Not too long ago it used to be the case that you could walk into any drugstore and pick a mercury thermometer off the rack for a couple of bucks. Many of these wound up being broken up on purpose by kids who could play with the fun little metal balls that scurried to and fro. But times have changed and mercury is synonymous with poison so a safety conscious world has seen to it that those thermometers share the same historical fate as shoe fitting X-ray scopes and cocaine tonics.

But this reputation is in large part undeserved. True, mercury organometallics remain among the most feared of poisons and it's caused terrible environmental damage. But uncombined in its elemental state mercury is fairly inert which means it doesn't do much of anything. And locked up inside an ampule within a chunk of super inert acrylic resin makes it even safer.

Embedded ampule contains 30 grams of 99.9% pure mercury.