gallium has a tendency to stick to just about anything it comes into contact with as well.

like my hands.. they kind of turn bluish after handling some when its liquid. .. so its not something I play with everyday as you can imagine.

I've noticed if you take the solid stuff, and bend it, even when its fairly cold, it will make a creaking noise...quite loud and distinctive if you use flat pancake-like pieces.

I'm not a metalurgist, so I don't know if this is exclusive of gallium, just something I noticed.

The creaking is pretty commonplace amongst the elements in that section of the periodic table. Gallium, Indium, Tin and Antimony all creak and crackle when you bend them.

Jdurg, I'm wondering how can you store rubudium as thermo-melters that they won't be oxidized?

Heh. My rubidium and cesium are stored in fully sealed ampoules under low pressure argon gas. There is no oxygen or nitrogen in the sealed ampoules. So when the ambient temperature is warm enough, they begin to melt inside their ampoules.

2 (perhaps silly) question,

1. What are ampoules? (I can't find it in the dictionary!)
2. What is the seal made of? Glass? Plastic? Why won't it leak?

glass containers, hermedically sealed with glass. Gases diffuse through glass painfully slow at room temperature.

Sealed with glass...? What does that mean? Wouldn't the whole stuff melt when sealing?

take a test tube. Now put your sample in it. Now with a flame heat the rim / opening of the test tub. When the glass is above the glass transition temperature, it becomes soft and plyable. Squeeze the opening shut (not with your hand as it should be around +1000 C). Now the sample is hermedically sealed inside the tube.

Still little problems. Wouldn't the metal take reaction during the sealing process (it's >1000'C!!!). How can you prove that there's no leakage (or things going in) during the sealing process? What was the heater powered by? Is it soda glass or pyrex glass? How can you prove that there's no reaction between the metal and the glass during the heating? (Ya know, glass come with silicon and boron, and sometimes oxygen)

1000C is a local temperature at the rim. Glass is a very poor thermal conductor. In other words, the heat doesn't move very far. I'm sure in industry they use a natural gas flame with a pure oxygen stream.

All the glass you know of contains Oxygen. The main ingredient in glass you are familiar with is probably 70% SiO2. Oxides are the BASIS of glass.

The only "reaction" that would take place would be minor surface diffusion. Not enough to even measure or see (unless you have the $$$$$$). Glass is very unreactive, hence why all your lab equipment is Pyrex. If any of my friends etch glass, they use the extremely nasty acid, HF. Not much else readily attacks it.

Pyrex/Kimmex are almost exclusively SiO2. They contain some B2O3 which is dissolvable by water. Kimmex I believe, they leech out the B2O3 after molding the glass, then "recook" it at 1400C to close the pores left where the B2O3 was located. In Pyrex, the B2O3 forms "dropplets in an SiO2 mattrix". In other words, the B2O3 is completely surrounded by the unreactive SiO2. B2O3 lowers the melting point, which is why its used in the first place. Regular Soda Lime Silica glass is slightly more reactive, doesn't possess the thermal shock resistance of pyrex (why you can cook with pyrex and it doesn't shatter), but melts at several hundred degree C lower (from alkali/alkine earth additions) which makes it cheaper to produce. I'm sure its probably sealed in Pyrex.

You'll have to look up the specifics of how they do it EXACTLY. Light bulbs are similar, as they are backfilled with an unreactive gas as to protect the W or Sb filament.

You can turn ANY solid into a glass if you can cool it fast enough. I can make silver into a glass if I can cool it at 10^7 C/second. Silicon Dioxide can cool over the course of weeks and still form a glass without crystalizing. Glass is nothing more than a "frozen in" disordered structure.