The Stardust spacecraft collected thousands of particles from comet 81P/Wild 2 and returned them to Earth for laboratory study. The preliminary examination of these samples shows that the nonvolatile portion of the comet is an unequilibrated assortment of materials that have both presolar and solar system origin. The comet contains an abundance of silicate grains that are much larger than predictions of interstellar grain models, and many of these are high-temperature minerals that appear to have formed in the inner regions of the solar nebula. Their presence in a comet proves that the formation of the solar system included mixing on the grandest scales.

The bulk of the comet 81P/Wild 2 (hereafter Wild 2) samples returned to Earth by the Stardust spacecraft appear to be weakly constructed mixtures of nanometer-scale grains, with occasional much larger (over 1 micrometer) ferromagnesian silicates, Fe-Ni sulfides, Fe-Ni metal, and accessory phases. The very wide range of olivine and low-Ca pyroxene compositions in comet Wild 2 requires a wide range of formation conditions, probably reflecting very different formation locations in the protoplanetary disk. The restricted compositional ranges of Fe-Ni sulfides, the wide range for silicates, and the absence of hydrous phases indicate that comet Wild 2 experienced little or no aqueous alteration. Less abundant Wild 2 materials include a refractory particle, whose presence appears to require radial transport in the early protoplanetary disk.

Interstellar dust (ISD) from the local interstellar medium (LISM) streams into the solar system from approximately the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus. Prior to the return of the NASA Stardust spacecraft (1) no recognizable samples of this interstellar dust were available for laboratory study. Thus, our understanding of the properties of contemporary ISD has been derived primarily from astronomical observations of the ISM, including optical properties of the ISD and remote spectroscopy of the gas composition (2-4), and from in situ measurements by the dust analyzers on the Cassini, Ulysses and Galileo spacecraft (5-7). The canonical picture of ISD is that it is dominated by ~0.2 µm diameter (8) amorphous silicate grains, with or without carbonaceous mantles. However, the inferred properties of the particles, including size distribution, density and composition are heavily model dependent.

NASA's Stardust spacecraft collected dust particles from Comet 81P/Wild 2, at an encounter speed of ~6.1 km/s, into low-density, silica aerogel capture cells and in impact craters in the Al-

Humans are contaminated by mercury in different forms from different sources. In practice, contamination by methylmercury from fish consumption is assessed by measuring hair mercury concentration, whereas exposure to elemental and inorganic mercury from other sources is tested by analysis of blood or urine. Here, we show that diverse sources of hair mercury at concentrations as low as 0.5 ppm can be individually identified by specific coordination to C, N, and S ligands with high energy-resolution X-ray absorption spectroscopy. Methylmercury from seafood, ethylmercury used as a bactericide, inorganic mercury from dental amalgams, and exogenously derived atmospheric mercury bind in distinctive intermolecular configurations to hair proteins, as supported by molecular modeling. A mercury spike located by X-ray nanofluorescence on one hair strand could even be dated to removal of a single dental amalgam. Chemical forms of other known or putative toxic metals in human tissues could be identified by this approach with potential broader applications to forensic, energy, and materials science.

Parabolic refractive x-ray lenses with short focal distance can generate intensive hard x-ray microbeams with lateral extensions in the 100 nm range even at a short distance from a synchrotron radiation source. We have fabricated planar parabolic lenses made of silicon that have a focal distance in the range of a few millimeters at hard x-ray energies. In a crossed geometry, two lenses were used to generate a microbeam with a lateral size of 380 nm by 210 nm at 25 keV in a distance of 42 m from the synchrotron radiation source. Using diamond as the lens material, microbeams with a lateral size down to 20 nm and below are conceivable in the energy range from 10 to 100 keV.

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Conventional x-ray transmission tomography provides the spatial distribution of the absorption coefficient inside a sample. Other tomographic techniques, based on the detection of photons coming from fluorescent emission, Compton and Rayleigh scattering, are used for obtaining information on the internal elemental composition of the sample. However, the reconstruction problem for these techniques is generally much more difficult than that of transmission tomography, mainly due to self-absorption effects in the sample. In this article an approach to the reconstruction problem is presented, which integrates the information from the three types of signals. This method provides the quantitative spatial distribution of all elements that emit detectable fluorescent lines (Z⩾15 in usual experimental conditions), even when the absorption effects are strong, and the spatial distribution of the global density of the lighter elements. The use of this technique is demonstrated on the reconstruction of a grain of the martian meteorite NWA817, mainly composed of low Z elements not measured in fluorescence and for which this method provides a unique insight. The measurement was done at the ID22 beamline of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility.