Nickel

At the same time the 50-year-old boss of the world's number one miner also pocketed 300,000 BHP shares worth more than $10 million thanks to the company's employee share incentive scheme.

Google’s billionaire co-founders and filmmaker James Cameron’s owned asteroid-mining focused Planetary Resources is hiring interns for 2013.

Frontier is advancing the Zandkopsdrift rare earth project in South Africa and in December sold 10% of the venture to Kores for $23.8 million. The South Korean state-owned company now wants to ink a more comprehensive deal.

A record number of skilled New Zealanders involved in trade are leaving their country to take up higher paying jobs in Australia.

A Buddha statue looted by Nazis in Tibet in the 1930s was carved from the Chinga meteorite, which crashed to the Earth 15,000 years ago, revealed Elmar Buchner of the Planetology Institute at Stuttgart University.

Only five months after Google’s billionaire co-founders and filmmaker James Cameron officially launched their asteroid mining focused Planetary Resources company, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is funding a study to evaluate how viable the endeavour really is.

The debated contract, that has Colombian authorities divided over the terms under which BHP Billiton should operate the Cerro Matoso nickel mine, found a momentary solution this week after the government decided to extend the mining deal until 2029.

Australia's Dragon Mining announced the discovery of a promising new area of gold deposits in Kuusamo, Finland, only hours after the country was announced as the top destination for mining and oil investment by a trade magazine.

Diversified miner Xstrata (LON:XTA) announced Wednesday it is suspending operations at its Cosmos nickel mine in Western Australia, as nickel prices have plummeted dramatically.