Streets ahead: Artist transforms London pavement into an amazing 3D cave scene

Dramatic: Edgar Mueller lies on top of the cave scene he created on the pavement in London's Docklands 

A stretch of pavement in London has been transformed into a stunning cave scene by a renowned street artist.

Edgar Mueller, from Germany, chalked the 3D scene onto the street in the Docklands area as part of a summer festival in West India Quay.

Mr Mueller started work on the 100m sq drawing last week and put the finishing touches on it today.

He spent 15 hours a day on the piece, starting between 3am and 4am every day.

Describing the work, Mr Mueller told The Wharf: 'It's a cave scene. I got the idea three weeks ago when I was in China and spent a week visiting some natural caves. I just thought "Why don't I put a cave in London?"

Leaps and bounds: A parkour team jump over the cave, which is part of a summer festival at West India Quay

'The idea is after a little earthquake this cave appears. It shouldn't be there and scientists say it is 10million years old. Maybe it's a series of different caves.'

He added: 'I think it's one of the best I've ever done.'

A specially-built lens allows people to look at the spot where the picture looks most 3D.

The owners of West India Quay, X-Leisure, are staging a month of entertainment, starting with an art week.

In the past, Mr Mueller has created a huge 3D Ice Age scene, a lava scene and a giant waterfall.

Source: Daily Mail

Caver critically injured in fall in Queensland

A caver is in a critical condition after falling and hitting his head in an underground cave in central Queensland.

Rescue crews had to penetrate hundreds of metres underground to save the man.

The man's friends raised the alarm at about 8.40pm (AEST) yesterday after exiting Johannsen's Cave, part of a complex of caves around 20km north of Rockhampton.

The man had fallen while climbing several hundred metres inside the cave and had been knocked unconscious.

A local urban search and rescue team, fire appliances, ambulance crews and senior personnel helped in the rescue, a spokeswoman for the Department of Community Safety said.

The man was taken to Rockhampton Hospital in a critical condition and was airlifted to Brisbane early today.

Source: http://www.news.com.au

Students discover cave on Red Planet

A group of 16 seventh-grade students have found a cave on Mars using the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter.

The schoolgoers were using the THEMIS to find lava tubes on the Red Plant when they came across a small black feature straddling one of the tubes.

The feature, identified as a cave or "skylight", near the Pavonis Mons volcano was a hole, punched in the top of a hollow tube.

The students, from Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, California, were participating in the Mars Student Imaging Program (MSIP), a part of Arizona State University's Mars Education Program.

"This pit is certainly new to us," Discovery News quoted Glen Cushing, a US Geological Survey scientist, as saying.

He added: "And it is only the second one known to be associated with Pavonis Mons."

Cushing believes the new skylight is around 190×160 meters wide and at least 115 meters deep.

Source: Zeenews

Cave and fell rescues keep volunteers busy

A volunteer team carried out its first underground rescue of the year at the weekend.

Members of the Cave Rescue Organisation were called to help an exhausted caver in Bar Pot in the Gaping Gill system on Ingleborough.

The 20-year-old man was unable to ascend the second pitch of the pothole and the Clapham-based team was alerted at 4.05pm on Sunday. They hauled both the exhausted man and his 20-year-old caving companion to the surface and transported the two men to Clapham.

The following night, four cavers were reported overdue on a trip from Lancaster Hole to Wretched Rabbit in the Ease Gill system in eastern Cumbria. A major search, which began at 11.30pm on Sunday, found the four men, aged 18, 30, 33 and 38 in the High Level Route, making their way back to Lancaster Hole. They had failed to find the connection to Wretched Rabbit.

One of the men was hauled up the entrance pitch because he was exhausted.

The team had been called to an injured walker on Saturday who fell while descending Ingleborough’s western side towards Chapel-le-Dale. The 55-year-old woman suffered head and chest injuries after falling forwards.

She was treated at the scene by paramedics from the air ambulance and CRO members carried her the short distance to the helicopter which flew her to hospital.

The Cave Rescue Organisation is one of three volunteer teams in Yorkshire that carry out rescues both above and below ground. This year it is celebrating its 75th anniversary.

Source: Grough

Researchers find world's oldest leather shoe and more

A perfectly preserved shoe, 1,000 years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt and 400 years older than Stonehenge in the UK, has been found in a cave in Armenia.

