geekosystem

For some species of social spiders, it seems the family that lives together, kills together. A recent study in the journal Animal Behavior shows that young spiders who live with alongside their older siblings grow up big and strong, at least in part because they're dining on the leftovers brought home by their older siblings.

In an embarrassing turn of events, an Australian politician was injured during a run-in with a kangaroo. While the kangaroo that attacked Canberra politician Shane Rattenbury was reportedly just spooked by its unexpected encounter with a human, we can't help but wonder if the menacing marsupial didn't have loftier political goals in mind.

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) have reportedly arrested a 24-year-old hacker they claim is a leader in the LulzSec organization. We're loath to be the ones to break it to them, but LulzSec isn't really a "leaders" sort of organization, as other parties associated with the group are making clear on Twitter today.

"Showrooming" is the process by which customers go to a store to get their grubby little hands on a product before going to order that product online for less money. Stores hate it, and would love it if you stopped doing it. Some stores try to offer better deals, or improve the buying experience, but one store's taking the opposite approach and charging customers a fee just to look around. You're doing it wrong.

As many as 15 employees at Western Australia's Agnew Gold Mine have lost their jobs after producing a video showing the world exactly what the Harlem Shake looks like underground -- pretty much exactly like it does everywhere else, but with way worse lighting. Our hearts go out to the workers, because losing a job is always pretty terrible. On the plus side, though, maybe now they can get new jobs that are not in mines, as working in a mine is also pretty terrible? Check out the video below and let us know if you think dancing topless in a gold mine should be a fireable offense.

Staff at Australia's Featherdale Wildlife Park are scratching their heads over the recent theft of one of their emus. How the bird burglars carried a bird the size of a small ostrich over an electrified barbed wire fence in the dead of night while avoiding a guard and security camera is one good question, but there's an even better one -- why would anyone steal an emu in the first place?

People can be touchy about air travel these days, so a shirt with the words "prepare to die" written on the front might not be the smartest choice of apparel for a trip through the friendly skies. "Prepare to die" sounds intimidating, but it's all about context. The phrase, "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die," is frankly downright inspiring, but when Wynand Mullins wore his The Princess Bride shirt with that line onto a plane, he found out the other passengers weren't fans, and he was ultimately asked to remove it.

It's hot in Australia right now. How hot is it? So hot that they had to add new colors to their weather maps to show how hot it's going to be next week. A shade of purple was added to denote temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius, or 122 Fahrenheit. Sometimes adding new colors to things can be exciting. Remember how happy everyone was when they added a blue M&M? Or how much cooler things were once the Green Power Ranger showed up? Now imagine wearing a Power Ranger costume and trying to eat melted M&Ms in 122 degree heat. That's a lot less exciting.

For the second time in just a few months, things at the Melbourne International Airport parking lot ground to a standstill this week as police and animal control officers worked to capture a kangaroo that had entered the garage and just started hopping around like it owned the place. Keep reading for footage of the rogue marsupial and a final answer to that eternal question: just how many Australian police officers does it take to wrangle a kangaroo? Because we count at least four.

We love a good heist story here at Geekosystem. We even love ridiculous heist stories, which is good, because this story is exactly that -- Ridiculous. Two men in Australia have been arrested after tunneling into a KFC and holding it up, making off with thousands of dollars, and we assume the Colonel's secret recipe. That's silly enough, but the pair was actually trying to tunnel into the adjacent jewelry store. Better still, this marks their third unsuccessful attempt at robbing that same jewelry store. They're persistence is admirable, even if their burglary skills are somewhat lacking.

I've never been to Australia, but I have seen the Australian anthropological documentary Beyond Thunderdome, so I think I have a pretty good handle on what things are like down under. It's basically one big Rube Goldberg device set into motion to kill you, right? Poisonous spiders, poisonous snakes, poisonous marauders hunting for gas. It can be a dangerous place, and if you have an iPhone it's even more dangerous. Police in Mildura, Victoria are warning travelers that if they use Apple Maps to get there, they could die.

Even in its ancient days, the continent of Australia was renowned for its bizarre menagerie of marsupial mammals that beggar description. The one major difference between now and then is that nearly all marsupials at the time were considerably larger and forced to reside on the ground. That said, fossil researchers from the University of New South Wales and the University of Adelaide recently declared that the wombat-like marsupial Nimbadon lavarackorum lived among the treetops in spite of its massive weight and size.

Your hopes of ever visiting a real-life Jurassic Park -- yes, we all still hold onto that dream, minus the rampaging dinosaurs part -- may have just been dashed upon the jagged cliffs of science fact. A team of researchers from Australia's Murdoch University released a study today suggesting that the very longest DNA could survive in a fossil intact is about 6.8 million years, meaning that giant lizards from the Cretaceous period are not viable candidates for cloning, no matter how sweet that would be.

Australia is notorious for television piracy. This is likely because a number of shows, produced elsewhere, are then delayed during transit for whatever reason. This time discrepancy is a perfect excuse for piracy; why wait a week when others already have it and the show is available everywhere online? In an effort to curb this behavior, the Australian broadcaster, ABC, has announced that they'll be hosting the premiere of Doctor Who -- and each subsequent episode -- on their digital iview service within hours of the show being available in the UK.

Australian authorities began receiving notifications Monday morning that a number of citizens had received death threats via text message. Every message received was identical and was what is referred to as a "Hitman Scam." This type of scam has been seen before, but rarely on so large a scale.