Britain’s fledgling shale gas industry will get a major boost today as George Osborne cuts taxes on fracking profits to less than half the amount paid by conventional oil and gas producers.

Would you help yourself to a holdall of cash abandoned in a phone box? Or intervene in a restaurant if a customer was subject to racist abuse from a waiter? You’d take the cash, buy the restaurant and sack the waiter – of course, you would. Not everyone is like you, though, oh heroic reader.

A moderate earthquake has struck southern Mexico, shaking buildings in the capital and sending frightened people out into the streets.

There are seven big buds on my peony "Sarah Bernhardt". I've just counted them. I've been waiting several whole summers for this. And you do wait a long time for peonies. You can occasionally find yourself feeling like the End Times will approach and the Sun and the Moon and the stars will all go dim before the peonies get themselves going. Here come the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse! Oh well, that's very inconvenient timing, because my "Bowl of Beauty" just decided to open.

An earthquake on the North Wales shoreline has been felt over an area of 140km.

Chile and Argentina have  evacuated a region near the Copahue volcano in the Andes on the border between the two countries, after fears intensified that it would erupt.

Force of 7.8 magnitude quake could be felt from Kabul to Delhi and Dubai

Witness extraordinary geological formations while canyoneering in Utah

A youngster wowed his teachers when it emerged the piece of shale he brought with him to a show-and-tell was in fact a 300 million-year-old fossil.

Nursing and Geology are proving particularly lucrative graduate career paths, according to the Complete University Guide

Imagine a limestone gorge. Look back in time and imagine it covered over. And then think what happens at some time between the two. Imagine standing above ground at that stage and discovering the first hole in what was then a cavern 'roof' when the ground opened up. And you're thinking of a sinkhole.

The row over a flagship Government employment programme took another twist today when geologists hit back at comments made by a Cabinet minister.

Concerns that the Government is secretly operating a positive-discrimination scheme, whereby the possessor of a double-figure IQ is randomly selected for the Cabinet, were assuaged yesterday.

Orbiting probe around Jupiter could be launched in 2021 or 2022 and could reach the giant planet within six years