geekosystem

One of the great things about setting aside land as a sanctuary for one creature is that it helps to preserve a whole ecosystem full of plants and animals -- some of which we may not even know exist yet. Take for example the two new species of spider -- both among the world's tiniest -- that were just discovered on the grounds of a panda sanctuary in southwest China. One of these little guys averages less than a millimeter across. You could eat, like, 50 of them in your sleep and never even know it!

A Chinese national the government suspected of trying to smuggle NASA secrets out of the United States and back to his home country has been brought up on charges, and it's looking like things are going to go easier than anticipated for him. That's because former NASA researcher Bo Jiang's laptop wasn't full of the sensitive material that authorities thought they would find. Instead, it was full of the same things you'd expect to find on pretty much anyone's laptop -- pirated movies and pornography.

In case you weren't already aware, a 6.6-magnitude earthquake hit a rural area of China's Sichuan province at 8AM local time on Saturday. The exact number of dead and injured isn't clear just yet, but many are reporting at least 100 dead and many times more than that injured. A little strange levity came out of this, though: One reporter -- identified as Chen Ying -- had her marriage ceremony interrupted by the quake, and went on to then cover it in her wedding dress.

On the off chance you needed another reason not to use live eels in sex play, consider the story of a man in China's Guangdong province who was hospitalized after an eel -- apparently being used in sex play to imitate a porn the man had been watching -- slithered up his anus and proceeded to wreak havoc on his innards as it tried to chew its way out of his body to freedom. Which, if you're the eel, is a perfectly reasonable reaction here.

The Europeans get all the press. They've got all that history of old empires and discoverers and globe-spanning explorers. Columbus, Copernicus, Magellan. Ah, but who's writing the history? It may just be that Europe's got all the PR. There's two sides to every coin. What if the history books are wrong sometimes? What if, for example, China was out and about discovering stuff decades before Christopher Columbus even boarded a ship? Anthropologists have just unearthed a 600-year-old coin near Kenya that proves that China was hip to trading a long, long time ago.

Space debris is fascinating, fun, and sometimes scary. The meteorite pieces that rained down on Russia’s Chelyabinsk region last month hit with the force of 30 atomic bombs, but these were not the largest we've seen or recovered. On this day in 1976, a meteor entered Earth's atmosphere, broke up, and erupted into a massive fireball over the outskirts of Jilin City in northern China. Around four metric tons of extraterrestrial rock "scattered radially in all directions."

Chinese vendors are the place to go if you're looking for counterfeit merchandise. The nation that practically invented the knockoff Coach bag has raised counterfeiting goods to a sublime art form, going so far as to open entirely fake Apple stores so convincing they fool even their own employees. The latest story of a fake product coming out of China, though, has left us too impressed to offer anything but a slow clap as at least one street vendor there has started selling fake walnuts -- walnut shells with the nut taken out and replaced with a less tasty chunk of concrete.

Good news for Chinese gamers! China is thinking about lifting its ban on game consoles. The news is just speculation right now, and it's based on the Playstation 3 receiving a quality certification from the Chinese government, but even that speculation has been enough to bump up stock prices for Sony and Nintendo, both of which are champing at the bit to enter the Chinese market. Obviously, a lifting of the ban would help those companies greatly. It might also destroy the mental and physical development of Chinese children, since that's what the ban was trying to protect.

American companies outsource jobs to places like China because they can hire people to do the same jobs their employees do for less money. One developer's job was outsourced last year, but it wasn't by his company. He did it himself. Someone hired a company in China to do his job for him, and paid them a fraction of his salary. While his bosses thought he was working, he was just screwing around online. Is there a way to type out a slow clap? Because that's what I'm giving this guy. Bravo, sir. Bravo.

Smog is increasingly a public health concern in many Chinese industrial centers and metropolitan areas, as you can see from the above picture of what we're told is Shanghai. That concern took on an unexpected dimension earlier this week, though, as smog in the nation's Zheijiang province prevented residents from noticing that a building was actively burning down. On Monday, a fire at a furniture factory in the province burned out of control for three full hours before anyone even noticed the smoke through the smog that regularly blankets the region.

Customs agents in Hong Kong busted an ambitious smuggler carrying about $1 million worth of illicit cargo, including dried endangered seahorses and crocodile meat. Though it's an abhorrent crime and we hope the folks behind it are locked up for a good long time, as poachers should be, we can't help but grant the smugglers points for common sense. After all, if you're going to try and smuggle a crocodile into a place, it's really best to do so once someone more capable has already converted the creature into a series of steaks and fillets. Anything else just sounds exceptionally dangerous.

Never in a million years would we have guessed that panda bears, the very same creatures that tumble down slides and make us lose all sense of personal dignity over their irresistible cuteness, hold the very key to mankind's survival within their own bodies. It may sound like the trite plot of the next Kung Fu Panda flick -- we can only pray that doesn't actually happen -- but, we assure you friends, this is legitimate science. Dr. Xiuwen Yan of China's Life Sciences College of Nanjing Agricultural University discovered that pandas naturally produce a potent antibiotic in their bloodstream that can wipe out various forms of bacteria and fungi. Scientists are eager to analyze and fully understand this panda antibiotic, hoping that it will be instrumental in the fight against known superbugs of notorious resilience.

Not too long ago, the Chinese government had been toying with the notion of approving a proposal requiring real-name registration for Internet users when working with service providers and similar vendors. This procured registration information would then be stored in a data system that could possibly be accessed by the authorities to monitor the online day-to-day activities of the general public. Many concerned citizens feared that this proposed controversial move would be an encroachment on the free speech online anonymity brings -- especially in a nation notorious for censorship crackdowns on those that dispense unpopular opinions against China's ruling body. It looks like those fears have been made real since the government has sanctioned the real-name registration proposal, putting the public's private affairs on shaky ground.

Fifteen people were injured last week when a 33-ton aquarium exploded in the middle of a Shanghai shopping center. The injuries sustained are reported mainly as cuts from the shattered glass, and not from, as one would suspect, sharks. The aquarium was installed two years ago, and had been a popular attraction at the mall until it exploded, spilling fish, turtles, and sharks into the shopping center. That tends to drive down foot traffic.

Another week, another accusation of illegal child labor in China. This particular claim, from China Labor Watch, is interesting due to the fact that it concerns Samsung. The technology company conducted an investigation of its own back in September, and they recently claimed that they didn't find any instances of child labor. China Labor Watch claims that they found three underage girls working at HTNS Shenzhen Co., a Samsung supplier. Samsung denies these allegations, because of course they do.