Topic
Mercury (element)
About: Mercury (element) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 38957 publications have been published within this topic receiving 707704 citations. The topic is also known as: Hg & quicksilver.
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TL;DR: The ability of organic matter to enhance the dissolution and inhibit the precipitation of mercuric sulfide, a highly insoluble solid, suggests that DOM competes with sulfide for mercury binding, confirmed by very high conditional stability constants for mercury-organic sulfur (RSHg+) complexes (10(25)-10(32)) recently reported in literature.
1,088 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors studied uncertainty in the global biogeochemical cycle of mercury, including oxidation processes in the atmosphere, land atmosphere and ocean-atmosphere cycling.
Abstract: Mercury pollution poses global human health and environmental risks. Although mercury is naturally present in the environment, human activities, such as coal burning, have increased the amount of mercury cycling among the land, atmosphere, and ocean by a factor of three to five. Emitted to the atmosphere in its elemental form, mercury travels worldwide before oxidizing to a form that deposits to ecosystems. In aquatic systems, mercury can convert into methylmercury, a potent neurotoxin. People and wildlife are exposed to methylmercury as it bioaccumulates up the food chain. Mercury continues to circulate in the atmosphere, oceans, and terrestrial system for centuries to millennia before it returns to deep-ocean sediments. Areas of uncertainty in the global biogeochemical cycle of mercury include oxidation processes in the atmosphere, land-atmosphere and ocean-atmosphere cycling, and methylation processes in the ocean. National and international policies have addressed direct mercury emissions, but further...
1,034 citations
TL;DR: The three modern "faces" of mercury are the authors' perceptions of risk from the exposure of billions of people to methyl mercury in fish, mercury vapor from amalgam tooth fillings, and ethyl mercury in the form of thimerosal added as an antiseptic to widely used vaccines.
Abstract: The three modern "faces" of mercury are our perceptions of risk from the exposure of billions of people to methyl mercury in fish, mercury vapor from amalgam tooth fillings, and ethyl mercury in the form of thimerosal added as an antiseptic to widely used vaccines. In this article I review human exposure to and the toxicology of each of these three species of mercury. Mechanisms of action are discussed where possible. Key gaps in our current knowledge are identified from the points of view both of risk assessment and of mechanisms of action.
975 citations
TL;DR: Decreased performance in areas of motor function and memory has been reported among children exposed to presumably safe mercury levels and disruption of attention, fine motorfunction and verbal memory was also found in adults on exposure to low mercury levels.
963 citations
908 citations