Time to get down and get chemical today, with a look at "Rieke metals". These are named after their discoverer, Rueben Rieke, who founded a company dedicated to their production and use in chemical building-block synthesis. In general, these are extremely fine particles of your desired metal, produced by chemical synthesis in a way that gives you both huge surface areas and "naked" metal surfaces that are largely free of oxide layers. That's a recipe for very high reactivity, and indeed these reagents can do some really interesting reactions that are just not going to happen in any useful way using your handy jar of magnesium turnings or what have you. Metal-surface heterogeneous reactions always have the aroma of witchcraft around them, anyway. There are a lot of variables that can turn out to have huge effects - particle size and surface area, of course, as mentioned, cleanness of the metal surface, definitely, but also things like particle shape: corners and ridges tend to contain more reactive metal atoms than flat planes do (they're more naked out there). Then there are effects from tiny amounts of impurities in the metal sources themselves - several times it's been discovered that trace amounts of nickel or other metals are crucial additives, and if you use extremely high-purity metals or salts things actually go awry. The choice of solvent can be critical, too, because some of them will complex with your desired metal-organic species and stabilize them, perhaps even too much in some cases. The general chemical recipe for Rieke metals is to start with a chloride salt of your desired metal and reduce that with a more reactive metal like lithium, sodium, or potassium. You can do that at higher temperatures where the reactive metals themselves have melted under…