The amount of gaseous mercury in the atmosphere has dropped sharply from its peak in the 1980s and has remained relatively constant since the mid 1990s. This welcome decline may result from control measures undertaken in western Europe and North America, but scientists who have just concluded a study of atmospheric mercury say they cannot reconcile the amounts actually found with current understanding of natural and manmade sources of the element.
One of the world’s most successful fusion devices of the eighties, the ASDEX experiment of Max-Planck-Institut f?r Plasmaphysik at Garching, near Munich, went into operation again on 2 December 2002 at Southwestern Institute of Physics in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China. Five years after shutdown in 1990 ASDEX was given to the People’s Republic of China. The ASDEX (Axially Symmetric Divertor Experiment) large-scale device was shut down in 1990 after ten years of successful experimentation, when its successor, ASDEX Upgrade, went into operation. The internationally acclaimed results achieved with ASDEX ? including the discovery of a plasma state with improved thermal insulation ? made it one of the most successful fusion devices of the eighties.