Cave Woman

摘要

Jack bradley cave is not on any map of Kentucky. To get there, you have to drive over Pulaski County's winding roads, pass some sagging trailer homes with rusted cars out front, then get out of the car and cut across Bradley's cornfield. At the edge of his tree line is a forbidding 4-foot hole in the ground. Hazel Barton, a 33-year-old biology professor at Northern Kentucky University, shows up on a February afternoon with a merry band of five male undergraduates. Like most of the hundreds of thousands of caves around the world, this one is relatively untouched, which is what makes Barton so excited. "Caves are one of the last unexplored environments left on Earth," she says. They also may hold the secret to finding powerful new antibiotics.