Every few months, chemist Brian Bachmann sheds his white lab coat, collects his flashlight, helmet, surgical gloves and knotted rope, puts on old clothes and hiking boots and heads to a nearby cave.

Bachmann, an assistant professor of chemistry at Vanderbilt, has combined his industrial experience in natural products drug discovery with his undergraduate hobby of caving to set up the first systematic program to search for novel drugs produced by cave-dwelling microorganisms.

Caving expert John Hickman, who accompanies Bachmann on his underground expeditions, repels down to the entrance of the Snail Shell Cave near Murfreesboro, Tenn. (Photo credit: John Russell, Vanderbilt University)
To most people, caves may be dark, spooky and claustrophobic, but to Bachmann they are a treasure trove – "an untapped source of potential therapeutics," he said.

The world's leading cave scientists have joined an Emirati geography professor to search for a fabled cave near the Oman border.

Dr Asma al Ketbi, the head of the Emirates Geographic Society and a geography professor for UAE University, hopes to find her "dream cave" in the mountains of northern Ras al Khaimah, where the cries of jinn - supernatural creatures that occupy a parallel world in Arab folklore - are said to be common.

The myths surrounding the dark holes caught the interest of Dr al Kebti, who invited a group of the world's top cavers to separate myth from fact and discover what the noises were really about. To sweeten the deal, she has called on the public for information on local caves and will offer a reward of Dh10,000 to anyone who can find a cave with a depth of 50 metres or more.

A group of die-hard fans are exploring a labyrinth of caverns 100-150m down known as the Three Counties System, which is already regarded as one of the premier caving areas in the UK.

They hope to link two – Long John's Cave and Notts Pot – by excavating collapsed caves, a move which, if successful, could create 100km of stomach-churning shafts and routes deep underground.

Tim Allen, a caver with 35 years experience, said: "We've lost a sense of adventure in a world where safety is everything so caving is one of the few true adventure sports you can do and there are often times you can be the very first person to go through a certain area.

"Over the last 50 years or so people have been exploring right across the hillside when there would've been a number of isolated caves.

"One caver years ago, who was a bit of an amateur geologist, thought one day you would be able to connect them all. People mostly laughed but since that time those caves have been extended and we got to the point where we think there is only one gap left. That's the final link that will make the system 100km long. There are longer caves in the world but this is still a very long cave system, it is significant."

This is hardly a mountain we're standing on up here in northern Spain. Compared to the snow-capped Picos de Europa visible to the southwest, which tower over 2,600 metres, this green mound in the Sierra de Arnero is barely a geological speed bump.

In fact, at a mere 540 metres, this hill is as tiny as Toronto's CN Tower and as such, doesn't even warrant a name in this lofty landscape.

Still, it's worth taking a trip up this no-name mountain, which rises above the village of Rábago, some 60 kilometres southwest of Santander, the capital of Cantabria. The views are spectacular, but the really remarkable attraction is hidden underfoot.

Three cavers who were trapped 700 metres underground for five days, including Christmas Day, were brought to the surface in Sunday after meeting rescue teams as they escaped. They had been on an expedition in the Pyrenees mountains in south-west France.

A smelly Steamboat curiosity yields an extraordinary scientific discovery.  

SULPHUR CAVE has never been a big secret. Cavers know it's in downtown Steamboat Springs – a small, malodorous hole near the base of a travertine slope that is Howelsen Hill, Colorado's oldest operating ski area. But at a mere 10,000 years young, it isn't as old, pretty or big as other caves. It also has other things keeping it off most spelunkers' radar. "The signs that say you could die in there are very persuasive," says Rocky Mountain Caving editor Richard Reinhart. 

Divers bravely went were no man had gone before in a bid to find a link between the colossal Aspoladeru la Texa and Cueva Culiembro caves in northern Spain for the first time ever.
Students from the Oxford University Caving Club spent six days and nights living in darkness while exploring the giant limestone chambers.

