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U.N. Kills Any Plans to Use Mercury as a Rocket Propellant

Cars That Think

A recent United Nations provision has banned the use of mercury in spacecraft propellant. Although no private company has actually used mercury propellant in a launched spacecraft, the possibility was alarming enough—and the dangers extreme enough—that the ban was enacted just a few years after one U.S.-based Mercury is a neurotoxin.

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5 Big Ideas for High-Temperature Superconductors

Cars That Think

In 1911, Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes plunged a mercury wire into liquid helium and noticed that the wire’s electrical resistance vanished. But the materials could show up sooner in a wide array of practical applications, including wind power, energy storage, and nuclear magnetic-resonance machines.

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