTorin @b4cks4w @vozoto That would do it, but the article mentioned something about seeing little silver balls, and that's metallic mercury, isn't it? Unfortunately I can't find any images of what pure methylmercury compounds look like.
@sfleetucker @b4cks4w @vozoto Oops, I meant to type dimethylmercury - but it's a colourless liquid.
I don't specifically know of any methylmercury (or more generally organomercury) compounds which look metallic, but here's a wild idea: maybe the compound itself doesn't look metallic, but instead is light-sensitive (or I suppose it could be somewhat oxygen-sensitive) and breaks down into metallic mercury + XYZ when exposed.
Although I'm not sure what'd keep the Hg on the surface of the drop...
@sfleetucker @b4cks4w @vozoto AH - on second reading it doesn't specifically say she said the balls looked metallic... I wonder if something got lost in translation.
OTOH, maybe it was a *mixture* of dimethylmercury and elemental mercury... which could result from using the methyl iodide / sodium amalgam process to make dimethylmercury, then not bothering to purify it and just applying the crude reaction mix.
Which one might do if one were an amateur chemist looking to cook up a deadly poison.
@b4cks4w @IrelandTorin @vozoto Elemental mercury is poorly absorbed. Touching it won't hurt you. You need an organic mercury or at least a mercury salt to be dangerous.