Iron 'snow' helps maintain Mercury's magnetic field, scientists say

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Mercury surface taken by Mariner 10. Credit: NASA
Mercury surface taken by Mariner 10. Credit: NASA

New scientific evidence suggests that deep inside the planet Mercury, iron “snow” forms and falls toward the center of the planet, much like snowflakes form in Earth’s atmosphere and fall to the ground.


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All News summaries for May 07, 2008

First measurement of entangled states in nitrogen

4 hours ago | User rating: not rated yet
When atoms form molecules, they share their outer electrons and this creates a negatively charged cloud. Here, electrons buzz around between the two positively charged nuclei, making it impossible to tell ...

Research puts new wrinkle in study of materials folding under pressure

4 hours ago | User rating: not rated yet
Scientists at the University of Chicago and the University of Santiago in Chile have explained, for the first time, the physics that governs how thin materials at scales millions of times different in thickness ...

MIT Creates New Material For Fuel Cells, Increases Power Output By 50 Percent

4 hours ago | User rating: not rated yet
MIT engineers have improved the power output of one type of fuel cell by more than 50 percent through technology that could help these environmentally friendly energy storage devices find a much broader market, particularly ...

New efficiency record for solar cells

May 14, 2008 | User rating: not rated yet
Physicist Bram Hoex and colleagues at Eindhoven University of Technology, together with the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, have improved the efficiency of an important type of solar cell from 21.9 to 23.2 percent (a relative ...

Physicists Demonstrate How Information Can Escape From Black Holes

May 14, 2008 | User rating: not rated yet
Physicists at Penn State have provided a mechanism by which information can be recovered from black holes, those regions of space where gravity is so strong that, according to Einstein's theory of general ...
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