Since its discovery, the Chauvet cave elaborate artwork called into question our understanding of Palaeolithic art evolution and challenged traditional chronological benchmarks [Valladas H et al. (2001) Nature 413:419-479]. Chronological approaches revealing human presences in the cavity during the Aurignacian and the Gravettian are indeed still debated on the basis of stylistic criteria [Petti...

We describe a new species of the genus Endecous Saussure (1878), recorded at the Lapa do Cipó and Olhos d'Água caves, which are located in the Itacarambi municipality, Minas Gerais state, Eastern Brazil. Another species, E. aguassay Mews, 2008 was recordedin the surroundings of the caves. The genus Endecous corresponds to the most common cricket in Brazilian hypogean environments. In general, t...

Hesperonemastoma smilax, n. sp., is a minute, highly troglomorphic harvestman described herein from a single male specimen collected in McClung’s Cave, Greenbrier County, West Virginia. Hesperonemastoma species described previously from caves are briefly discussed. H. packardi (Roewer), first collected in a shallow cave in Utah, is a widely distributed surface-dwelling species found mostly in r...

—We propose the concept of Gap Between Displays (GBD) as a component of immersion in virtual environment systems. We hypothesized that GBD may reduce users' task performance in some cases, and choosing appropriate stimuli in GBD can alleviate its negative effects. We performed two empirical experiments to test the two hypotheses. Using a four-screen CAVE™ as the experiment platform, we carefull...

As the major field in petroleum reserve growth, fractured-vuggy reservoir is the key research in the future. However, in the development of fracture-cavity reservoir, collapse may occur in karst cave which greatly affects the oil well output. In order to forecast the cave collapse before drilling, this work adopts the method of span dichotomy reduction to determine the critical karst collapse o...

Cave geometric properties have been studied between 1958 and today as statistical or fractal objects. These studies have divulged some degree of order in such properties as the distribution of cave lengths in a region and the distribution of cave passage sizes, and exhibiting some degree of self-similarity, suggesting a fractal nature, or moderate departures from self-similarity, suggesting geo...

Combining augmented reality (AR) environments with immersive virtual environments (VEs) can reduce interaction gaps and provide embodied interactions in distributed collaborative works. It can also provide many opportunities and degrees of freedom for collaboration in both real and virtual worlds. A gesture based AR environment provides variety of input and output modalities to networked and di...

A total of eight Ensifer sp. strains were isolated from two pristine cave environments. One strain was isolated from a cave water pool located in the Wind Cave National Park, South Dakota, USA and the remaining seven strains were isolated from Lechuguilla Cave of Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico, USA. Whole genome sequencing and comparative genomic analyses of the eight isolates compa...

Research on the development of virtual environments has been limited to date to universities due to the high cost of equipment and high-speed internet access. Applications of virtual environments using CAVE technology are numerous in medicine, architecture, military weapons systems, medicine, science research and business training. However, the cost of this emerging technology has prevented the...

In the study, the growth traits, photosynthesis and morphology characteristics of several cultivars of switchgrass (Panicum virgatum L.) have been assessed the yield potential and adaptability in diverse environments (Yangling, Dingbian of Shaanxi province, Guyuan of Ningxia) on the Loess Plateau of China. Alamo was the best adapted switchgrass cultivar for biomass production in Yangling with d...