Thirty-three years after NASA got the first clear pictures of the surface of the planet Mercury, the Messenger spacecraft has transmitted surprising information and images of a mysterious formation that no one can yet explain.

From 125 miles up, Messenger sent home pictures of an enormous formation that NASA scientists have dubbed “The Spider.” It’s a 26- mile-wide crater with more than 50 steep-sided, flat-bottomed valleys radiating out from it.

What created it and the relationship between the crater and the troughs is unknown. Did the crater come first and the troughs afterward? Is it the result of volcanic activity or the movement of dust? Scientists have not been able to even hazard a guess.

“It’s not entirely clear what created them,” says Louise Prockter, an instrument scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory who worked on the Mercury imaging system. “It was a real mystery and a very unexpected find.”

Says Sean Solomon, Messenger’s principal investigator and director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C.: “The spider feature is unlike anything we’ve ever seen anywhere in the solar system.”

NASA’s Messenger spacecraft traveled 2.2 billion miles, taking 3 1/2 years, to get to Mercury. It flew by the solar system’s innermost planet on Jan. 14.

Messenger’s instruments collected more than 1,200 images as it whizzed by. It’s the first time scientists have gotten a clear look at the surface since Mariner 10 flew over the planet on March 16, 1975.

Another conundrum is that Mercury appears to be the only other inner planet besides Earth to have a strong magnetic field — a north and south pole, Solomon says.

Messenger confirmed readings taken by the Mariner 10. But astronomers are puzzled. The Earth’s magnetic field is created by spinning molten metal at its core. Mercury is the solar system’s smallest…

Fallout spread Thursday from a cut in two undersea Internet cables off Egypt’s coast, with India waking up to half of its bandwidth disrupted and widespread outages still hampering a wide swathe of the Mideast.

Officials said it could take a week or more to fix the cables, in part because of bad weather. Officials in several countries were scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables through Asia.

In all, users in India, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain were affected. Israel was unaffected by the outages because its Internet traffic is connected to Europe through a different undersea cable, and Lebanon and Iraq were also operating normally.

The biggest impact to the rest of the world could come from the outages across India — where many U.S. companies outsource back-office operations including customer service call centers.

The outage also raised questions about the system’s vulnerability. A Gulf analyst called it a “wake-up call” while an analyst in London cautioned that no one, including the West, was immune to such disruptions.

They could have a “massive impact on businesses,” said Alex Burmaster, from Nielsen Online in London, and ordinary people “probably couldn’t imagine” a life without the Internet.

Large-scale disruptions are rare but not unknown. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in December 2006. That repair operation also was hampered by bad weather.

So far, most governments in the region appeared to be operating normally, apparently because they had switched to backup satellite systems. However, the outages had caused slowdown in traffic on Dubai’s stock exchange Wednesday.

In India, major outsourcing firms, such as Infosys and Wipro, and U.S. companies with significant back-office and research and development operations in India, such as IBM and Intel, said…

The research arm of Missouri-based brokerage and investment banking firm Stifel Financial Corp. has reported that “the staff of DG Competition, the European Commission agency responsible for merger reviews, has prepared its draft ‘Statement of Objection’ (SO) in the planned Google (GOOG) takeover of DoubleClick.”

Privacy advocates already are pouncing on this as a potential roadblock in the European Commission’s approval of the deal.

Let’s make one thing clear: This is a draft. The analyst firm has not reported that an SO has been sent.

I just spoke with Rebecca Arbogast, a principal analyst with Stifel who focuses on legal and regulatory issues. She was not able to tell me who she learned about the draft from, nor even what type of entities the people she’s gathered this information from represent. In other words, even if this draft does indicate something, ClickZ News has no first-hand confirmation that it exists.

Arbogast told me, “If they were sure they were going to clear [the Google/DoubleClick deal], they wouldn’t have done it [drafted the SO].”

She added it is common practice among government lawyers, both in the EU and the US to draft such statements in order to clarify thoughts about a particular case, whether it actually is submitted or not. Thus, there’s no telling whether this alleged draft will ever see the light of day, at least from what I’ve gathered from her.

In the end, Stifel predicted the European Commission won’t block the merger.

Just last week, observers of the acquisition jumped on a Reuters report that suggested the deal would “likely go ahead.” It based this conclusion on a source’s statement that the Commission had not sent Google an SO. The source said, “If they had serious doubts, we’re at the point where … if you don’t send (such a statement), you don’t have time to complete the case.”

This information was attributed to “a lawyer acting for a client concerned about the deal.”

Well, I’m concerned about the deal between the Mets and Johan Santana going through, but I don’t expect anyone will be citing me or my lawyer as reliable anonymous sources on the matter anytime soon.

I’ve contacted the Commission’s Directorate General for Competition in the hopes of confirming this information, or at least vetting it. As far as we understand, the time is close to a reasonable deadline for submitting an SO to the defense, but let’s not jump to conclusions based on pure speculation.

Expect to see several stories today and tomorrow that do just that, though.

Can you feel the nervousness in the business community? Even search — the golden child of marketing — has been getting pushed around by the market. In today’s Link Love column, “Recession-Proof Your Business by Building Links,” Sage Lewis warns that search marketers need to wake up and stare reality in the face.

Educating employees in SEO and PPC marketing can seem impossible when they have no search background. In today’s SEM.EDU column, “How To Educate Search Staff from Scratch,” Ron Jones offers advice for those struggling to organize a program to teach employees the fundamentals of search.