The questions kept coming:

"How long is the cave?" "How long are we going to be in there?" "Will we get wet?" "Do I need a jacket?" "Have you ever been down there alone?" (No! Caving alone is dangerous.) "Can we get lost?" "Are there animals down there?"

Amazing phenomenon!

The British Caving Association confirmed on April 22 that a cave in Phong Nha – Ke Bang World Natural Heritage site in Quang Binh Province is the world's largest after some of its members explored it during a one-month trip to the area.

Rescuers in the Yorkshire Dales were involved in two major searches at the weekend – one above ground and one below.

Divers call north and central Florida "cave country" - for the dozens of springs and sinkholes that lead to networks of caverns and twisting tunnels, some hundreds of feet deep and miles long.

The caves can be beautiful. Divers have photographed spellbinding images of sun beaming through aquamarine water at a cave's entrance. Other photos show divers trekking through towering limestone formations, as if in another world.

But for all their allure, the caves can be extremely dangerous.

Geologists in Hungary have been exploring a newlfound underground lake beneath the capital, Budapest. The lake system is believed to extend 25 miles (40 kilometers).

MORE than 100 members of the emergency services will be involved in a major disaster planning exercise at Kents Cavern in Torquay next week.

Police and fire teams, along with the Devon Cave Rescue Organisation, will be going underground at the popular tourist attraction on Tuesday to take part in Exercise Bedrock.

Sergeant Mike Rose, joint director of operations for Exercise Bedrock, said: "This will prove vital in testing the contingency plans of the emergency services in the event of a major incident at any of the numerous underground locations across Devon and Cornwall, from caves to mines and other industrial sites."

He added: "We will be mocking up a partial cave collapse with a dozen or so casualties, some with very serious injuries.

Cave divers have recovered an almost complete skeleton of a bear that is believed to have died some 11,000 years ago.
The cavers in the Scottish Highlands first found pieces of bone in 1995 while exploring a network of caves at Inchnadamph in Sutherland, but only recently reached some of the final fragments.
The bones are now being studied at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh to try and establish whether it was a brown or polar bear

A Christchurch caver was flown to Nelson Hospital after injuring his back in a fall inside Harwoods Hole, near Takaka.

St John Ambulance acting team manager Blair Andrews said an experienced group of cavers had gone into the cave on Takaka Hill and were on their way out when the accident happened on Friday night.

Two cavers drowned when they were trapped deep underground by swiftly rising water caused by heavy rain earlier in the day.

The pair, a man and a woman, had been exploring the Alum Pot cave system near Selside, North Yorkshire, a well-known attraction for experienced cavers and novices.

Rescuers believe that the 33-year-old man, from Darlington, and a 28-year-old woman, from Bradford, were unable to find their way back through the underground passage which had become a rushing stream.

A TEACHER has relived the moment he realised a 14-year-old boy who drowned during a school outing was missing - and the agonising decision was made not to go back and search for him.

An inquest into the death of Joe Lister, who lost his life on a trip to Upper Nidderdale in North Yorkshire, heard how panic gripped a group of teenagers as they scrambled to escape from a flooded cave.

Snakes are a big part of the traveling myth Down Under, and a caving trip through the Capricorn Caves near Rockhampton, Queensland, might be the trip that brings you face to fang with a slithery python. (Don't worry, they're usually the harmless ones.) There are bats, too, and a few other creepy-crawlies to keep the hikes and cave climbs exciting.

The four cavers missing since early Sunday morning in a South Austin cave have been located.

The cavers, four University of Texas students aged 19-23, were novice, and entered Airman s Cave Saturday night. They had planned to check in at midnight, but did not. They were reported missing about 5 a.m. Sunday.

A group of six Auckland students have survived a terrifying ordeal, trapped in a cave in Northland.

The 13 to 15-year-olds from North Shore's Northcote College, along with a caving instructor, became trapped in caves in Waipu when a flash flood blocked the exit.

Police spokeswoman Sarah Kennet says the students had been in the cave since 8.30am Thursday and were rescued almost 12 hours later.

