Here is a couple tips to help keep the air cleaner!

1. Keep your car tuned up and the air in your tires properly inflated

2. Plan one trip to take care of multiple errands

3. Reduce time on the road by shopping online!

4. When possible ride a bike or public transpertation

5. Use pump sprays instead of earosols

6. Store paints and solvents in a air tight container

7. Use a manual or electric mower

8. Reduce reuse and recylce at work

9. Look for more options to become “Green Friendly”

Having sex is like playing bridge. If you don’t have a good partner, you’d
better have a good hand.

John Gray in “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” suggested men respond to stressful situations by withdrawing or “retreating into their cave.” What if you really could retreat to a cave which offered escape without compromising on comfort? From a thousand year old cave carved out of volcanic rock in beautiful Turkey, to going “down under” in an Australian desert-like opal mining town or an ancient fortress carved from rock in France, there’s plenty of options for the adventurous traveler looking to get in touch with their Neanderthal roots… and without compromising on luxury.

Online resources like Unusual Hotels of the World offer information on many of these below-ground destinations. Here’s a taste of our favorites:

American cave retreats

Kokopelli’s Cave Bed & Breakfast is in Farmington, New Mexico and is a privately-owned sandstone hotel which was excavated and blasted out in 1980. This 1650 square foot, one bedroom inn is 70 feet below the ground with the entrance located in a cliff face. Getting to the entrance of Kokopelli sounds difficult (75 steps and a further 110 steps on an inclined path) but with unparalleled views from the cave and cliff tops of Shiprock and the Chuska mountains on the Navajo Indian reservation in northwest New Mexico or the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, it sounds as though it is worth the exertion. The cave has carpet, hot and cold running water and a fully appointed kitchen and the cascading waterfall-style shower and flagstone hot tub may help soothe aching legs after the climb down. Just remember, you’ll need to get up again.

Beckham Creek Cave Hotel is located in Buffalo National River country, Arkansas and is one very luxurious cave hotel. The Cave House is on a 530 acre estate and features natural ‘living’ cave walls and ceilings. The windows ensure that lots of natural light enter the living areas during the day and with central heating, you will stay comfortable throughout the day and night. If you can tear yourself outside, away from the games room, complete with billiard table, then you may enjoy a spot of hiking or fishing on the estate. The house has five bedrooms, each with bath and has a kitchen with everything required for the creation of a simple breakfast or a nighttime banquet. Rooms start at USD $1000 per night.

Turkish Delight

Cappadocia is located in the middle Anatolian region of Turkey. Due to volcanic eruptions millions of years ago, the Cappadocian landscape is covered with hundreds of volcanic pillars from which, over the ages, people have carved out to form houses and other buildings. Elkep Evi was once an ancient cave dwelling and has been transformed into a 9-room (including two suites) bed and breakfast hotel. Located in Urgup, Cappadocia, all the rooms at Elkep Evi have en-suites and most have a terrace which allows the visitor sweeping views over this truly fascinating land.

The Gamirasu Cave Hotel is also located in Urgup, Turkey and is guaranteed to take your breath away. This former monastery still has a 12th century Byzantine Christian church attached to it and has, in the past, also been used as a prison. The hotel has eighteen rooms including a family suite and has all the features you would expect in a hotel but is set in a fascinating location, with a hiking trail which begins at the front door and winds through a valley.

Cool off “down under”

In the summer months, average temperatures in Central Australia can be as high as 36.2 degrees Celsius (97.16 degrees Fahrenheit) so sleeping in the cool of a cave makes a lot of sense. The hotel rooms at the Coober Pedy’s Desert Cave Hotel are not only cool, but are also quiet, airy and dark. Coober Pedy is an opal mining town in outback Australia and has lured opal miners and tourists for many years but it is semi-desert country so it gets very hot. The hotel has nineteen underground rooms but you can choose to sleep above ground as well. There’s also a bar, café and shops and a pool and gym if you’re feeling energetic.

