Stone-Ideas.com 
The Pink Stone Challenge is a global charity campaign that raises money every October to support the fight against breast cancer. To participate, anyone can submit a photo showing their face next to a natural stone with a touch of pink. At the end, winners will be selected in various categories (photo, video, stone), and their prize money will be donated to breast cancer organizations. Submissions are accepted until October 31, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. EST.
Visitor Registration for Xiamen Stone Fair 2027 is open.
The Brazilian stone sector accelerates its market diversification with new initiatives in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East (1, 2).
Geoarchaeologist Per Storemyr has dicovered tafoni in Tertiary shale at 2700 m in the Swiss Alps and in Portugal (1, 2).
Coast protection: While storm waves knocked concrete slabs as heavy as 55 tons out of place at a 150-year-old English breakwater, granite boulders of up to 33 tons are going in underwater one at a time, because a sloped rock pile takes the energy out of a wave before it hits the breakwater.
A marble statue by Harriet Goodhue Hosmer was discovered in a private garden in England. She was an American neoclassical sculptor born in Massachusetts in 1830, and widely regarded as the first professional female sculptor in the United States.
Stonehenge’s Altar Stone: A team from Sheffield Hallam University and Curtin University, Australia, analyzed ancient ice movement and found that glaciers during Britain’s last ice age may have transported the stone from Scotland’s Orcadian Basin as far as Dogger Bank in the North Sea. From there, however, people would still have had to move it hundreds of kilometers to Salisbury Plain.
A previously unknown complex of large geometric stone structures has been discovered in the remote Cordillera del Tigre in Argentina‘s Andes, prompting an international archaeological investigation into its origins and purpose.
The 43rd Cersaie trade fair held in Bologna from September 21 – 25, 2026, hosted 595 exhibitors: 314 ceramic tile companies, 96 bathroom furnishing companies and 185 businesses from related sectors. Its international profile remained strong, with 233 overseas exhibitors (39% of the total) from 24 countries. The number of visitors was 92,352, 2.4% fewer than in 2025. Italian attendance fell by 3.7%, from 49,671 to 47,852, while international visitor numbers remained broadly stable. Overseas visitors accounted for 48.2% of total attendance.
The winners of the European Heritage Awards have been announced (1, 2).
Video of the month: A 54-pound Martian meteorite — the largest known piece of Mars ever found on Earth — was sold in an auction at Sotheby’s in July 2026. Designated NWA 16788, this monumental rock was discovered in the Sahara Desert in 2023 and is approximately 70% larger than any other verified fragment from the Red Planet. Sotheby tells the story how the celestial stone came to Earth and how it was found here.