"mercury"

Mercury is a metallic element that that is present in elevated levels in some lakes in southwest Alaska. It can build up in fish that live in these lakes year-round. Then as birds, people and other animals dine on fish from those lakes, mercury can make its way up the food chain.

Last August, 3 million gallons of orange wastewater flooded into Colorado’s Animas River, ending up in Lake Powell. But Congress has failed to come up with a way to stop this from happening again.

Stargazers, ready your (solar-filtered) telescopes: Mercury will pass directly across the sun on Monday for more than seven hours. And you can watch when it does — if you do it just right.

Messenger was launched from Earth back in 2004. After 4,104 orbits of Mercury and billions of miles of space travel, the orbiter will end its mission with a quiet bang Thursday.

The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium is distributing the paper to subsistence hunters to collect blood specimens from subsistence mammals.

Warning that no single authority can order utilities to beef up security at their facilities, the former head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission continues to raise the alarm about a sniper attack last April on an electric power station in San Jose, Calif..

The second very lucky winner of last month’s massive Mega Millions jackpot is a California delivery driver who didn’t get around to checking his lottery tickets for nearly two weeks.

If you know somebody in Atlanta or San Jose, Calif., this might be a good time to get in touch.

A report from the ocean conservation group Oceana confirms that there’s a pretty decent chance that fish on the plate or on ice in the seafood case is not what it’s labeled to be.