How a baby T-1000 is born. Youtuber NurdRage has done a lot of work on isolating elemental sodium. To clean up the product from one method, he needed to separate sodium from magnesium. He heated the mixture in mineral oil to 125 °C along with a few milliliters of a tertiary alcohol. The blob of molten sodium shown swirls around the flask because of the magnetic stirrer integrated into the hotplate; the sodium is paramagnetic, so the stirrer’s magnetic field pulls the metal along. The excess magn