The bizzare beast in Romania's poison cave

In the south-east of Romania, in Constanța county close to the Black Sea and the Bulgarian border, there lies a barren featureless plain. The desolate field is completely unremarkable, except for one thing.

Below it lies a cave that has remained isolated for 5.5 million years. While our ape-like ancestors were coming down from the trees and evolving into modern humans, the inhabitants of this cave were cut off from the rest of the planet.

Despite a complete absence of light and a poisonous atmosphere, the cave is crawling with life. There are unique spiders, scorpions, woodlice and centipedes, many never before seen by humans, and all of them owe their lives to a strange floating mat of bacteria.

Since then the cave has remained sealed by the Romanian authorities. Fewer than 100 people have been allowed inside Movile, a number comparable to those who have been to the Moon.

This is partly because the journey into the cave is extremely hazardous.

To enter, you must first lower yourself by rope 20m down a narrow shaft dug into the ground. The only light is from your helmet, which bounces around the walls as you descend.

You must then climb down through narrow limestone tunnels coated in an ochre clay, in pitch darkness and temperatures of 25 °C.  These paths eventually open out into a central cavern containing a lake.

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What The New Horizons prob saw as it passed Pluto

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  Why reaching Pluto is so amazing

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  The planet that wasn’t

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New Gecko Climbing Secret Revealed

Geckos are famed for their extraordinary ability to scale walls, run across ceilings and even hang upside down from apparently smooth materials like glass.

Microscopic hairs allow the lizards to employ dry adhesion – meaning they can stick to surfaces without the use of liquids or surface tension – through the creation of so-called van der Waals forces which draw materials together.

Their amazing climbing skills have long been a source of fascination for scientists, and have even led to the invention of adhesive tape that mimics the properties of their specialised toe pads to easily attach and detach.

But some elements of their abilitihat their adhesive ability was related to the size of their toe pads, allowing les have remained a mystery, including how some of the heavier species (weighing up to 250g) can still stick to things so effectively. The assumption was targer geckos to climb just as well as the smaller ones (which weigh as little as 2g).

But now a team of scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, US, have shown that additional factors are also at play. They've discovered that their bodies become stiffer as they grow bigger, acting like a spring, giving their adhesion the increased power needed to support more weight.

“This is an exciting result because it shows how simple mechanical changes in the adhesive system explains how large geckos can climb effectively," explains Professor Duncan J. Irschick, co-author of the study.

They based their hypothesis on recent work which showed that man-made adhesives inspired by gecko's adaptations get stronger as they are made stiffer, or less compliant.

"Prior theory has shown that synthetic adhesive systems become more powerful if they are stiffer, and we wanted to see if this theory was upheld in living animals," Prof Irschick says. 

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