Driven by a key strategic imperative to expand its leadership and support for customers in the mining industry, Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT) today announced it has completed its acquisition of Bucyrus International, Inc. Caterpillar funded the acquisition, valued at approximately $8.8 billion (including net debt), using cash from its balance sheet and debt. The company did not issue equity to help fund the transaction.

Reuters reports that nickel went untraded today, but still managed to fall as copper, aluminum and zinc also fell.

Five Turkish companies have been named among the world's biggest steel producers. ANKARA- Turkish companies Erdemir Group, Habas, Icdas, Diler Group and Colakoglu Metalurji were included in the world's leading steel & metal markets publication Metal

Peabody Energy has teamed up with ArcelorMittal to offer $5 billion for Australia's Macarthur Coal , the world's biggest producer of pulverised coal, as demand for steel-making raw materials intensifies. The cash offer of A$15.50 a share represents a 40-percent premium to Monday's close and comes just a day after Australia unveiled a plan to tax carbon emissions from the nation's worst polluters, or about 500 companies, including coal miners.

Australia's powerful coal mining industry warned it was being unfairly singled out under the country's new carbon emissions trading scheme, predicting it will lead to job losses and fewer collieries at a time when buyers are paying top dollar for coal.

Copper fell on Monday as concerns over Italy's sovereign debt curtailed appetite for risky assets, but a series of strikes in producer countries highlighted supply constraints and lent support to prices. Three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange traded at $9, 581 a tonne in official rings , down from the $9,661 close on Friday.

The Greens say South Australia will benefit from the $10 billion allocated to renewable energy projects as part of the federal government's carbon pricing scheme. But the party has conceded that as the state transitions to a clean energy future, towns that are largely supported by coal mining have a limited future. Image is from Billy Hathorn.

Environmentalists worry oilsands development could threaten whooping cranes, as new data shows the iconic endangered species continues to migrate through the increasingly industrialized area. G.P.S information collected last fall by U-S and Canadian agencies on 12 whoopers show that nine of them stopped in and around the oilsands region. Image from Flickr user szatmar666

Diamonds have the potential to act as building blocks for quantum computing. In an article published in Nature Physics last month, a group of researchers found that the nitrogen vacancy centre in a diamond can be used for quantum memory. The paper was published by the Center for Spintronics and Quantum Computation, University of California, Santa Barbara, California; and the Department of Physics, University of Konstanz. Researchers named were G. D. Fuchs, P. V. Klimov, and D. D. Awschalom.