Some indium-gallium alloy, that has irritatingly gone and firmly stuck itself to a load of broken glass.
Gallium is pretty similar in many respects to mercury, although unlike Hg it is nontoxic, as are its compounds pretty much sans poisonous properties. It has a higher melting point, but it still melts JUST above room temperature. Will melt at the least touch, and indeed is liquid on a warm day, and when it does melt, it flows like mercury, turns into lots of little beads that scatter everywhere if dropped, forms amalgams with the likes of aluminium and some other transition metals, and can, like Hg, be used to strip the oxide coating off aluminium and prevent it reforming, thence forming a gallium-aluminium amalgam. Which like the Al/Hg amalgam can be used for reductions of all manner of interesting things.
Trying to get as much as possible off the glass so I can then add it to some compressed Al foil nuggets, and use it to attempt reduction of a certain substituted nitroalkene. One that I have been wanting to get that double bond reduced and the nitro moiety reduced to the corresponding amine. Al/Hg will do it, all in one so as to give the aminoalkane I seek. So too, apparently will Ga/Al amalgam, possibly assisted by a little copper chloride.
The indium is not needed for what I wish to accomplish, it just happens to be in the gallium alloy, in order to lower the MP yet further so as to be liquid at most room temperatures. Its kinda neat stuff. I froze it in the fridge until solid, then when I took it out, it liquified back into a blob the second my fingers came into contact with it. And they, from working at isolating as much metal as possible, are now metallic silvery grey, as though I had a localized but severe case of argyria.
