3 men grew pot in cave, D.A. says

Authorities say operation could grow 100 pounds every 8 weeks

Investigators from the 15th Judicial District Drug Task Force found a mother lode of marijuana in the unlikeliest of places--a cave.

Beneath a stylish A-frame home on Dixon Springs Road in eastern Trousdale County, three men allegedly set up a sophisticated operation to grow as much as 100 pounds of marijuana every eight weeks.

"It's pretty amazing what they had under there--water for irrigation, special lighting, devices to keep the humidity just right. These guys were professionals. They knew what they were doing," said District
Attorney General Tommy Thompson of Hartsville.

"They could grow in 60 days what it would take four and a half months to
grow outside."

Arrested on Wednesday were Brian Gibson and Greg Compton, while a third man, Fred Strunk, was arrested near Gainesville, Fla. All three are in jail, with Gibson and Compton being held in the Trousdale County Jail. Bail was set for Gibson and Compton at $5 million, while Strunk's was set at $15 million, Thompson said. Local authorities were in Florida yesterday to return Strunk to Tennessee.

Book: A Wonderful Underground. By Kyung Sik Woo

Caves: A Wonderful Underground. Kyung Sik Woo
(English translation by Kyeong Park and Eunmi Chang).
Hollym, Elizabeth, New Jersey; 2005.
ISBN 1-56591-221-7. 6 by 9 inches, 230 pages, softbound. $29.50.

This is a fairly nice little introduction to caves from Korea.

The majority of the book is an elementary description of cave geology and biology at about, I'd say, a ninth-grade level. There is more about lava tubes than is usual in such a book, perhaps because they are relatively prominent among the caves of Korea. Except in a forty-page section devoted specifically to the caves of Korea, the coverage is international.

There are color photographs on most pages; a number of the photos of lava tubes are by Dave Bunnell. There is a good conservation message at the end, where the author bemoans vandalism in Korea's caves.

Unfortunately, there are some of things that are not quite right. The Clansman is not in Carlsbad Cavern. The town and cave in Kentucky are not named Horseshoe Cave. Mammoth Cave was not mined for saltpeter during the Revolutionary War.

The book can be bought on Amazon.

Urine-Powered Battery

In their quest to develop a smaller, cheaper battery for medical test kits - like those used to detect diabetes by analyzing a person's urine - scientists in Singapore had a eureka moment of sorts when they realized that the very urine being tested could also serve as a power source.

In the September issue of The Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, Ki Bang Lee described how he and his team of researchers created "the first urine-activated paper battery" by soaking a piece of paper in a solution of copper chloride, sandwiching it between strips of magnesium and copper and then laminating the paper battery between two sheets of plastic. In this setup, the magnesium layer serves as the battery's anode (the negatively charged terminal) and the copper chloride as the cathode (the positively charged terminal). An electricity-producing chemical reaction takes place when a drop of urine, which contains many electrically charged atoms, is introduced to the paper through a small opening in the plastic.

The scientists' largest prototype battery generated a maximum of roughly 1.5 volts, the equivalent of an AA battery, and sustained an average of about 1 volt for about 90 minutes. Lee explains that its uses could extend to any device that consumes a small amount of electricity. "For instance," he says, "we could integrate a small disposable cellphone and our battery on a plastic card, for use in an emergency. And we are continuing to develop batteries that could power regular cellphones, MP3 players and laptop computers." While Lee emphasizes that urine is the biofluid of choice (since "everybody produces large amounts of it"), he notes that other bodily fluids - blood, tears, semen and saliva - will work in a pinch.

Source: NY Times

Magazine: Expedition Volume 47, Number 3 Winter 2005 Special Issue: Caves

Cover: Photo by Graeme Barker

Features: Caves as Sacred Places on the Tibetan Plateau (Mark Aldenderfer) Burial Rituals of Prehistoric Forager-Farmers in Borneo--The Neolithic Cemeteries of Niah Cave, Sarawak (Graeme Barker) What Did Ice Age People Do in the Deep Caves? (Jean Clottes) Archaeological Caving in Croatia--The Illyrian Rituals of Nakovana Cave (Timothy Kaiser and Staso Forenbaher) The Heart of Creation, the Heart of Darkness--Sacred Caves in Mesoamerica (Holley Moyes and James E. Brady) The World of Ancient Ancestors--Australian Aboriginal Caves and Other Realms within Rock (Paul S. C. Tacon)

Book review: Cumberland Caverns

Cumberland Caverns. Larry E. Matthews. Greyhound Press, Cloverdale, Indiana; 2005. ISBN 978-0-9663547-2-0. 8.5 by 11 inches, 188 pages, softbound. $18.

Cumberland Caverns was known as Higgenbotham and Henshaw caves during most of its history, before it was turned into a Tennessee show cave by Roy Davis and Tank Gorin in 1955 and 1956. Similar in style and content to Matthews's recent book on Dunbar Cave, this book is a nice account of the history of Cumberland Caverns, which began in the pioneer days and continued, as far as significant events go, up to the completion of the current map in 1978, at 27.6 miles. Among the appendixes are a nice gazateer and a chronological summary. Roughly half the entries in the chronology, if one ignores trivial things like forty-four entries for the annual Cumberland Caverns christmas parties, are from the nineteenth century. There is also a poem that was apparently inspired by Higgenbotham Cave in 1880. It has over four hundred lines of the good old-fashioned sort that actually rhyme and scan.

This is a slightly revised and updated second edition of a book that was originally published by the NSS in 1988. It has been reformatted to a larger page size, and the photographs, many of which are new to this edition, are much better reproduced. (A number of photographs in the first edition could not be reprinted, though, so that edition may still be of interest to serious historians.) There are many nicely drafted maps, in the style of the 1970s, of parts of the cave, but the small scale required for even parts of such a long cave would not have permitted much floor detail anyway.

Cumberland Caverns was one of the most exciting cave exploration stories during the 1950s and 1960s, and cavers as well as speleo-historians will enjoy this book.