Crystal Cave is your source for incense, candles, oils, aromathrapy products,gifts, metaphysical products, books, wiccan and pagan supplies and books, and a wealth of information ...

Offers a forty-five minute interpretive tour. Includes dates and hours of operation, admission rates, and map directions to location in Kutztown.

The longest cave in Wisconsin, open for tours April through October. History, rates and schedule, map and directions, contact information.

Features 45-minute guided tour and 4-6 hour wild cave trips. Includes hours and fees. Located in Sequoia National Park.

See photos of some of the world's largest crystals in a giant Mexico cave under Naica mountain -- discovered by miners.

Crystal Cave Handcrafted Artisan Jewelry Designs and accessories crafted with Quality Natural stones and Metals.

Crystal Cave of Giants in Mexico. The Naica Mine of Chihuahua, Mexico, is a working mine that is known for its extraordinary crystals. Naica is a lead, zinc and silver mine in ...

Near Springfield: includes pictures and tour information.

Crystal Cave. Giant crystal cave discovered So clear, you can read text through the crystals. June 12, 2000 - BBC A gigantic cave of crystals has been discovered in an old ...

Tarot Symposium 2008 with: Our Tarot Symposium is finally here! Saturday September 27th, 8:30 am to 5:00 pm Facilitated by Barbara Rapp-Geerlings

Eurogamer reports on some good news for fans of the Final Fantasy series: a new game is in development for the Nintendo Wii and DS systems. "It's said to be titled Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time. ... the game will apparently be playable on both machines at once, thanks to the spiffing new Pollux engine. So, while whoever is the best negotiator/fighter/Wii owner is playing on the big screen, another lucky adventurer can wade in on the DS, presumably following around and summoning Ifrit on their elder siblings. This harks back to the series' origins on DS, with the first CC game enjoying the relative splendour of Gamecube/GBA link-up play."

Bennett Haselton contributes the following essay on the consequences of license choice as it applies to sites based on user contributions; read on below for more of his big idea for making Knol a more useful resource. "Google Knol should allow its writers to publish under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. The preceding sentence may not mean much to you, but if you've ever wanted to cite a Wikipedia article as a source, or simply read a Wikipedia article with some assurance that someone wasn't pulling your leg with some creative editing, or if you've wanted to contribute to Wikipedia but couldn't afford the time unless you received some modest compensation for it, then the addition of this one simple feature to Knol might make all the difference." (More below.)

Because the number of abductions in Mexico has jumped almost 40% in the past 3 years, the wealthy are getting subcutaneous transmitters so they can be tracked when kidnapped. Xega, the Mexican security firm which makes the chips, has seen a sales jump of 13% this year. The company injects the crystal-encased chip, the size and shape of a grain of rice, into clients' bodies with a syringe. The chip then sends radio signals to a larger device carried by the client with a global positioning system in it. A satellite can then be used to find the location of the missing person. Things must be a lot worse in Mexico than I thought.

jamie found links to a discriminating selection of Siggraph papers at waxy.org. Among the more captivating: automatically improving the attractiveness of faces in portraits; automatic substitution of similar faces into photographs (with potential applications such as a privacy-enhanced Google Street View); and using still photographs to enhance video of a static scene.

An anonymous reader sends along a link to a mindbending article in Science News on quasicrystals — odd materials with a structure partway between order and disorder. Now researchers have found something even odder: a material that's partway between a quasicrystal and a regular crystal. The order in the new structure is provided by the Fibonacci sequence. It was constructed with plastic beads and laser beams, so no new materials science inventions are on the horizon. "'We are absolutely sure that this structure should have properties that are not usual,' Mikhael says, because materials with odd structures almost always do. Now they just have to figure out what those properties are."

(0d0 writes "Some researchers at Columbia University's Computer Vision Labratory have developed software to automatically replace faces in batches of photos. Practical applications include protecting the identities of people in Google's Street View, coupling it with a digital camera's burst mode to create a perfect group photo, or protecting the identities of witnesses or law enforcement and military personnel. Other links to coverage include Boing Boing, American Public Media, and New Scientist."