In another Australian state; New South Wales, is the White Cliffs Underground Motel , a 3-star hotel with 30 underground rooms, some of which feature unpainted walls to highlight the beauty of the rock. The rooms or ‘dugouts’ also have in-built shafts so natural light can enter the room and the hotel has a swimming pool and its own restaurant and bar.

Ooh La La?

Fancy a vacation to Provence, France but looking for accommodation other than a French villa or pensione? Le Prince Noir in Les Baux, Provence, France offers a truly unique experience. This hotel sits on top of an ancient Roman fortress and the rooms are carved into the rock face. The hotel offers three rooms all with ensuite and can sleep up to four people. Legend has it that one of the founders of Les Baux is one of the three kings of the Nativity, Balthazar and his family arms features a comet with 16 rays which represents the star that guided him all those years ago.

Suppose we were time travellers, and could transmit one key item of modern knowledge to a great intellect of the ancient world - Aristotle, for instance. What would we choose to tell them, a single sentence that would most transform their view of the world? We could tell them the scale of the universe - that the stars are other suns, and that there are billions of them. Or that all species emerged, over billions of years, via natural selection.

But I think what would enlighten them most of all would be the knowledge that all the stuff in the world is made of atoms - not of earth, air, fire and water, as the ancients believed. But what are the atoms themselves made of? Are they like an onion-skin with layer upon layer of structure, or will we soon reach bedrock, in the sense that the stuff of the universe will be fully understood?

It might seem paradoxical that the biggest scientific instruments of all are needed in order to probe the very smallest things in nature. The micro-world is inherently “fuzzy” - the sharper the detail we wish to study, the higher the energy that is required and the bigger the accelerator that is needed.

The Cern laboratory in Geneva was set up in 1955, to bring together European scientists who wished to pursue research into the nuclear and sub-nuclear world. Physicists then had greater clout than other scientists because the memory of their role in the second world war was fresh in people’s minds. Through a succession of projects - each too expensive for any single European country to fund - Cern has been at the forefront of endeavour to build ever more powerful accelerators probing ever smaller scales. This culminates in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Within its circular tunnel, 27km in circumference, protons hurtle around at 99.99% of the speed of light. The amazing technology combines huge civil engineering with microscopic precision.

Cern is a triumph of European collaboration, but it now has a global ascendancy, and is the premier laboratory in the world for particle physics. When it switches on this summer, the LHC will generate, in a microscopic region where beams of particles collide, a concentration of energy that has never been achieved before - a concentration that mimics, in microcosm, the conditions that prevailed in the universe during the first trillionth of a second after the big bang.

The impacts may generate particles of a novel kind never before detected in a laboratory (and which may even never have existed on the earth before). This possibility is especially interesting, because one of the most perplexing features of our universe is that there is a lot of material which isn’t made up of ordinary atoms. It’s possible that this “dark matter” consists of particles that are left over from the fiery beginning of the universe. The LHC may allow scientists to create and study these particles.

There are strengthening links between the sciences of the very large and the very small. It’s even possible that the LHC might tell us about the nature of space itself. In everyday life we regard space as dull vacuum. But this dismissive attitude is as misleading as it would be for us to believe that invisible clear air is less substantial that the clouds floating in it. Most theorists suspect that space has an intricate structure - that it is “grainy” - but that this structure is on a much finer scale than any known subatomic particle. The structure could be of an exotic kind: extra dimensions, over and above the three that we are used to (up and down, backward and forward, left and right).

A polished surface may seem smooth, but when viewed under a microscope it has bumps and dips in it: likewise our space, viewed on an ultra-fine scale, may have extra dimensions. The favoured view is that these extra dimensions only manifest themselves on scales a trillion trillion times smaller than atoms, and one of the most fascinating outcomes from the LHC could be the first evidence for them.

Whatever comes out of the LHC, the results will be a stimulus to next-generation Einsteins who will achieve the next steps in a quest, which started in ancient times, to understand the building blocks of the natural world.