When Apollo punished King Midas by giving him donkey ears, only the king and his barber knew. Unable to keep a secret, the barber dug a hole, whispered into it, "King Midas has donkey ears," and filled the hole. But plants sprouted from the hole, and with each passing breeze, shared the king's secret.

Scientists say that a type of rock found at or near the surface in the Mideast nation of Oman and other areas around the world could be harnessed to soak up huge quantities of globe-warming carbon dioxide. Their studies show that the rock, known as peridotite, reacts naturally at surprisingly high rates with CO2 to form solid minerals—and that the process could be speeded a million times or more with simple drilling and injection methods.

The research done at the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences has shown that after geochemical experiments, the porosity of crystalline rocks in the middle crust increases sharply due to water-rock interaction (see ref.).

McGill University researchers have discovered the oldest rocks on Earth – a discovery which sheds more light on our planet's mysterious beginnings. These rocks, known as "faux-amphibolites", may be remnants of a portion of Earth's primordial crust – the first crust that formed at the surface of our planet.

Most rock paintings and rock carvings or petroglyphs were created by ancient and prehistoric societies. Archaeologists have long used them to gain clues to the way of life of such peoples. Certain rock frescos − such as the renowned Lascaux and Chauvet cave paintings or the petroglyphs of Scandinavia and North America − have already yielded substantial information on our ancestors' daily lives.

New evidence, based on mineral dating, suggests that rocks of the Blue Mountains, the oldest geological formation in Oregon, may have been derived from the Klamath and Sierra Nevada mountain chains, University of Oregon researchers report.

For the first time, geologists have extracted intact rock samples from 2 miles beneath the surface of the San Andreas Fault, the infamous rupture that runs 800 miles along the length of California.

If our planet did not have the ability to store oxygen in the deep reaches of its mantle there would probably be no life on its surface. This is the conclusion reached by scientists at the University of Bonn who have subjected the mineral majorite to close laboratory examination.

Every now and then a space rock hits the world's media – sometimes almost literally. Threatening asteroids that zoom past the Earth, fireballs in the sky seen by hundreds of people and mysterious craters which may have been caused by impacting meteorites; all make ESA's activities in this field, including the Don Quijote study, look increasingly timely.

This Uinta Mountains of Utah are distinctive for the ancient (roughly 700-million-year-old) sedimentary rocks that are exposed throughout the range. As such, they are part of a larger system preserved in small areas throughout the southwestern United States that contain vast quantities of sediment eroded from roughly one-billion-year-old rocks.