Archaeologists have found that people living in the Iberian Peninsula used to ingest mercury powder around 5,000 years ago. The levels of mercury they found in the bones of the ancient people were ...

And then anyone who inhaled powder or vapors with mercury may have suffered pneumonitis, or inflamed lungs. “Western medicine has basically banned mercury … [like] public health enemy No. 1, ...

This was a time-consuming job because we needed a very fine powder — much finer than even sand. (We wore out several pairs of gloves in the process.) We used mercury to actually extract the gold ...