NASA's Messenger spacecraft has been exploring Mercury and just sent back some of the clearest images yet of the planet's scorched surface. On the other end of the solar system, two of Uranus' moons, Titania and Miranda, are featured in Space.com's ongoing series about what it would be like to live on different worlds.
A rather uninhabitable spot on our own planet is the subject of a photo essay by Johnny Haglund. He visited an underground spot in Jharia, India where a never-ending fire rages just beneath the earth. Back in the US, there is concern that fracking could be reawakening 300-million-year-old fault lines in Oklahoma that could trigger devastating earthquakes. And 130,000 years ago, it appears that Neanderthals may have made jewelry from the talons of white-tailed eagles.