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When the temperature dips below freezing, reliable electricity becomes more than a matter of convenience but a matter of life and death. Unfortunately, the reliability of our electric grid is at-risk due to EPA regulations that are shutting down America’s coal plants.Existing EPA regulations already have led to the scheduled shutdown of nearly 20 percent of the U.S. coal fleet. EPA’s newest carbon regulations being finalized this summer will lead to even more shutdowns. With coal responsible for generating nearly 40 percent of America’s electricity, these shutdowns will further strain our nation’s electricity grid and could leave many Americans in...

In their studies, the team analyzed the effects of what is called the ‘Kozai mechanism,’ which is related to the gravitational perturbation that a large body exerts on the orbit of another much smaller and further away object. They looked at how the highly eccentric comet 96P/Machholz1 is influenced by Jupiter (it will come near the orbit of Mercury in 2017, but it travels as much as 6 AU at aphelion) and it may “provide the key to explain the puzzling clustering of orbits around argument of perihelion close to 0° recently found for the population of ETNOs,” the team...

Explanation: Inner planets Venus and Mercury can never wander far from the Sun in Earth's sky. This week you've probably seen them both gathered near the western horizon just after sunset, a close conjunction of bright celestial beacons in the fading twilight. The pair are framed in this early evening skyview captured on January 13 from the ruins of Szarvasko Castle in northwestern Hungary. Above the silhouette of the landscape's prominent volcanic hill Venus is much the brighter, separated from Mercury by little more than the width of two Full Moons. On Friday, planet Earth's early morning risers will also...

Tonight the duo will be at their closest and remain near one another for the next week or so. This is one of Mercury’s best apparitions of the year for northern hemisphere skywatchers and well worth donning your winter uniform of coat, boots, hat and thick gloves for a look. Just find a location with a decent view of the southwestern horizon and start looking about a half hour after sunset. Mercury and Venus will be about 10° or one fist held at arm’s length high above the horizon.

The former top aide to First Lady Chirlane McCray announced on Twitter on Monday that she was hired as managing director at the PR firm. She resigned from her City Hall post after a series of scandals including the revelation her live-in boyfriend was an ex-con who spewed anti-cop comments. Rachel Noerdlinger, the controversial ex-aide to First Lady Chirlane McCray, has landed a new gig at a prominent PR firm Mercury Public Affairs. “I'm elated to start the new year as Managing Director at #Mercury! I'm thrilled to join one of the best firms in the country!” Noerdlinger tweeted Monday,...

Massive volcanic eruption, burning coal and accelerated greenhouse gas choked out lifeAbout 250 million years about 95 per cent of life was wiped out in the sea and 70 per cent on land. Researchers at the University of Calgary believe they have discovered evidence to support massive volcanic eruptions burnt significant volumes of coal, producing ash clouds that had broad impact on global oceans. "This could literally be the smoking gun that explains the latest Permian extinction," says Dr. Steve Grasby, adjunct professor in the University of Calgary's Department of Geoscience and research scientist at Natural Resources Canada. Grasby and...

EPA is trying to remove the tiniest amounts of mercury in the environment, Congress passed a law eliminate the incandescent light bulb and required their replacement by fluorescent lights that contain mercury Is it surprising that the Environmental Protection Agency continues to tell big fat lies about anything it wants to ban, but is reluctant to show the “science” on which the bans are based? There is currently a piece of legislation under consideration by Congress, the Secret Science Reform Act, to force the EPA to disclose its scientific and technical information before proposing or finalizing any regulation. This is...

According to a study published in Nature, oceanic mercury levels have tripled since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Far surpassing earlier estimates, data collected during research cruises from 2006-2011 in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans has revealed a 340% increase in surface-level mercury content. During the cruises, deep seawater samples (depths up to 5km) were compared to surface water samples. The analysis implicates the burning of fossil fuels as the primary culprit of this dramatic rise, with mining activities thought to have also contributed a significant amount.

Explanation: What's that dot on the Sun? If you look closely, it is almost perfectly round. The dot is the result of an unusual type of solar eclipse that occurred in 2006. Usually it is the Earth's Moon that eclipses the Sun. This time, the planet Mercury took a turn. Like the approach to New Moon before a solar eclipse, the phase of Mercury became a continually thinner crescent as the planet progressed toward an alignment with the Sun. Eventually the phase of Mercury dropped to zero and the dark spot of Mercury crossed our parent star. The situation could...

