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As the leader of ORNL’s Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health Group, environmental scientist Teresa Mathews works to understand the impacts of energy generation on water and solve challenging problems, including mercury pollution. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Moving to landlocked Tennessee isn’t an obvious choice for most scientists with new doctorate degrees in coastal oceanography.

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Biologists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center have confirmed that microorganisms called methanogens can transform mercury into the neurotoxin methylmercury with varying efficiency across species.