How not to salt your popcorn!

Apparently someone thought it would be fun to synthesize NaCl (Table Salt) directly from a bowl of molten Sodium bubbled with Chlorine gas. Imagining that this would be photogenic, they decided to have both still and video cameras at hand for the demonstration. The link is to the story at PopSci.com, the web version of Popular Science Magazine.

Lots of white smoke consisting almost entirely of NaCl evolved, engulfing a net full of popcorn and presumably salting them nicely.

Then the net holding the popcorn melted...

The photo they got for the mag is impressive enough, but the video is scary.

Now you are going to wonder how I found this... I was looking for a source of interesting looking math puzzles and found www.mathpuzzle.com, where a recent posting mentioned this exercise in absurdity. Lots of good stuff to be found on line ;-)

Just don't even think about trying to duplicate this at home!