Results tagged “mercury” from 60 Second Science

According to the Meteoritical Society, more than 30,000 meteorities have been identified. (Meteorites are the interstellar rocks that make it through our atmosphere and land on Earth.) Most of them come from the rocky debris (like asteroids and comets) floating through space, but a few dozen are believed to have originated on Mars or the moon.

Or Mercury? (What, can anomalous meteorites only come from places the begin with the letter “M”?)

In a new paper submitted to the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science, two Canadian astronomers crunch the numbers and find that we should expect Mercury-borne meteorites to strike the Earth at roughly half the rate of those from Mars. In other words, there might already be a few pieces of Mercury here on Earth.

Continue reading 'Mercurial Meteorites' >

We told you we'd post up pics when they came back from Messenger, and here they are — just click for hi-res:

Sure it looks kind of like the moon, but already a few unique things are coming out from this picture. The topography of the Caloris Basin, one of the largest impact areas in the solar system, is revealed in full. We can also see bands or cliffs called "rupes" that score some of the craters. These are places where tectonic uplift occurred after crater impact, showing that Mercury still may have geological compression going on.

We'll keep you posted on any other Mercurial developments.

I just finished watching Danny Boyle's sci-fi opus Sunshine last night, and it was pretty incredible as a purely visual, visceral experience. Even though the film loses a bit of face with a credibility-stretching horror twist near the end, it was one of my better sci-fi experiences in recent memory. (Heavy emphasis on the fi: The loopy science only gets loopier, but they certainly make it look believable. And who doesn't want to believe we could fire a nuke the size of Manhattan into the core of the sun to reignite it?)

One of the most memorable scenes is a close flyby of Mercury — the supposed iron core content helps amplify a distress signal. In an example of life imitating art, NASA's Messenger satellite — if all goes well — will have flown within 124 miles of Mercury's surface around noon EST today. It's our first visit in 33 years, and it's freaking cool. But, sadly, I'm pretty sure we're not launching a nuke into the sun.

Continue reading 'Messenger satellite flies by Mercury today — sweet pictures TK' >

New research published in the Archives of General Psychiatry-- one of the most exhaustive studies yet-- should put a nail in the coffin of the hypothesis that vaccines cause autism. Cleverly sub-titled Mercury in Retrograde, the study looked at all the diagnoses of autism in the state of California reported to the Department of Developmental Services. It is especially informative because prior analyses of earlier data in that system had suggested some correlation.

Continue reading 'Mercury in retrograde? Autism authors can only hope' >