Melts In Your Hand, Not In Your Mouth....

Gallium eh, that is it no doubt, nice link.....

He claims it is not Mercury as you mentioned and that it is safe and not hazardous and no doubt mercury being very poisonous this is something one could not have any Grey area on....

My next question, is this the next big thing to invest in, sure looks like this one main source out of Australia is KILLING the sells on it check his sold list so somebody is seeing it as a potential solid investment and at just about 40 bucks or so for an oz. it is still way cheap.....

The big pitch is.....It is more rare the platinum and gold....

Well for one thing we all know platinum is way rare, gold certainly does not fit into the rare category IMO.....

Indeed it is Fuzzy copy and paste I see....

Just because it can melt in your hand doesn't mean you should. It's always a good idea to check the MSDS with something you aren't familiar with: http://www.acialloys.com/msds/ga.html

Yes, it is indeed gallium. These hypers of gallium have been on ebay and elsewhere for quite a while now. We had a discussion on this "liquid bullion" over on the Australian forum back in February.

And most of the claims for it are indeed hype. It is not "rarer than gold", as the Table of relative abundances makes quite clear; the only things rarer than gold here on Earth are the platinum-group metals, which does not include gallium.

Nor is gallium particularly difficult to find, mine and refine. There's usually refinable quantities in bauxite, the raw material used to make aluminium. The few places that refine gallium today do so as a byproduct of aluminium refining. If there is less actual metallic gallium lying around than there is of gold, that's simply because pure gallium is, well, pretty much useless. Low demand equals low price on the open market; These guys will sell you all the gallium you could possibly want, for $579 per kilogram, or 58 cents per gram. The price has actually fallen since the discussion in February, when it was 63 cents per gram.

Most aluminium refiners don't even bother trying to separate out the gallium; they just throw it away with the rest of the red mud. Of course, if someone actually discovers a use for the stuff and demand takes off, pretty much any aluminium refinery on the planet can become a gallium refinery overnight too, meaning even if demand increases, the supply will increase in proportion, keeping the price down.

Finally, of course, there is an inherent problem with "liquid bullion". A 999 silver or gold ingot is pretty much guaranteed to remain 999 fine indefinitely. Your chunk of gallium may start out at "999 fine", but if you go around melting it, sloshing it around in your hand, and refreezing it all the time, you're going to wind up contaminating it with an awful lot of dust, salt and oil from your sweat, gallium oxide, and whatever else that touches it. So nobody would want to buy your used gallium back off you for anywhere near the "bullion price", since they'd have to re-purify it. Which kind of disqualifies it as "bullion".

Still, if you've a hankering to add gallium to your metallic elements collection, you can always buy a "gallium coin" from these guys. They'll sell you a cold-struck penny-sized "coin", in an airtite, for $38. Just be sure to keep it out of the sun and away from bright lights, warm weather and your hands...

What do you suppose would happen if you drank it?

You would probably survive, if you went to hospital. that being said, the MSDS doesn't list much under the ingestion section. Gastrointestinal irritant - perhaps you'd be alright afterwards.

Gallium is funky. You can buy spoons made of it which melt when you stir your coffee. Magic trick stuff, mostly. Its swollen in price way too much, I reckon - as people say, its got no use but as a parlor trick. Mercury can be frozen using dry ice or liquid nitrogen (I believe both are obtainable stateside) and this can do the same - albeit a bit more dangerously.

I tell you what though - if you could mint designs onto gallium rounds(easy to do as they are soft but difficult to keep temp down I'm guessing) then they could be pretty collectable. They'd melt in many place, even inside a slab. Would represent a cool investment - they'd get more and more collectable as global warming sets in!

Now here's why you shouldn't hold it in your hand: low surface tension. Mercury beads, which makes it a lot more fun - but it is toxic and volatile (any liquid evaporates over time, so always keep mercury completely enclosed!). Gallium isn't as toxic, but its surface tension is low enough to stick to glass. So you can actually paint little mirrors out of the stuff - but your hand is full of tiny ridges for it to get stuck in, so holding liquid gallium in your hand will end up staining your skin. Reportedly, this will turn your hand either gray or brown for weeks, and water won't help (gallium isn't very soluble). So keep your hands off it!

On that element coins page, most of the really nasty stuff is enclosed in resin - like thallium, which is about as bad as arsenic but less famous. But I wouldn't buy anything that you aren't familiar with before at least Googling it.