The 5,500 year old shoe, the oldest leather shoe in the world, was discovered by a team of international archaeologists and their findings will publish on June 9th in the online scientific journal PLoS ONE.

The cow-hide shoe dates back to ~ 3,500 BC (the Chalcolithic period) and is in perfect condition. It was made of a single piece of leather and was shaped to fit the wearer's foot. It contained grass, although the archaeologists were uncertain as to whether this was to keep the foot warm or to maintain the shape of the shoe, a precursor to the modern shoe-tree perhaps? "It is not known whether the shoe belonged to a man or woman," said lead author of the research, Dr Ron Pinhasi, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland "as while small (European size 37; US size 7 women), the shoe could well have fitted a man from that era." The cave is situated in the Vayotz Dzor province of Armenia, on the Armenian, Iranian, Nackhichevanian and Turkish borders, and was known to regional archaeologists due to its visibility from the highway below.

International Speleologists Meet in Cuba

The 6th Congress of the Speleological Federation of Latin American and the Caribbean, now meeting in the western Cuban province of Matanzas, debated actions on Thursday for protecting the underground world, faced with human mismanagement.

The Latin American speleologists' meeting also will analyze the current situation of caves in the region and their vulnerability to human interaction.

"We speleologists are making an appeal, because we want a better world," Ercilio Vento, president of the Cuban Speleological Society, stated on Wednesday during the opening ceremony of the group's congress, the National News Agency reported.

"We have real problems that are not particular to a country or zone, but common everywhere, and our challenge is to face them and help as scientists to solve them," Vento told the group of experts, who are meeting for five days under the slogan "Speleology and Society."

Source: Cuba Headlines

6 Bodies Found in Cancun Cave, 3 Without Hearts

Drug-related violence in Mexico has claimed
over 22,000 lives since 2006.

Three of six corpses found in a cavern near Cancun yesterday had had their hearts ripped out, Mexican police say. "They were apparently tortured and their chests were opened to remove the hearts," said the official statement. The four men and two women have not been identified. Police didn't say whether they believed drug cartels were behind the gruesome killings, although the Zetas cartel's trademark "Z" had been carved into the abdomens of three of the bodies.

Source: Newser

Tango and Flamenco in this year's Nerja Caves Festival

The festival has reached its 52nd edition and moves to the middle of July

The Nerja Caves Festival reaches its 52nd edition this year, with a budget of nearly 300,000 €, and will be held a week earlier than normal between July 13 and 17.

Flamenco singer Estrella Morente headlines along with the Argentinean tango of Julio Bocca.

Morente is well known across Spain coming from the famous Granada family of flamenco artistes.

Bocca will perform ‘De Burdel, Salon y Calle’ which is choreographed by the lead ballerina, Eleonora Cassano, and which is described as ‘a very aesthetic representation of the traditional tango’.

There will be two separate performances from Artists from the Prague Theatre Ballet, who will interpret sections from well known works such as Romeo and Juliet, Don Quixote, and Sleeping Beauty, among others.

The Radio Televisión Española Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Englishman, Adrian Leaper, will perform works from Delius, Mendelssohn and Mozart, accompanied by Vicente Coves on classical guitar.

Source: Typically Spanish

Hunting in the Cave of the Beasts

Archaeologists are studying prehistoric rock drawings discovered in a remote cave in 2002, including dancing figures and strange headless beasts, as they seek new clues about the rise of Egyptian civilization.

Amateur explorers stumbled across the cave, which includes 5,000 images painted or engraved into stone, in the vast, empty desert near Egypt’s southwest border with Libya and Sudan.

Rudolph Kuper, a German archaeologist, said the detail depicted in the “Cave of the Beasts” indicate the site is at least 8,000 years old, likely the work of hunter-gatherers whose descendants may have been among the early settlers of the Nile Valley.

The cave is 10 kilometers from the “Cave of the Swimmers,” which was romanticized in the film the “English Patient,” but with far more, and better preserved, images.

By studying the sandstone cave and other nearby sites, the archaeologists are trying to build a timeline to compare the culture and technologies of the peoples who inhabited the area.

“It is the most amazing cave … in North Africa and Egypt,” said Karin Kindermann, member of a German-led team that recently made a trip to the site 900 kilometers southwest of Cairo.

“You take a piece of the puzzle and see where it could fit. This is an important piece,” she said.