MechEMark writes with this excerpt from a hope-inspiring article at the IEEE Spectrum, which says "Researchers from Microsoft say they've built a prototype of a display screen using a technology that essentially mimics the optics in a telescope but at the scale of individual display pixels. The result is a display that is faster and more energy efficient than a liquid crystal display, or LCD, according to research reported yesterday in Nature Photonics ... The design greatly increases the amount of backlight that reaches the screen. The researchers were able to get about 36 percent of the backlight out of a pixel, more than three times as much light as an LCD can deliver. But Microsoft senior research engineer Michael Sinclair says that through design improvements, he expects that number to go up — theoretically, as high as 75 percent."

onehitwonder writes "New Mexico cavers have set foot — for the first time ever — on a 'river' of tiny, white calcite crystals covering a four-mile stretch of the floor of the Fort Stanton Cave in New Mexico. The privileged few spelunkers who have explored the 'Snowy River' formation say they've seen nothing like it. Not only is Snowy River exquisite, it is also home to some three dozen species of microbes previously unknown to man."

Aeonite writes "Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-playing Games chronicles the rise and fall of the Computer RPG industry, from Akalabeth to Zelda and everything in between. While the bulk of the book is devoted to the genre's 'Golden Age' in the late '80s and early '90s, author Matt Barton explores the entire history of CRPGs, from their origins in the mid '70s to the very recent past. While not entirely comprehensive, the book covers not only the major players and award-winners, but also dozens of obscure 'also-ran' as well as notable games in related genres." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review.

esocid writes "Impeding the dream of ultrafast optical computers, we've been unable to build an ideal 'photonic crystal' to manipulate visible light, until now. University of Utah chemists have discovered that nature already has designed photonic crystals with the ideal, diamond-like structure: They are found in the shimmering, iridescent green scales of a beetle from Brazil. The beetle is an inch-long weevil named Lamprocyphus augustus. Bartl and Galusha now are trying to design a synthetic version of the beetle's photonic crystals, using scale material as a mold to make the crystals from a transparent semiconductor. The scales can't be used in technological devices because they are made of fingernail-like chitin, which is not stable enough for long-term use, is not semiconducting and doesn't bend light adequately. Ideal photonic crystals could be used to amplify light and thus make solar cells more efficient, to capture light that would catalyze chemical reactions, and to generate tiny laser beams that would serve as light sources on optical chips."

Do you fancy eating at a restaurant with a theme straight out of the movies?Many connoisseurs consider the Rainforest Cafe to be 'the' theme restaurant, and the one that inspired the fad worldwide.

Columbia TriStar Home Video presents Jay Jay the Jet Plane: Liking Yourself, Inside and Out "I can't fly, I'm a truck.

The film work of Paul Newman, who died Sept. 26, is celebrated in an 11-film all day retrospective on Turner Movie Classics beginning with "The Rack" and continuing with "Until They Sail" , "Torn Curtain" , ...

Well, here we go with another Leafs season. Am I pumped? How could I be when the Leafs brass decides the best way to get people interested is to put the pre-season games on Leafs TV.

Corning Inc, the largest maker of glass for LCD televisions and computers, warned that third-quarter glass sales volume was worse than expected and said it was cutting spending and stopping outside hiring.

Tucked away in the Mexican desert, hiding in the depths of a mysterious mountain called Naica, is a breathtaking cavern carved by the world's largest crystals.

White Lies have said they plan to 'lift the spirits' of the Icelandic people at Airwaves festival next week.

Posted by Frank Bentayou/Plain Dealer Reporter October 09, 2008 19:14PM Gravity ruled on Wall Street today, as investors dumped shares with enough urgency to drive markets into the deepest hole in more than ...

THE DATING AND mating rituals of 30-something New Yorkers fueled Candace Bushnell's "Sex and the City" column and book, spawning the Manolo-mad TV series and movie.

Discovering gold and other treasures is the furthest thing from Alan Warild's mind when he enters the world's deepest caves.