Astrology, Numerlogy says

MN recovers mercury offered on Craigslist

May 19, 2012 in Mercury

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) —
A Minnesota man who discovered 64 pounds of mercury in his late grandfather’s garage tried to sell it on Craigslist but was forestalled by state pollution control officials who feared the highly regulated toxin presented an environmental hazard.

The Floodwood man found the liquid metal stored in four sealed plastic bottles and its original packaging and posted an online ad to sell it for $650, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency said Thursday. A citizen spotted the ad and notified the Western Lake Superior Sanitary District, who alerted the agency. Within hours, agency staff had negotiated a lower price and arranged for sanitary officials to pick up and safely dispose of the mercury. There was no contamination at the scene.

The seller inherited the mercury, along with some unused mining equipment, from his grandfather, who had intended to get into gold mining, the MPCA said in a news release.

The use of mercury is legal in certain industrial processes but is highly regulated. Since the seller didn’t do anything illegal, he won’t face any penalties, the agency said.

MPCA enforcement manager Jeff Connell called the recovery “a phenomenal and fortunate coup.” He pointed out that coal-burning electric utilities spend millions of dollars to keep even a fraction of that amount of mercury from coming out of their smokestacks. And he noted that spills of even a few ounces can set off a major hazardous materials response. The cleanup and response to the release of 12 pounds of mercury in Rosemount several years ago cost nearly $400,000, he said.

Exposure to elemental mercury can damage human health because it’s toxic to the kidneys and the nervous system. In the environment, elemental mercury can be converted into methylmercury, which accumulates in the tissues of fish.

Article source: http://feeds.mpr.org/~r/MPR_science/~3/-Jj_WbZg-DU/

New Evidence Shows that Mercury, the Planet Closest to the Sun, Is Icy

May 19, 2012 in Mercury

Craters on Mercury as mapped by MESSENGER. Radar bright spots, shown in yellow, may mark ice deposits.
Image: Courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

The Best Science Writing Online 2012

Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way…

Read More »

Mercury is a world of extremes. Daytime temperature on the planet closest to the sun can soar as high as 400 degrees Celsius near the equator—hot enough to melt lead. When day turns to night, the planet’s surface temperature plunges to below –150 degrees C.

But some places on Mercury are slightly more stable.Inside polar craters on the diminutive planet are regions that never see the light of day, shaded as they are by the craters’ rims. The temperature there remains cold throughout the Mercury day. Now new data from NASA’s MESSENGER satellite, which were presented in March at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, corroborate a long-held hypothesis that Mercury has squirreled away pockets of water ice in those shadowy craters, despite the sun’s proximity.

Since 2011 MESSENGER has orbited the innermost planet, charting Mercury’s surface in unprecedented detail. MESSENGER’s maps of polar craters match up nicely with earlier imagery of the poles, taken by Earth-based radars, which showed anomalously bright features—patches that reflected radio waves much better than the surrounding terrain, just as ice does.

But the radar hotspots also line smaller craters and those at lower latitudes that would have less ice-friendly temperatures across the crater floor. These ice deposits would likely require a thin insulating blanket, perhaps a layer of fine-grained surface material, or regolith, to keep it from sublimating away.

In fact, MESSENGER’s data seem to confirm that some insulating material blankets whatever ice may line the craters. The temperatures inside the shadowed craters are just right for ice deposits blanketed by regolith darkened by organic compounds, explained David Paige of the University of California, Los Angeles.

The new look at features spotted long ago by Earth-based radars, Paige said, shows “fairly conclusively that they are predominantly composed of thermally stable water ice.”

This article was published in print as “Fire and Water.”

Article source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-evidence-shows-mercury-icy