Mercury

LAKE FOREST, Ill. -- Mercury Finance Co., facing a widening financial crisis, suspended its quarterly dividend yesterday as Missouri regulators moved to protect the assets of Mercury's insurance unit.The company's shares fell 37.5 cents to $2.25 on heavy trading of 8.8 million shares. After trading in a narrow range most of the day, they fell in the final minutes of trading on word of Jayhawk Acceptance Corp.'s intent to seek bankruptcy protection. Both Mercury and Jayhawk finance car loans for borrowers with poor credit.

After an absence of more than 25 years, a spacecraft from Earth will be going back to the sizzling planet Mercury before the end of the decade. NASA gave the green light yesterday to the Messenger project, a $256 million effort to put a Maryland-built spacecraft in orbit for a year around the planet closest to the sun. Built in Maryland The craft will be designed, built and operated by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel....

Question: : The other day, I had a fever and was taking my temperature. When I was shaking my thermometer, the bottom broke off, and it spilled down the sink drain. I was too sick to do anything about it that day. Today, I am feeling better, and when I searched the Web for ideas about disposal, I got freaked out. What should I do about the mercury that went down the drain? Answer: : This is a serious situation, because liquid mercury from a thermometer can release mercury vapors that are toxic.

Scientists poring over their first close-up data from Mercury in almost 33 years say they're delighted by some new discoveries and astonished by the remarkably sharp view of the planet captured by the Maryland-built Messenger spacecraft during its flyby Monday. "We're just jumping up and down as each new image gets examined and new data comes down," said Messenger's principal investigator, Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution in Washington. "One experimenter after another has been coming into the bullpen and showing us brand-new stuff," he said.

A hazardous-materials crew finished cleaning up a mercury spill yesterday at the foot of Piney Run Dam near Sykesville, and Carroll officials said they are satisfied there is no danger.Clean Harbors, the Massachusetts company hired to clean up the site, has sealed soil contaminated with mercury in 13 drums and will take the drums to a hazardous-waste disposal site, said James E. Slater, of Carroll's Office of the Environment.Test results received this week showed that fish in the stream were not contaminated by mercury, he said.

A memo from the drug giant Merck & Co. shows that nearly a decade before the first public disclosure, senior company executives were concerned that infants were getting an elevated dose of mercury in vaccinations containing a widely used sterilizing agent. The March 1991 memo, obtained by the Times, said that 6-month-old children who received their shots on schedule would get a mercury dose up to 87 times higher than health guidelines for the maximum daily consumption of mercury from fish.

The Maryland Department of the Environment had not inspected South Carroll High School by late yesterday to determine whether it was safe for students and faculty after mercury from a broken barometer was found in a science room last week. MDE officials did not return phone calls requesting an explanation of why the inspection had not been conducted. Environmental contractor AEG Environmental finished the cleanup work yesterday in a science teachers' office, a custodial storage closet, a hallway and a stairway leading to the outside.

NASA launched the Messenger spacecraft to Mercury today, the first spacecraft in 30 years to head to the sun's closest planet. Messenger rocketed away in the pre-dawn moonlight from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on what will be a 5 billion-mile, 6 1/2 -year journey to Mercury. The trip should have started a day earlier, but clouds from Tropical Storm Alex postponed liftoff. Messenger's team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory was told to stand down yesterday 7 minutes before their spacecraft had been scheduled to rocket into space.

Scientists poring over the first closeup pictures of Mercury in almost 33 years say they're rediscovering a "dynamic" planet brimming with features they've seen nowhere else in the solar system. The new images were captured Jan. 14 by NASA's Maryland-built Messenger spacecraft, which is being managed by scientists and engineers at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory near Laurel. One of the most puzzling images is that of a 25-mile-wide crater in the middle of Mercury's broad Caloris impact basin.

WASHINGTON - The federal government warned yesterday that pregnant women and young children should limit their intake of tuna and other types of seafood because the mercury content can harm developing nervous systems. But the advisory by the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency also said tuna offers health benefits that should not be ignored. That led to a political food fight, with consumer and environmental groups saying the advisory didn't go far enough, and a tuna industry official accusing critics of trying to scare people away from a food that is low in fat at a time when America faces an obesity epidemic.