Mercury Is Shrinking Way Faster Than We Thought, Scientists Discover
Here are the studies this week that got dumped, went high, shrank in size, and got the blues.First, you’ve heard of getting a feather in your cap, but what about a feather in some crap? That’s the upshot of a new study about rare bird remains found in dino doodoo. Birds of a feather are pooped out togetherO'Connor, Jingmai et al.
- ▪Here are the studies this week that got dumped, went high, shrank in size, and got the blues.First, you’ve heard of getting a feather in your cap, but what about a feather in some crap?
- ▪That’s the upshot of a new study about rare bird remains found in dino doodoo.
- ▪Birds of a feather are pooped out togetherO'Connor, Jingmai et al.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 18 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: lean left. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ Mercury Is Shrinking, and Faster Than We Thought — NYT — Science
404 Media files mainly under tech. We currently carry 90 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | 404 Media |
| Canonical URL | https://www.404media.co/mercury-is-shrinking-way-faster-than-we-thought-scientists-discover/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 12 Sep 2026 10:00:10 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-12T10:02:51.019Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-12T10:02:51.019Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | rob98n5ptcx0 · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that got dumped, went high, shrank in size, and got the blues.First, you’ve heard of getting a feather in your cap, but what about a feather in some crap? That’s the upshot of a new study about rare bird remains found in dino doodoo. Then: a walk on titanosaur eggshells, the contractions of Mercury, and a luxe fishpond painting.As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files. Birds of a feather are pooped out togetherO'Connor, Jingmai et al. “Bird feathers from a Late Cretaceous coprolite.” Current Biology.Some 66 million years ago, a bird ate a fish, and then a dinosaur—perhaps a T. rex—ate that bird.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at 404 Media.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from 404 Media
