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%excerpt% Read more from the original source: Most Shocking Business News of 2011

Let's talk about Earth [More]

Dear EarthTalk : I know that large fish contain a lot of mercury, but where does it come from? And what are we doing to prevent this contamination?

Dear EarthTalk : Is it true that gas furnaces cost less to run and burn cleaner than their oil counterparts? If I make the switch, how long should I expect it to take for me to pay back my initial investment? And are there any greener options I should consider?

A pair of NASA spacecraft is getting set to orbit the moon this weekend, a move that will kick off the probes' effort to study Earth's nearest neighbor from crust to core. [More]

Dear EarthTalk : I heard that the less meat one eats, the better it is for the environment. How so? [More]

By Nicola Jones of Nature magazine Two scientists from New Zealand will travel to Antarctica on December 28 in a quest to continue a 100-year-long record of Earth's magnetic field: a record begun by British explorer Robert Scott at the start of his ill-fated expedition to the geographic south pole (see "Turning the world upside down "). Record-keeping is necessary because the magnetic poles move about, thanks to the complex circulation of Earth's fluid outer core.

The moon has been with us for billions of years, almost since the formation of Earth.

Dear EarthTalk : I've heard of the slow food movement, but what is “slow money” all about? [More]

An x-ray image of the region around Sgr A*. Credit: NASA/CXC/MIT/F.K.Baganoff et al.

Photographs never quite capture the sparkling blue tint of glacial ice, so when I visited the Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia on a backpacking trip through South America some years ago, I was happy to get this camera angle: the blue of the Argentine flag gives you a sense of what the blue of the ice looks like in person.

This year was quite an eventful one in spaceflight, with many vessels launching toward the heavens -- and a few crashing back to Earth . [More]

NASA's Kepler spacecraft is starting to put the pieces together in its search for virtual Earth twins in other planetary systems. Kepler, which launched in 2009 , is on the lookout for planets that are about the size of Earth and have temperate surface conditions. One half of that formula was realized on December 5 when mission scientists announced the discovery of a planet in the so-called habitable zone, called Kepler 22 b , a few times larger than Earth

NASA's Kepler spacecraft is starting to put the pieces together in its search for virtual Earth twins in other planetary systems. Kepler, which launched in 2009 , is on the lookout for planets that are about the size of Earth and have temperate surface conditions.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The crushing pressures and intense temperatures in Earth's deep interior squeeze atoms and electrons so closely together that they interact very differently. With depth materials change