Okay, today I'm going to be testing out if you can really chew Indium metal like a stick of gum.
So I made my own stick of indium gum here. Actually it's just pure indium metal.
I flattened it out. So I want to test if you can chew it like gum. So indium is a really interesting metal.
So what's interesting about it is it's really malleable.
You can pretty much cut through it with a knife. It's one of the most malleable metals in the periodic table that you can just
pick at it with your fingernail.
Just cut right into it with a fingernail.
So I've heard it said that you can chew indium just like gum or tar, and
I wanted to test if that was really the case by trying to chew it myself.
So before I chew it,
I want to show you some other cool things about indium. When you bend it you can hear the metal
crystal structure sliding past each other. You can also do this with tin,
but indium is really loud to hear. So I'm going to bend it and see if you can hear it.
Another cool property of indium is that if you mix it with some gallium,
so this is some gallium metal here. You can form an alloy that has a lower melting point than both of them together.
So if I just touch them together,
It starts to melt.
See it melt?
So it's forming alloy at the tips here.
This is a similar alloy that's used in thermometers, the ones that look like they're mercury, but they're not.
Let's see if I can get a little drop to form here.
So here's my gallium indium alloy
Looks just like mercury
but infinitely safer than mercury.
So gallium will melt kind of at room temperature; you have to warm it up
to around I think it's like 85 degrees,
but,
this alloy can be much colder than the gallium.
Also indium is one of the few metals that wets glass.
So what that means is if you put on a piece of glass,
It doesn't bead up, but it sticks to the glass, so that means that you can make really cool mirrors with it.
Hey, here I am.
Okay, here's my stick of indium gum. As far as we know today indium is non-toxic, and I really hope that's true.
So let's see if you can really chew indium like gum.
So it's really hard gum, but I can chew it.
So,
you can chew aluminum foil like this, but what's really happening is it's not being malleable or
forming together. It's really just crunching it up into a small piece.
This, see how I have three separate pieces?
And crunch them back into one piece together, so the metal's just forming back together, unlike aluminum.
There you go, you can chew indium like gum.
What's cool when I'm biting this, is like
I showed before you can
feel the crystals reforming in there and sliding past each other, so you hear the little crunching sound while you're biting it.
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