Revenge of the Copper

Yesterday, I helped teach a Chemistry lab wherein we studied copper. The point of the lab was to measure your copper, mix it with a bunch of compounds, unmix it with a bunch of compounds, and then measure it again to see how much of it you lost. Strangely enough I had about a dozen pairs of students who came out with more copper than they started with. How can this be? It appears that we have nearly a dozen individual experiments that disprove the Law of the Conservation of Mass! How can people call it a law!? Wait! Maybe there are some extenuating factors... aha! The copper over time has gotten tired of being mixed and unmixed day in and day out and has evolved into a living organisms that reproduces through mitosis, like bacteria. Probably the reason they only multiply during experiments is because they need zinc to reproduce and they can't synthesize it themselves, being copper. A-ha! It all makes sense now. Watch out students, the copper is coming for you.