CSI had an episode where someone was shot with a bullet made of frozen ground meat.

The Mythbusters tried that. It didn't work very well.

I saw the Mythbusters one with the bullets made of ice.

Mythbusters annoyed me when it took them so long to get the "frozen bird hits airplane window" thing right....

ita, I don't know about the bullets, but I do know there are sledgehammers that have an internal mercury compartment, for extra ooomph. IIRC, they're called deadblow hammers.

As I understand it, the purpose is not so much for ooomph as to reduce the chance the hammer will bounce and hit something you didn't intend to hit.

ita, I know that there are 'safe' rounds out there for use by bodyguards and the like, which are designed to not ricochet and not exit targets, but I don't think they use mercury.

One that's pretty common is the Glaser safety slug, which uses little lead pellets. [link]

You know what'd be cool? A bullet made from sodium. Sodium is a metal that burns upon contact with water (or, you know, blood).

Heh, in one D&D adventure I played in, the party was given a glass container with a large chunk of sodium suspended in a non-reactive liquid (though we weren't told it was that - it was a "magic" item). We were to use it if we ran into trouble with a water-based creature (and in fact did very successfully). I'm not sure if the science actually holds up, but it was cool in a geektastic sort of way.

In my high school chemistry class, the teacher went to throw a small chunk of sodium into a large glass tank of water. Except that he didn't completely cut the small sample and managed to throw the golfball sized chunk of sodium into the tank.

Blew the front off right off the tank, it did. Had to evacuate the wing.

I wonder if he's ever lived that down. He was really fucking lucky nothing worse happened.

yeah, but it must have been AWESOME

I wonder if he's ever lived that down.

Lived it down? Hell, it's a one-way ticket to living legend status!

Of course!

My physics teacher in HS once was demonstrating the different colored flames one gets by burning different materials. Instead of a little burner though, he cranked the gas jet and lit it directly for a nice large jet of flame. He was a little nuts.

I wonder if people with repressed pyromaniacal tendencies tend to end up as physics or chemistry teachers.