geekosystem

Ants do all sorts of things we think of as human activities. Some of them are kind of endearing, like keeping farms of aphids. Others remind us of our ugly side, and none more so than the work of Protomognathus americanus, the American slavemaker ant, which has evolved to stop foraging for food, and instead steal larvae from the colonies of other ant species, and then raise them as slaves. A recent study demonstrated that, unlike some newscasters we know, enslaved ants don't take life in captivity lying down, instead working to destroy the slavemaker colony and killing up to three out of four of their captors' children.

Completed in 1929, the Fort Steuben Bridge spanned the Ohio River for some 83 years before it finally met its match in the form of 153 pounds of explosives. The decision to do away with the bridge apparently came from mounting concerns over its structural integrity, and decreased traffic in the wake of increased weight restrictions for vehicles crossing the bridge. It'd also become functionally obsolete, on account of the completion of the nearby Veterans Memorial Bridge in 1990. With all that against it, there wasn't much else to do with the crossing except blow it to hell. See another view of the demolition, after the break.

An unlucky man from Johnstown, Ohio came to find that his computer had broken. In order to get it fixed, he decided he would ship it off to Sony for repairs. As per their instructions, once he contacted him, he patiently waited for them to send him a return label that he could use to mail his broken computer. They mailed him some boxes alright, the problem was that they were filled with other people's broken computers.

After receiving a call from a customer who believed he was a Sony technician, the man called Sony to resolve the issue. He suspected that perhaps his address had merely been swapped with someone else's; in actuality, it was a little worse. Apparently Sony had begun printing his address on the return labels they were sending to other customers with broken computers. Sony assured him they would remedy the situation but that there were at least 5 more computers that were already in transit. Hope he's got some storage space.

Local news coverage of the story after the jump.

On Wednesday, thousands of Springfield, Ohio residents were left without power when a 275-foot smokestack being demolished fell the wrong way, knocking down two 12,500 volt power lines. According to the demolition company that handled the work at the former Ohio Edison Mad River Power Plant (not a nuclear power plant --Ed.), the explosives detonated correctly, "but an undetected crack on the south side of the tower pulled it in a different direction. 'Nobody's happy with things that go wrong in life, and sometimes it's out of our hands and beyond anybody's prediction. ... We're all extremely thankful no one was injured,' Kelly told The Columbus Dispatch." (via CBS, B&P, MSNBC)