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WCN News - 31 Jan. 2007.

Автор: zenas@vip.gr
Дата: 31 Jan 2007

(1) Karst and cave scientists to support an Open Access petition.
(2) Tenglong Cave the World Largest Cave.
(3) Did humans wipe out Australia's big beasts?

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(1) Karst and cave scientists to support an Open Access petition.
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>From World Caving News http://www.zenas.gr/WCN => 31 Jan. 2007.

Dear Colleaques,

I'd like to draw your attention to, and encourage you to join, the
"Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research
results", directed to the European Commission, opened for joining on
January 17, 2007 and already signed by 13,862 individuals and organisations.

http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/198-guid.html
http://www.ec-petition.eu

The petition is sponsored by a consortium of European organisations -- JISC
(Joint Information Systems Committee, UK), SURF (Netherlands), SPARC
Europe, DFG (Deutsches Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany), DEFF (Danmarks
Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark),to demonstrate support
for the policy of providing Open Access to research results on the part of
the European and worldwide research community. Signatures may be added by
individual researchers or universities and research institutions.This is an
important part of an active ongoing global movement for free and open
access to research results. I think that the principles of Open Access to
scientific information are particularly important for the karst/cave
community. This is because much of studies in our area is being done by
researchers and explorers which are not necessarily affiliated with major
scientific institutions capable to pay for access to research results..
much of which were produced by publicly-funded or voluntary-driven
projects. This problem is particularly severe for scholars in countries
wherefunding for science is not very abundant (in fact, georgaphically, the
most of the world).I feel that karst and cave researchers may have many
reasons to actively support the Open Access initiatives.

Best wishes!
Sincerely,
--Alexander Klimchouk.

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(2) Tenglong Cave the World Largest Cave.
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>From World Caving News http://www.zenas.gr/WCN => 31 Jan. 2007.

>From the CAVEDIGGERS mailing list:
Professor Yan Zhiwu at China University of Geosciences expressed in his
recent published results of the united scientific research on the Tenglong
cave that, after measured and compared with data of other large caves in
China and in the world, the Tenglong cave in Lichuan City of Hubei Province
covers an area of 230,000km2 and a volume of 15,750,000m3, being the world
largest cave at present. (...)

Read more:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cavediggers/message/5057

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(3) Did humans wipe out Australia's big beasts?
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>From World Caving News http://www.zenas.gr/WCN => 31 Jan. 2007.

To animals unfortunate enough to fall in, it was a death trap. To
palaeontologists, it was a sensational discovery. Now the first detailed
analysis of a spectacular cache of fossilised prehistoric "marsupial
lions", giant wombats and kangaroos, owls and parrots discovered in a cave
in Australia suggests that humans killed off the continent's megafauna.The
cache, found in the Nullarbor Plain in south-central Australia, contains
fossils of 69 species of mammal, bird and reptile, and includes many
complete skeletons, including the first of a marsupial lion (see right).
There are also eight species of kangaroo that had never been recorded
before.The site was discovered by cavers in 2002, but its size and depth -
20 to 70 metres below the desert - means that it has taken a team led by
Gavin Prideaux of the Western Australian Museum in Perth four years to
collect and analyse the fossils.

Source and details:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19325884.200?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg19325884.200

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Worldwide Caving News
http://www.zenas.gr/WCN



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