Lycopodium Powder!

OK. Everybody knows the coolest part of chemistry in high school was when your teacher stood at the front of the classroom and dropped solid sodium into water and you watched it explode, right? Right. So now about this? We (somehow) managed to stumble across this at work today. Lycopodium Powder. For the less botanically inclined that read this, the Lycopodiums are a Class (King Phillip Came Over For Good Spaghetti, remember) of club mosses. Club mosses are between moss and ferns, evolutionarily speaking. Some people call them mini-evergreens. They literally look like a little club, like 6 inches high, that's green and mossy. Hence, club moss. So...apparently people collect the spores of club moss and sell it as Lycopodium Powder. Good for what? Who knows...but it has a MSDS sheet. MSDS = Material Safety Data Sheet. If you've ever had to work somewhere in the public service industry, your establishement was required to have MSDS sheets for each chemical on its premisis, and you (as an employee) were required by law to know where your MSDS sheets were kept. Whether or not you did, well...different story. See the Lycopodium Powder MSDS here...
Hummadah what? Flammable? Spores are flammable? Well, kinda. I guess the real topic of conversation at work was grain silos. They're demolishing one for the new MN Gopher football stadium (my company did the environmental permitting for it). Which got us on the topic of grain silos exploding because they literally have enough dust in the air which makes the air so dense with carbon in a quasi-pressurized environment that a little spark from loose wiring inside (or a farmer's cigarette) makes the air flammable. From there it's like gunpowder exploding inside a shell, and sometimes the roofs of these exploded silos are propelled some hundreds of feet away. Anyways...despite the advanced ventilation systems these things have nowadays, they still tend to go boom. The MN locals tell me you see one on the news every 5 years or so. What does this have to do with club moss, you ask? Well check out this experiment. This is so badass...If I was a kid and saw this I would idolize whichever teacher performed this experiment in a classroom. Makes you wonder whether this kind of thing can be done with other things...flour, for example. Don't think I've ever seen an MSDS for flour. But then again, I'd never seen one for Lycopodium Powder either...