Search and rescue workers in Pagsanjan, a town in Laguna province, south of Manila, rescued 18 foreign and local tourists who spent several hours trapped inside a cave near a well known tourist attraction.

A television report aired by the GMA Network said the group comprising Koreans, Japanese and Filipinos were in the vicinity of the Pagsanjan Falls around late afternoon when a heavy downpour caused a sudden rise in the river level in the area. The flooding cut off the tourists as well as their boatmen, who doubled as their guides, in the cave.

A seriously injured doctor was recovering in hospital on Tuesday after spending two-and-a-half days trapped underground in one of New Zealand's deepest and longest cave systems.

A team of 50 expert cave explorers brought Michael Brewer, 47, to the surface in the early hours of the morning after a rescue operation was mounted after he suffered a suspected broken pelvis when hit by falling rocks at about 5pm on Saturday.

Brewer, an experienced caver and the region's recognised cave rescue doctor, was surveying the Middle Earth system under the Takaka Hill near Nelson with three others when the accident happened.

A South Dakotan has won the world's top award for cave exploration. Mike Wiles, 51, who works for Jewel Cave National Monument, accepted the Lew Bicking Award last month for his work as a volunteer spelunker.

Wiles is one of a rare breed of explorers who clamber through Jewel Cave for up to four days at a time mapping passageways. Thanks to his time in its 140 miles of passages, the cave moved from fourth to second on the list of the world's longest.

A man is in critical condition after falling thirty five feet, landing in the bottom of a cave. The accident happened Saturday morning, in Marion County, Tennessee just north of Jasper.

Chad Dubuisson and Rick Gattone have both been caving for many years. But this weekend when they headed out to drop forty five feet down into a cave, they had no idea their ropes would fail... sending Gattone plummeting to the bottom, and Dubuisson running for help.

A Port Alberni caver hopes to protect an area around Sproat Lake that is filled with spectacular caves and ancient species.
Craig Wagnell, president of the Central Island Caving Club in Port Alberni, said he discovered and surveyed the caves in that area two years ago and was amazed by all the things he had found.
"It was absolutely mind-blowing finding all these unfound caves and untouched treasures."

An injured cave explorer from Belgium was rescued from a cave in Spain after a four-day multi-national effort.

Annette Van Houtte, 49, was injured Sunday in a cave around Isaba, in the Navarre region near the Pyrenees, according to Spanish press reports.

Cavers like Garry Coomer of Elizabethtown try to spend a little time underground every weekend. But this weekend, he'll be doing more than a little caving at the 36th annual Speleofest, hosted by the Louisville Grotto at the Lone Star Reserve in Upton.

Cave exploration is not for everyone, in fact it is for very few. Just reading about it can make a claustrophobe cringe. But for those few ­ those strong, fit, physically narrow and psychologically hardy few ­ an entrance to an immense world, almost a different planet, is available in Central Kentucky. The massive limestone stratum that underlies that region has been carved by the waters of the Green River Basin, and the mapped stretches of labyrinth in what is now known officially as the Mammoth Cave System total more than 360 miles, making it the world's longest by a factor of three. It is a wonder of the world as impressive as any mountain, glacier, or ocean, but photographs can only capture slices of it and few humans will ever grasp it as anything like a whole.

How we are going to get out?" asked my daughter, the calm 15-year-old.
It was a good question, and timely. The two of us were scuttling on our haunches under a four-foot stone passageway, slowly surrendering to the pull of gravity in a small, uninviting cave paved in mud way out in the fields of County Roscommon, Ireland.

Equipped with a single flashlight, six youths descended around midnight Friday into a vast system of caves described by rescue workers as "Swiss cheese" in an abandoned North Side quarry, fire officials said.
Frightened, three of them quickly turned back. The other three, between the ages of 17 and 21, got disoriented in the pitch black and became lost.

Rescue workers with the San Antonio Fire Department found them around 6:45 a.m. Saturday about 1,000 feet inside the caves in the Longhorn Quarry on Wurzbach Parkway near Thousand Oaks Drive and pulled them to safety, said District Fire Chief Randy Jenkins.

