Who Discovered The Element Mercury

Quest for life takes new twists

Somewhere in the puzzle of Mercury, there are answers to questions about the origins of all of the rocky, "terrestrial" planets from Mercury to Mars - but especially about Earth and the life that has evolved there.

All around the world - from the deep gold mines of South Africa to the far-seeing telescopes in Chile's Atacama Desert, from the frigid glaciers of Antarctica to the halls of the world's best universities and research institutions - scientists are on a quest unlike anything we've seen before. Tens of thousands of researchers are involved in the effort, which could be the big idea of our era.

This hidden-in-plain-sight campaign is the renewed scientific push to find signs of life, or of past life, beyond the confines of our planet. The umbrella science that organizes the effort is called astrobiology, and the field is making surprising and compelling progress. It may be years before science finds anything that is clearly extraterrestrial life, but scientists are more convinced than ever that it exists, and they have the newly sophisticated (and still quickly evolving) tools and knowledge to find it.

The scientific breakthroughs of the field reflect its breadth: Astrobiology takes in fields ranging from microbiology to chemistry, astronomy and planetary science to cosmology.

From the world of microbiology, for instance, scientists have learned that microbial life is far more tenacious than ever imagined - able to survive deep underground, in glaciers, alongside hydrothermal vents, and even floating in the atmosphere. From astrochemistry we have learned that all of the elements and molecules needed for life as we know it - hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, water and complex carbons - exist throughout the universe.

These nonliving building blocks need planets to land on where they can possibly interact in ways that can lead to biology and life, and now we know that such planets (or exoplanets, as they're called) are common. More than 500 have been positively identified in the past 15 years; 1,200 new candidate planets were discovered by NASA's Kepler mission this year, and astronomers are convinced there are billions, and maybe hundreds of billions, of exoplanets in the Milky Way and beyond. Several groups have claimed to have located "Goldilocks" planets - those orbiting their suns at a distance where water won't always be either boiling or freezing.

Global Environmental Health: Mercury: The Element

Mercury is a naturally occurring element that can be found throughout the environment. It is a very potent pollutant and very toxic.The amount of mercury found in parts of the environment like lakes, stream and the atmosphere have been increased due to human activites such as burning coal and using mercury to manufacture certain products. By eating organisms that live in places where microbes have converted some of the natural and human mercury to a more toxic form called methylmercury, humans and animals get most of their exposure and risk.  Still not fully understood is the bioconcentration of mercury. Elemental mercury is transported around the globe in gas form. In some areas its origination has been shown to come from industrial soucres like power plants. Two major forms of mercury besides elemental mercury are ionic mercury and organic mercury or methylmercury. Methylmercury is bioconcentrated due to the retention throughout the food chain among several organisms. It is the accumulation of mercury in fish that is of most concern because in some regions the amount of mercury found in fish is near or exceeds the limit for safe human consumption. The amount of mercury for safe human consumption is 0.5-1.0ppm.

Mercury

CRC handbook of chemistry and physics

Trace element speciation, analytical methods and problems

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A dictionary of applied physics