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April 20th, 2024

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Can't Possibly Be True | An 'Ant' Version of Hell

News of the Weird by Chuck Shepherd

By News of the Weird by Chuck Shepherd

Published Feb. 1, 2017

Can't Possibly Be True | An 'Ant' Version of Hell


Kids as young as 6 who live on a cliff top in China's Atule'er village in Sichuan province will no longer have to use flexible vine-based ladders to climb down and up the 2,600-foot descent from their homes to school. Beijing News disclosed in October, in a report carried by CNN, that a sturdy steel ladder was being built to aid the 400 villagers after breathtaking photographs of them making the treacherous commute surfaced on the internet earlier this year [http://cnn.it/2f2PCon] [CNN, 10-26-2016].


Researchers in Poland reported in August the "survival" of a colony of ants that wandered unsuspectingly into an old nuclear weapon bunker and became trapped. When researchers first noticed in 2013, they assumed the ants would soon die, either freezing or starving to death, but, returning in 2015 and 2016, they found the population stable. Their only guess: New ants were falling into the bunker, "replacing" the dead ones. Thus, ants condemned to the bunker slowly starve, freezing, in total darkness, until newly condemned ants arrive and freeze and starve in total darkness -- and on and on. [Science Daily (8-30-2016) via WeirdUniverse.net (9-16-2016)]

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