Lost for two days in a seven-mile-long cave in West Virginia, five friends were bruised, shivering and had run out of food and water. Three prayed for help, then heard a faint voice.

"I collapsed and started crying," said Heidi McWilliams, 20. "I thought we were hearing things."

McWilliams and her fellow explorers in the 718-foot-deep Mingo-Simmons cave, 130 miles east of Charleston, were treated for minor injuries and returned Tuesday to their homes in central Pennsylvania, a day after their rescue.

Water gurgled along his shady gravel drive. Of course Jerry Lewis had to stop, to kneel and to flip a rock or two.
He found bugs, all right, bugs that look like every other bug and a crustacean that did not. Lewis spotted something special and soon confirmed something unique. "The only place it's known is there," Lewis said.
Believe him. The Nature Conservancy does; same with Uncle Sam and state governments, among others. When they need a feel for life in caves, they need the impeccable reputation and insatiable curiosity of Lewis.
Lewis goes here and there, deep and deeper among bats and mud in spaces where few men have ventured. Lewis takes deliberate stock, makes reasoned recommendations used to protect land, to route highways and water mains.
"To have a resource like him in our region, we're very lucky," said Cloyce Hedge of Indiana's Department of Natural Resources.

"Flash floods, assassin bugs, poisonous gasses," Bruce Hagan, head of Global Medical Rescue Services and an expert on wilderness survival, ticked off the hazards of caving as he downed another rum-and-Coke. It was just past the witching hour and we were elbow-to-elbow at the open-air bar in Ian Anderson's Caves Branch Jungle Lodge, a rustic retreat deep in the misty hills of western Belize. "And, of course, there's the rabid bats, lung diseases, and venomous snakes."

The results of a special three-year study of caves in the Peak District and Yorkshire Dales National Parks reveal the fascinating history of the caves and showing how to protect them for the future.
The survey of more than 400 caves was funded with £95,000 from English Heritage and the project was led by Professor Andrew Chamberlain of the University of Sheffield and Dr Randolph Donahue of the University of Bradford.

About 20 Russian cave explorers escaped injury when an abandoned quarry near Moscow collapsed on Saturday, an Emergencies Ministry spokesman said.

Some underground martian caves may have been spotted, thanks to 'skylight' holes into the caverns that have been photographed from above.

Glen Cushing, from the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Flagstaff, Arizona, got his first hint of the underground cave system from THEMIS (Mars Odyssey's Thermal Emission Imaging System) images of the Arsia Mons region near the equator of Mars. He spotted a system of pit craters, indicative of collapsed areas, and nestled among them half a dozen dark spots ranging in diameter from 100 to 252 metres.

To ancient Mayans, the monstrous jungle caves known as Actun Tunichil Muknal represented the underworld.

But to a group of videographers and archaeologists who visited the caves in modern-day Belize last December, it was just another day at the office. They were there for a week to shoot the latest segment of the Inner Earth Film Project, a work in progress documenting the most spectacular, unusual and remote caves on Earth.

Jewel Cave National Monument in the Black Hills attracts a different kind of visitor in winter.
Up to eight species of bats hibernate in Jewel Cave each year, taking advantage of the cave's variety of climatic and structural conditions, including one of the largest hibernating colonies of Towsend's big-eared bats anywhere in the world, according to a release from the park.
A survey in February by bat biologists and park staff counted 1,351 bats, all found within a quarter mile of the cave's historic entrance.

It was almost too hard to tell who was who among the 10 Appalachian State University students with mud on their clothes as they emerged from Worley's Cave Sunday.

One thing was for sure ... they were wearing helmets, headlamps and smiles.

Another thing is for certain: each student had a once in a lifetime experience.

Two men and a woman lost in a deep Gippsland cave for more than 11 hours were found late last night.
About 11.30pm, Warragul State Emergency Services volunteers located the trio, whose identities were not released.