I can't think of anything pithy or even mildly amusing with which to kick off this week's letter, so instead of flailing around, let's get Monday started with these links:

Mercury: The planet that shouldn't exist — While we've learned a lot about the planets in our solar system over the last 60 years or so, the smallest of them is the one that still baffles planetary scientists.

From the article:

On its surface Mercury might be a pockmarked grey world devoid of obvious interest, but deep down this enigmatic world might just be one of the most fascinating places in the Solar System.

Why Modern Chinese is Just ‘English with Hanzi’ — This is a short but fascinating look at how languages (even ones as seemingly different as Chinese and English) interact with and influence each other.

From the article:

Over the last hundred years, Chinese has moved from the fluid landscape painting to the rigid blueprint. The Indo-European grammar have been imported and forced into the fluid body of Hanzi.

A brief history of instant coffee — Not being a coffee achiever, I've never seen the attraction of that dark liquid. That said, what it took to make the ubiquitous crystalline form of coffee that people know and love (or hate) makes for an interesting story about science.

From the article:

Making this possible required technical breakthroughs. One issue was aroma loss. While freeze drying helped preserve more volatile compounds during drying, delicate aromatics could still be lost during earlier stages like roasting, grinding, and extraction. Retaining more of these compounds required improved aroma recovery methods that capture volatiles early in the process, store them separately, and add them back after drying.

A Brief History of Lab Notebooks — Imagine doing some pioneering work but not being able to duplicate it because you don't have even rudimentary documentation. That's what makes the titular notebook so important, and it's interesting to see how they've developed over the centuries.

From the article:

In the twentieth century, scientific institutions continued scaling up, as did the pressure for standardization and reproducibility in science communications, including lab notekeeping. With the onset of the digital era, scientific data started moving from physical to digital formats that required large memory storage. Electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) emerged to address these changes, yet their history, in fact, goes back much farther than one might think.