mercury

Watch the planets dance in a triple conjunction

Triple planetary conjunctions are relatively rare in the night sky, but astronomers are about to be in for a real treat.

The three brightest planets in our solar system as seen from Earth -- Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus -- will be coming together in the sky, "dancing" around each other over the course of several nights, starting Friday, May 24.

If we're lucky, we see a triple conjunction once every two years or so. The most recent was in May 2011; the next won't be until October 2015.

Because the planets in this conjunction are so bright, the dance will be visible to the naked eye, even in densely populated areas. But if you have access to a telescope or binoculars, so much the better. … Read more

Mercury for Mac 3.1 Review

Chemists or other professionals working with crystals may need a program to visualize them on the computer. For those users, Mercury for Mac works well, but offers little for average Mac users.

Mercury for Mac comes as a free version with some functions limited. The program states a full version license may be purchased, but its cost was unavailable. Installation completed quickly despite the file's large size of over 200MB. Upon startup, the program requires the user to accept a license agreement and indicate if a full version license has been purchased. There are no instructions or tutorials available … Read more

Use your cell phone to detect mercury levels in water

It may not make your list of must-have camping gear, but a new sheet that detects mercury levels in water may prove useful to those who live or work downstream from industrial and mining sites (such as gold mines and coal-fired powered plants) and want to drink the local water.

When dipped in water for five minutes, the sheet, manufactured by chemists at the University of Burgos in Spain, signals the presence of mercury by turning red -- a process that can be seen with the naked eye.

Take a picture of that sheet with a digital camera, and you can learn the specific concentration of the mercury, a metal that is liquid at room temperature and has been found to cause long-term neurological issues after accumulating in the brain.… Read more

Mercury's north pole is probably chock full of ice

Disappointed about that hyped-up supposed Mars discovery that ended up evaporating? Turn your eyes toward Mercury.

A NASA news conference yesterday suggested what many scientists have suspected for decades: Mercury's northern pole most likely contains large deposits of water ice and possible organic materials. The new data comes from Messenger -- a NASA spacecraft currently orbiting Mercury -- which observed the icy deposits by measuring hydrogen concentrations on the planet. The findings were described in three separate papers published yesterday in the science journal Nature. … Read more

NASA: Cookie Monster is big on other planets

While Big Bird might be feeling a bit vulnerable to winding up on a list of endangered fictional species of late, "Sesame Street" colleague Cookie Monster appears to be expanding its range by at least 48 million miles, showing up recently on Mercury.… Read more

RadioShack kicks off latest contract-free mobile plans

Mobile phone customers can choose from even more contract-free plans from RadioShack as of today.

Four new plans are available altogether through Cricket Wireless -- two for feature phones and two for smartphones.

The $25-per-month feature phone plan offers 300 voice minutes, while the $35 plan raises that to 1,000 minutes. Both plans up the ante with unlimited data access, unlimited texting, call waiting, and three-way calling.

The $50-per-month smartphone plan adds unlimited voice minutes and promises that the first gigabyte of data will run at full 3G speeds. The $60 plan offers the first 2.5GB of data … Read more

OWC announces SSD uprades for MacBook Air

It's generally easy to upgrade your computer to a standard solid-state drive (SSD) as long as your computer supports the standard 2.5-inch hard-drive design. The MacBook Air, however, doesn't, so most people are stuck with the machine's relatively limited stock storage.

OWC announced today the OWC Mercury Aura Pro SSD, which is designed specifically for 2012 MacBook Airs. Instead of the standard design, the new SSD comes in the same design as those used inside the supported Air; it's shaped more like a stick of system memory than a hard drive.

OWC says the Mercury … Read more

Kennedy Space Center hits 50-year milestone

If you were an American astronaut heading into space anytime in the last 50 years or so, chances are your trip started in Florida.

More specifically, that flight -- into Earth's orbit or to the moon, in a shuttle or in a capsule -- would have started at the Kennedy Space Center on the Atlantic coastline. That now sprawling facility has been at the heart of NASA's operations since the fledgling space agency took over what had been a missile firing laboratory as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s.

The facility didn't carry John Kennedy's … Read more

Freddie Mercury returns to the stage (sort of)

He's been gone since 1991, but legendary Queen frontman Freddie Mercury is preparing for a long overdue encore performance tonight in London.

Well, sort of.

Queen guitarist Brian May told the BBC that an image of Mercury will appear onstage during a special 10th-anniversary performance of the musical "We Will Rock You" at London's Dominion Theatre. May said the image will not be a hologram, referring to it instead as an "optical illusion," but hinted at similarities to the hyped Tupac hologram seen at the Coachella festival last month. … Read more

Huawei Mercury tunes into Cricket's Muve Music service

If you're a Cricket customer who skipped over the Huawei Mercury smartphone because it lacked Muve Music, you'll be happy to know you can hop back to it.

Cricket will soon supply an over-the-air download to upgrade the phone and let in the unlimited music downloads and ringtones on top of the usual unlimited calling, data, and text and multimedia messaging.

The Muve Music plan costs $65 per month, making it the priciest of Cricket's unlimited plans, but also its most comprehensive.