Existing methods of cave survey are time consuming and require significantly more time than naturally moving through the cave. The efficiency of these methods, even in the case of state-of-the-art laser-scanning technology, is fundamentally limited by the requirement that measurements be taken at static locations. We present a mobile approach to cave mapping, in which a lightweight 3D laser sca...

BACKGROUND The best-known dangerous spiders belong to the six genera. The genus Loxosceles or violin spiders are well known for their ability to cause skin necrosis or loxoscelism. All Loxosceles species have medical importance due to their necrotizing venom. The present article reports the occurrence of L. rufescens in Charkhab Cave, south of Iran (Larestan). METHODS The specimens were colle...

One of the most challenging fauna to study in situ is the obligate cave fauna because of the difficulty of sampling. Cave-limited species display patchy and restricted distributions, but it is often unclear whether the observed distribution is a sampling artifact or a true restriction in range. Further, the drivers of the distribution could be local environmental conditions, such as cave humidi...

Subsurface habitats harbor novel diversity that has received little attention until recently. Accessible subsurface habitats include lava caves around the world that often support extensive microbial mats on ceilings and walls in a range of colors. Little is known about lava cave microbial diversity and how these subsurface mats differ from microbial communities in overlying surface soils. To i...

Gasarch, Golub, and Srinivasan studied the Robin Hood game in the case of random, memoryless strategies. In this brief note we extend their main result to the case of bounded memory, and clarify several questions raised by them. 1. The Robin Hood game The Robin Hood game RH(r, s, A) is defined for functions r, s : N → N such that 1 ≤ r(i) < s(i) for each i, and for a set A, as follows: (1) On d...

A remarkable aphaenopsian beetle, a sympatric species of Qianotrechus tenuicollis Uéno, 2000, was newly discovered in Cave Mahuang Dong of Shuanghe Dong cave system, the longest cave system of China in Suiyang County, northern Guizhou Province. To categorize this striking but still unknown species, a new genus and species are proposed: Shuangheaphaenops elegansgen. n., sp. n. Relationships of S...

The prehistory of the Mammoth Cave area has been of interest to archeologists for more than a century because of the remarkable preservation in the dry cave environment. Beginning with the antiquarian search for mummified bodies in the early nineteenth century up to the most modern scientific research, Mammoth Cave has revealed important information about the Native Americans who lived near and...

Despite considerable work on other trace elements, the incorporation of dissolved silicon from cave waters into speleothems has not been previously investigated. In this study, the controls on dissolved Si in cave waters and on adsorbed Si in resulting speleothems are therefore investigated. Bedrock (dolomite), soil water, dripping water, and cave carbonates were retrieved from Heshang Cave sit...

Caves are nutrient-limited and dark subterranean ecosystems. To date, attention has been focused on geological research of caves in China, whilst indigenous microbial diversity has been insufficiently characterized. Here, we report the fungal diversity in the pristine, oligotrophic, karst Heshang Cave, central China, using a culture-dependent method coupled with the analysis of the fungal rRNA-...

VFIVE is a scientific visualization application for CAVE-type immersive virtual reality systems. The source codes are freely available. VFIVE is used as a research tool in various VR systems. It also lays the groundwork for developments of new visualization software for CAVEs. In this paper, we pick up five CAVE systems in four different institutions in Japan. Applications of VFIVE in each CAVE...