The Cave of Crystals is an underground cavern filled with tree-size gypsum crystals, including some of the largest natural crystals ever found. The cave is located around 980 feet (300 meters) deep and is connected to a lead, zinc and silver mine in Naica, 65 miles (105 kilometers) southeast of Chihuahua City.  The mine was flooded almost 10 years ago after workers accidentally broke into an aquifer, but the Cave of Crystals sits higher in the ground, meaning the water didn’t reach it. 

Miners discovered the Cave of Crystals by chance in 2000 while drilling a side tunnel to help ventilation in the mine. When they stepped inside, they discovered a chamber packed with enormous, milky-white crystals — the largest measuring over 37 feet (11 meters) long and 3.3 feet (1 m) wide. The crystals are made of selenite gypsum, a sulfate mineral that forms from salts dissolved in groundwater. It is so soft you can scratch it with a fingernail.

Related: Water leaking into Earth’s core may have birthed a mysterious layer that churns out crystals

Mining operations in Naica began in 1974, and several crystal-filled caves have since been discovered — including the Cave of Swords, which is studded from floor to ceiling with dagger-like crystals. But the Cave of Crystals is by far the biggest, stretching 360 feet (110 m) across with a maximum volume of 210,000 cubic feet (6,000 cubic meters) — more than twice the size of an Olympic swimming pool. The cave is shaped like a horseshoe and carved out of limestone rock. 

“It’s the Sistine Chapel of crystals,” Juan Manuel García-Ruiz, a geologist with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and at the University of Granada in Spain, who has studied the cave, told National Geographic in 2007. 

The cave sits on a fault line and above a magma reservoir buried 2 to 3 miles (3 to 5 km) beneath Naica. Roughly 26 million years ago, magma rose from this chamber, forcing mineral-rich waters upward through cracks in the rock. The scalding water opened caverns in the limestone and formed deposits that crystallized over thousands of years as it slowly cooled. Temperatures later stabilized at around 136 degrees Fahrenheit (58 degrees Celsius), creating ideal conditions for gypsum crystals to grow to mammoth proportions from a mineral called anhydrite. 

The conditions in the cave are just right for crystals, but they are deadly to humans. Temperatures stayed the same after the water drained but humidity reached over 90%. At that humidity level, sweating has no cooling effect on the body. As a result, people need proper protection to stay in the cave for longer than 10 minutes. Walking among the crystals is also dangerous, because the beams are slick and with condensation and extremely slippery.

The crystals are growing more slowly now they aren’t submerged, and their appearance will likely change over time as they become progressively more dehydrated. But for now, the cave “is OK,” García-Ruiz told Live Science in an email.

A new X-ray space telescope is broadening our understanding of the universe with just three dozen pixels — really putting smartphones with as many as 12 million to 48 million pixels to shame!

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NASA spacecraft known as the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM; pronounced “crism”) launched in Sept. 2023. Its mission is to study the universe in “soft X-rays,” referring to electromagnetic radiation with energies around 5,000 times greater than that of visible light. The way XRISM works has to do with an instrument called “Resolve.”

The really stunning thing about Resolve is it allows XRISM to widen humanity’s celestial understanding with a fraction of the pixels used by the screen of the original Nintendo Gameboy, released in 1989. With Resolve in hand, the ultimate aim of the XRISM mission is to allow scientists to discover more about some of the hottest regions of the cosmos, as well as some of the largest structures in the universe and the feeding supermassive black holes that sit in the active hearts of many galaxies. 

Related: Hubble Space Telescope pauses science due to gyroscope issue

“That may sound impossible, but it’s actually true,” Richard Kelley, the U.S. principal investigator for XRISM at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. “The Resolve instrument gives us a deeper look at the makeup and motion of X-ray-emitting objects using technology invented and refined at Goddard over the past several decades.”

A space mission with plenty of Resolve

To be fair, it might be inappropriate to compare Resolve to a smartphone camera. 

The 6-by-6-pixel microcalorimeter array, which measures just 0.2 inches by 0.2 inches (0.5 centimeters by 0.5 centimeters), makes Resolve way more than a camera.

“Its detector takes the temperature of each X-ray that strikes it,” Brian Williams, NASA’s XRISM project scientist, explained in a statement. “We call Resolve a microcalorimeter spectrometer because each of its 36 pixels is measuring tiny amounts of heat delivered by each incoming X-ray, allowing us to see the chemical fingerprints of elements making up the sources in unprecedented detail.”

To produce a spectrum of X-ray sources between 400 and 12,000 electron volts, the entire Resolve detection has to be kept extremely cold at a temperature of minus 459.58 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273.1 degrees Celsius). That is a fraction of a degree warmer than absolute zero, the theoretical temperature at which all atomic movement would cease.

Resolve is so precise that it can detect a target celestial object’s motion, giving astronomers a 3D view of that target. For galaxies, this means the motions of hotter gas glowing at higher energies can be distinguished from that of colder gas. 

These X-ray maps should allow scientists to track the motion of matter blasted out by stars dying explosive supernova deaths — a pretty big deal for a little device with just 36 pixels.

A 23-year-old woman from Zengeza, Chitungwiza, who has been locked in the family house for three years, may soon taste freedom if her romantic relationship with a local pastor culminates in marriage.

Talent Gent’s grandmother, Gogo Mushore (71) has kept her locked up in the house saying there was a rogue man in the neighbourhood who wanted to abduct her because she turned down his love proposal.

However, Gogo Mushore has allowed some church pastors to conduct prayers for the family, though in most cases, the prayers are conducted on open ground and not in the house.