Mercury Is Not Toxic.

To be quite clear: some forms of mercury are extremely toxic. Some are not. Your body can deal with small amounts of the more common types of Hg pretty easily, and you piss out what your kidneys remove from your blood at a rate that would either astonish or confuse your Elected Heroes (depending on how smart they are).

If you would like to know what I'm talking about, click here and scroll down to the "Mercury as a Poison" section.

I tripped over this while trying to find the price of mercury for a work-related project. I also found a fellow named Hickston who used liquid mercury to build telescopes the optical equivalent of glass mirror-based, at 1/100th the cost. He worked his way up to a three-meter scope, for about a million dollars (vs. $100M). Parts of the 3m telescope were re-used when it was scrapped to build the current 6 meter Large Zenith Telescope, which is on the short list of the largest telescopes in the world.

Wow.