Cave

'Cave of Forgotten Dreams' MPAA rating: G Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes Playing: At ArcLight Cinemas, Hollywood

There were two questions heading into the xx's set on the main stage of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival on Saturday night. Could a band that's evolving by stripping more out of its songs hold the attention of a large festival crowd? And would R&B singer Solange make a guest appearance for a second week in a row? Both were clearly answered. Solange unfortunately didn't appear, once again making Weekend 1 the hotter ticket, but the xx continues to transfix by turning its songs into mini pieces of performance art. The xx didn't duet.

Let's be clear: That Harvard scientist you heard about is NOT seeking an "adventurous woman" to give birth to a "cloned cave baby. " But that was the juicy story making its way around Web on Tuesday . The blowup began when the German magazine Der Spiegel published an interview with Harvard synthetic biologist George Church, who is well-known for his genome sequencing effort, the Personal Genome Project, and for all sorts of other unusual and...

Twenty years ago, veteran caver Chris Nicola received an offer from a Ukrainian friend to explore the well-known gypsum giant caves in the western part of the European country. Nicola quickly accepted the invitation. "My family on my mother's side had Cossack roots and they were known to come from the Ukraine," the New Yorker said over the phone this week. "I thought in the back of my mind I could do some family research. " But his main reason was to visit the 77-mile long Priest's Grotto cave, which is part of an extensive gypsum cave system.

The Chumash tribe has expressed interest in buying a 450-acre slice of a contaminated nuclear research facility in the hills between the Simi and San Fernando valleys, hoping to preserve a cave that its members consider sacred. The tribe's inquiries about acquiring part of the 2,849-acre Santa Susana Field Laboratory have stirred concern among some residents who fear the purchase might be a back door to building a casino. "I very much respect their desire to protect sacred sites but I want to make sure any such action precludes the establishment of a casino," Ventura County Supervisor Linda Parks said.

Between wrapping her 124-date world tour in January and promoting her new 3-D movie, Katy Perry has had an unrelenting schedule this year. And that's not even taking into account her pending divorce from comedian Russell Brand, which it seems the pop star has barely had time to process. So it's no surprise that at the premiere of her documentary, "Katy Perry: Part of Me," the 27-year-old acknowledged she couldn't wait to go on a vacation. "I think I'm gonna go into a cave after this," the musician said while standing on a pink carpet Tuesday afternoon, before performing an eight-song set for around 5,000 screaming fans on Hollywood Boulevard.

The remains of 58 people, believed to be non-Serbian civilians, have been exhumed from a cave in northwestern Bosnia-Herzegovina and at a site near Sarajevo, the capital, said Amor Masovic, the head of the Muslim-Croat Commission for Missing Persons. The remains of 41 victims, most of them presumed to have been killed in a Serbian prison camp during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, were retrieved from the cave near the town of Bosanska Krupa, about 130 miles northwest of Sarajevo.

Archaeologists have discovered a cave underneath one of the world's oldest churches and say it may have been an even more ancient site of Christian worship. Archaeologist Abdel-Qader al-Housan, head of the Rihab Center for Archaeological Studies, said this week that the cave was unearthed in the northern Jordanian city of Rihab after three months of excavation and shows evidence of early Christian rituals. The cave is under St. George's Church, which some think was built in the year 230, though the date is widely disputed.

I think Maria Elena Fernandez's parents have it right ("The All-Male Clan of the Cave Bears," March 20). What her papa said hits the nail on the head about fear and sharing those fears with the woman a man loves. It seems that those guys who focus on this introspective, soul-searching stuff are really in love with someone else rather than their partners -- themselves! When I need to, I retreat and come out refreshed with a new perspective. But since we are Latinos, what we must have closest to our hearts and souls is treating people with respect, civility and honor.

At least 19 people died when a gold mine in Burkina Fasso caved in last week, Ouagadougou radio said Wednesday. Officials are unsure now how many miners were inside the Hora mine, and the death toll could be higher than the 19 known dead.

NEW YORK - Nick Cave, the moody Australian statesman of majestic post-punk folk rock, was only midway through answering the second question of an early interview in Manhattan when he stopped the conversation to try to clarify a point. Settling in at a corner table in the sumptuous lobby of a boutique hotel downtown, dressed in a striped satin shirt and black sport coat, Cave had been describing the improvisational approach he and his band, the Bad Seeds, took to writing the nine songs featured on their latest studio album, "Push the Sky Away.

