Another Lab! It's.........IONIC COMPOUNDS!

For the conductivity lab we used:
25 cm Magnesium Ribbon
A tiny crucible
A ring stand
Clay Triangle
Bunsen Burner
Conductivity Tester
Distilled water
Beaker
Balance

The bunsen burner was set up underneath the clay triangle and ring stand.  We weighed the magnesium and crucible separately on the balance and then crumpled the magnesium into a loose ball, put it into the crucible, and weighed them together.  We placed the crucible just over the blue part of the flame on the bunsen burner until the magnesium became so hot it ignited like those flashing fireworks.  Once it was cool enough we measured the crucible with the burned magnesium again.  Once we weighed it and found that the magnesium and crucible had gone down slightly in weight we dumped the burnt magnesium into a beaker and added distilled water.  When we checked the conductivity with our conductivity tester the light lit up at about a 5 in accordance with our last conductivity lab scale, putting it with antacid and light corn syrup conductivity wise.
Nikki made this awesome graph to show what happened.

Apparently the magnesium was supposed to gain mass.  We saw that it lost it, according to its weight.  Alas, we were impatient and our data was tampered with because we didn't allow the crucible enough time to cool down before we weighed it again.  Better luck next time.
The fact that the magnesium product weighs more is the main concern here.  When heat is added to the magnesium it causes a chemical reaction that apparently allows the magnesium to gain more mass.  The law of conservation of mass states that this can't be true.  So what happened?  The only possible explanation is that the magnesium, when heated, was able to combine with the oxygen in the air around it.  That's right, we weren't just heating up the magnesium, but also the air inside the crucible.  Those joined together and rather oxidized the magnesium.  That makes sense in my head but I might be mistaken.