The oldest known spatially-explicit archaeological excavation, conducted in Brixham cave, Devon, in 1858, is reconstructed using geographic information systems technology. Two dimensional plots of individual fossil taxa and flint artefacts demonstrate the utility of the technique for elucidating taphonomy and palaeobiology.The cave served as a den for hibernating brown bears, as a den for hyena...

Altamira Cave, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, houses one of the world's most prominent Palaeolithic rock art. The conservation of the rock art is threatened by microorganisms (bacteria and recently fungi). Previous studies revealed that the entry and dispersion of microorganisms and nutrients to the interior of the cave depends on the exchange rates between the cave atmosphere and the exterior t...

Sudden ground pressure disasters caused by deep mining such as rock burst and cave-in are major hidden dangers affecting safety production underground mine. The safe stable operation of monitoring platform is great significance for mine production. However, many small medium-sized enterprises make slow progress in the construction online due to limitations enterprise scale, capital capacity oth...

Patterns of sleep vary widely among species, but the functional and evolutionary principles responsible for this diversity remain unknown. The characin fish, Astyanax mexicanus, has eyed surface and numerous blind cave populations. The cave populations are largely independent in their origins, and the species is ideal for studying the genetic bases of convergent evolution. Here we show that thi...

Kapova Cave (Shulgan-Tash) is located in Bashkortostan, the Southern Urals, in the Shulgan Tash Reserve on the Belaya River. Its coordinates are 53°02’ N; 57°03’ W. It is a large karst three-level system of chambers, galleries and wells having the total length of 3323 m with vertical amplitude of 165 m. The karst system is characterized by large chambers and galleries, great dynamics of microcl...

Endemism, which is typically high on islands and in caves, has rarely been studied in the cave entrance ecotone. We investigated the endemism of the spider genus Uthina at cave entrances. Totally 212 spiders were sampled from 46 localities, from Seychelles across Southeast Asia to Fiji. They mostly occur at cave entrances but occasionally appear at various epigean environments. Phylogenetic ana...

Cave fish have rarely been investigated with regard to their inner ear morphology, hearing abilities, and acoustic communication. Based on a previous study that revealed morphological differences in the saccular otolith between a cave and two surface populations of Poecilia mexicana, we checked for additional differences in utricular and lagenar otoliths and tested whether different populations...

Lower Kane Cave, Wyoming (USA), has hydrogen sulfide-bearing springs that discharge into the cave passage. The springs and cave stream harbour white filamentous microbial mats dominated by Epsilonproteobacteria. Recently, novel 16S rRNA gene sequences from the phylum Acidobacteria, subgroup 7, were found in these cave mats. Although Acidobacteria are ubiquitously distributed in many terrestrial...

Our ongoing investigation of early maize farming in the American Southwest has entailed stable isotope analysis and accelerator radiocarbon dating of Basketmaker II remains from sites in the Four Corners region. Here we report radiocarbon dates on a large mortuary assemblage excavated by RichardWetherill in 1893 from a burial cave in southeastern Utah. It has long been thought that all individu...

A CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) is a 3D interactive environment that enables a user to be fully immersed in a virtual world and offers a unique way to visualise and interact with digital information. In this paper we build a foundation of CAVE interaction design by characterising generic affordances of such an environment and enumerating currently conceivable/implementable interacti...