It's not a good omen for "The Croods," about a likable family of Paleolithic cave dwellers, when a joke about "the first joke" falls flat. I don't fault the actors. The character voices provided by Nicolas Cage as the Croods' cautious dad, Grug; Emma Stone as Eep, his rebellious teenager, desperate to get out of the cave; Ryan Reynolds as Guy, the outsider who sees the future; Catherine Keener as ever-patient mom Ugga; and Cloris Leachman as cranky Gran are spot on. But "The Croods" was primed for problems before its 3-D characters found themselves right in the middle of the first continental divide.

In May 2005, DreamWorks Animation SKG and Aardman Animations announced that, following their collaborations on "Chicken Run," "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" and "Flushed Away," their next joint venture would be "Crood Awakening," a stop-motion comedy about a caveman living in a small village with a prehistoric genius. John Cleese of Monty Python fame and Kirk DeMicco ("Racing Stripes") were hired to write the script. And now nearly eight years later, a vastly different version of the tale is opening Friday.

AUSTIN, Texas -- There's no shortage of grizzled veterans at South by Southwest this year, from Depeche Mode to Iggy and the Stooges to Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, the last of whom opened NPR Music's jam-packed showcase Wednesday night at Stubb's. For a good 45 minutes, in fact, Cave and his not-so-merry men were playing at the same time as the Stooges, right across Red River Street at the Mohawk. Alas, an old-dude bro-down never took place. Maybe next year. Wearing his customary slim-fit dark suit, black hair swept back from his high forehead, Cave sauntered onstage at Stubb's before sundown, which as you can imagine was not ideal.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Outspoken rock 'n' roll balladeer Nick Cave traced his beginnings from “rural Australia” to the more comforting confines of his own imagination in a sprawling, hour-long chat at the South by Southwest music conference here. The standing-room-only Tuesday conversation focused largely on Cave's biographical history. The facts of the real world, however, weren't of as much interest to Cave as the more abstract matters of art. Speaking of his relationship with spouse Susie Bick, Cave said, “I feel that I know her better in the songs that I write about her than I do in real life.” Speaking of wanting to leave rural Australia for Melbourne, and then later Melbourne for London and then London for New York, Cave said, “Culturally, life has been a series of disappointments.

Dana Baldwin visited the Ajanta Caves, about 200 miles northeast of Mumbai, during a trip to India in November. The caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, were carved out of a cliff about 2,000 year ago and house early Buddhist artworks, some of which are said to present the start of classical Indian art. "I don't use the world 'awesome' much, but it applies here," Baldwin said. The La Jolla resident used a Canon EOS 5D Mark II. To submit your photos, visit our reader photo gallery . When you upload your photos, tell us where they were taken and when.

A Texas firm will be fined $231,400, a record for a construction company, in the case of a worker killed when a 10-foot-deep trench caved in on him in March, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration said. ABC Utilities Services Inc. of Fort Worth was accused of 28 safety violations. OSHA said that the firm had consistently ignored federal regulations requiring trenches to be shored to prevent cave-ins and that another of its workers had been killed in a similar accident in 1983.

Geologists, biologists and other scientists convened this week in Paris to discuss fungus stains that threaten France's prehistoric Lascaux cave drawings. Black stains have spread across the cave's murals of bulls, felines and other images, and scientists have been hard-pressed to halt their creep. Rising temperatures have complicated matters by stopping air from circulating inside the caverns, said Marc Gauthier, who heads the Lascaux Caves International Scientific Committee.

Those familiar with the work of musician Nick Cave will appreciate the juxtaposition of him working with a youth choir. The oft-menacing Australian-born singer, songwriter, screenwriter and novelist has long had a wicked streak. He's bellowed in deep voice of bloody hands, junkies ascending to heaven, embodied in song-damaged women, horrible men and their oft-poisonous interactions.  Yet there he was, the gangly 55-year-old who over a dozen-plus studio albums has walked a singular path through rock, country and blues, addressing about two dozen preteens between songs, apparently worried about their bedtime.

Songwriter, novelist, singer, screenwriter and dramatist Nick Cave's 15th record with his longtime backing band the Bad Seeds, "Push the Sky Away," is not a work to be appreciated casually. Cave delves into a meandering, meditative world that rarely offers the kind of hooks or tethers that dictate toe-tapping singalongs. But Cave fans understand that following such a mercurial and curious artist dictates adjusting expectations, adapting to new scenarios and, most important, listening closely.