Comet C/2014 E2 Jacques has returned! Before it disappeared in the solar glow this spring, the comet reached magnitude +6, the naked eye limit. Now it’s back at dawn, rising higher each morning as it treks toward darker skies. Just days after its July 2 perihelion, the fuzzball will be in conjunction with the planet Venus tomorrow morning July 13. With Mercury nearby, you may have the chance to see this celestial ‘Rat Pack’ tucked within a 8° circle.

On this day in 1961, Alan B. Shepard Jr. muttered to himself, "Don't f*** up, Shepard...", huddled into the Freedom 7 Mercury capsule, and lifted off to become the first America to reach space. These are the photographs from the historic suborbital flight.

Cilantro was described as an aphrodisiac in the Arabian Nights, but that fact fails to impress those who hate it with a passion. Cilantro was described as an aphrodisiac in "The Arabian Nights," but that fact fails to impress those who hate it with a passion. Julia Child famously told Larry King that it has a "dead taste," and she would pick it out of a dish "and throw it on the floor." The pro-cilantro crowd is just as vocal, if not as descriptive. You can find the debate anywhere you find cilantro and the people who meticulously pick it...

A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld the Environmental Protection Agency's first emission standards for mercury and other hazardous air pollutants from coal- and oil-fired power plants. In its ruling, the court rejected state and industry challenges to rules designed to clean up chromium, arsenic, acid gases, nickel, cadmium as well as mercury and other dangerous toxins. The EPA’s determination in 2000 that regulating emission standards is appropriate and necessary, and the agency’s reaffirmation of that determination in 2012, “are amply supported by EPA’s findings regarding the health effects of mercury exposure,” said the court. Congress did not specify what...

Deep down, the moon may be more like Earth than scientists ever thought. A new moon-rock study suggests the satellite has an iron core... The moon's core could be a clue to its ancient origins, which have long puzzled astronomers. "Our moon is too big to be a moon," Taylor said. "It's huge compared to the moons we see around other planets, so it has always been suspected that there was something strange in its origin." ...Rock samples from NASA's Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 moon missions of the early 1970s have now shed more light on the moon's origins,...

<p>When NASA astronauts were suiting up to go to space in the 1960s, they had to make a big decision before they explored the world above us: How large of a man are you?</p> <p>Getting it wrong could damage the mission.</p>

The Obama administration’s War on Carbon rages, but the good news is the incandescent light bulb still lives. For the third year in a row, the federal ban on the popular incandescent light bulb — the choice of most Americans — was postponed by Republican House intervention that defunded EPA enforcement of the law. “None of the funds made available in this Act may be used . . . to implement or enforce the standards with respect to incandescent reflector lamps,” reads section 322 of the $1.1 trillion budget signed by the president in January. The language was cheered by...

Line up Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars according to their distance from the sun and you'll see their size distribution is close to symmetrical, with the two largest planets between the two smallest. That would be no coincidence -- if the pattern emerged from a debris ring around the sun. Brad Hansen of the University of California, Los Angeles, built a numerical simulation to explore how a ring of rocky material in the early solar system could have evolved into the planets. He found that two larger planets typically form near the inner and outer edges of the ring, corresponding...

Are you ready for some lunar versus planetary occultation action? One of the best events for 2014 occurs early this Wednesday morning on February 26th, when the waning crescent Moon — sometimes referred to as a decrescent Moon — meets up with a brilliant Venus in the dawn sky. This will be a showcase event for the ongoing 2014 dawn apparition of Venus that we wrote about recently. This is one of 16 occultations of a planet by our Moon for 2014, which will hide every naked eye classical planet except Jupiter and only one of two involving Venus this...

Explanation: There is a road that connects the Northern to the Southern Cross but you have to be at the right place and time to see it. The road, as pictured above, is actually the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy; the right place, in this case, is dark Laguna Cejar in Salar de Atacama of Northern Chile; and the right time was in early October, just after sunset. Many sky wonders were captured then, including the bright Moon, inside the Milky Way arch; Venus, just above the Moon; Saturn and Mercury, just below the Moon; the Large and...

Next time you apply make-up, remember the fairness creams could contain mercury and the lipsticks may come packed with chromium, which can cause cancer. A new study by the Centre for Science and Environment's (CSE) Pollution Monitoring Lab (PML) has found mercury in 44 per cent of all the fairness creams it tested, while chromium was found in almost 50 per cent and nickel in 43 per cent of the lipstick samples tested.