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Pre-Columbian tunnel complex discovered in southeastern Peru Story Filed: Thursday, August 15, 2002 8:40 AM EST Lima, Aug 15, 2002 (EFE via COMTEX) -- A pre-Columbian tunnel complex has been discovered in southeastern Peru, officials said. Chumbivilcas Mayor Florentino Layme told Panamericana Television that the tunnels were discovered in the southeastern province of Chumbivilcas, some 1,300 kilometers (about 808) miles southeast of the capital. The tunnels apparently were made by the Wari people who lived in the area prior to the emergence of the Inca empire and are located under the village of Lliqui. The walls of the tunnels, or...

An ancient ceremonial building that was built thousands of years ago in northwestern Peru's La Libertad region was decorated with a painting of a spider deity clutching a knife. Archaeologists discovered the mural in November 2020, after local farmers damaged the temple structure during the expansion of their sugar cane and avocado plantations. When scientists inspected the monument ("huaca" in the Indigenous Quechuan family of languages), they found a figure painted against a white background on the southern wall, in shades of ocher, yellow and gray.... The wall holding the spider god mural faces a river bisecting the Virú Valley,...

Posted on a Facebook group called Tasmanian insects and spiders, the photos of the hairy huntsman spider is making headlines around the world. These viral photos are not for the faint-hearted. It shows a giant spider trying to eat a very small possum:It makes one wonder if the many-legged beast could make it away with a human baby – let's hope not! That doesn’t mean that you won’t find one in your flat or in the car. The Australian Museum states: “Huntsman spiders of many species sometimes enter houses. They are also notorious for entering cars, and being found hiding...

A Fresno man may have been taking the “kill it with fire” memes a bit too seriously when he set his parents’ home ablaze while trying to exterminate black widow spiders with a blowtorch, authorities said. ... Tuesday after he saw smoke coming from the attic of his parents’ home on East Mariners Circle in Woodward Lakes, a gated community in northeast Fresno ,,,“This is definitely not the preferred method to exterminate spiders in and around your home,”

Charles Darwin was onboard the HMS Beagle. He marveled at spiders that had landed on the ship after floating across huge ocean distances. “I caught some of the Aeronaut spiders which must have come at least 60 miles,” Darwin thought that electricity might be involved when he noticed that spider silk stands seemed to repel each other with electrostatic force... Peter Gorham, a physicist at the University of Hawaii, calculated that it was theoretically possible for spiders to use their silk to conduct static electricity as a means to fly, but Morley’s team is the first to confirm this in...

Sometimes, when it rains or when they feel the urge to migrate, spiders get out their little silk knapsacks, and balloon away. This ballooning behaviour is well understood by spider scientists, but researchers have recently discovered that electric fields can not only trigger the behaviour, but also provide lift – even without the slightest breeze... They travel via the atmospheric potential gradient (APG), an electric circuit between Earth and the ionosphere - the part of Earth's upper atmosphere that's ionised by solar radiation. Thunderstorms act like a giant battery for the APG, charging up and maintaining the electric fields in...

An eight-legged passenger caused a rollover crash Wednesday in Portland, Oregon that totaled a car, according to local authorities. The driver lost control after a spider fell from the rearview mirror, causing her to panic and swerve off the road into a ditch, reported news station WSBT.

A fear of spiders could be something we are born with rather than something we learn, according to a new scientific study. Research suggests that arachnophobia could be sown into our DNA as a result of survival instincts developed by our ancestors millions of years ago in Africa. The research suggests that spiders presented such a powerful threat to the survival of the first humans that the ability to spot them became an evolutionary necessity. more at link...

CENTER LINE, Mich. - A man tried to kill a spider at a gas station using a lighter causing a dangerous fire. Using a lighter to kill the bug, he started a blaze that quickly engulfed the gas pump.

A team of researchers working in Italy has found that simply spraying a spider with a carbon nanotube solution can cause the spider to spin stronger webs. In their paper they have uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, the team describes their experiments with both graphene and nanotube solutions and what happened when they sprayed it on ordinary spiders. As the researchers note, while silk production using silkworms has been quite successful, doing the same to harvest silk from spiders has not, (because of their territorial traits, the complex nature of the silk they make and their cannibalistic tendencies) which...

Man sets house afire trying to kill spider with lighter, spray paint SEATTLE -- Fire officials say a West Seattle man was using a lighter and a can of spray paint to kill a spider in his laundry room when the house went up in flames. Fire crews were called to a home in the 10200 block of 34th Avenue SW just before 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday. Firefighters originally battled the blaze from a distance after learning there may be ammunition inside. Crews were eventually able to extinguish the fire, but not before it did significant damage to the structure....

It's big, it's hairy, and it's venomous. The newest spider to give arachnophobes the willies, a tarantula named Poecilotheria rajaei has been discovered on the island nation of Sri Lanka. With a leg span of 8 inches (20 centimeters) and enough venom to kill mice, lizards, small birds and snakes, according to Sky News, the crawler is covered in subtle markings of gray, pink and daffodil yellow. "It can be quite attractive, unless spiders freak you out," Peter Kirk, editor of the British Tarantula Society journal, told the New York Daily News. Even the scientists studying the spiders admit to...

Even the elders in Pakistan's Sindh province admit they've never seen anything like it: whole trees encased in webs by millions of invading spiders. The mysterious phenomenon may be an unexpected result of the devastating floods that swept over Sindh in 2010, reports Wired. According to scientists, the spiders likely collected in the trees after fleeing from the rising floodwaters. At their height, the floods covered as much as a fifth of the country and displaced as many as 20 million people. One unexpected blessing from the bizarre post-flood event is that the hungry spiders seem to be significantly reducing...

The largest fossil spider uncovered to date once ensnared prey back in the age of dinosaurs, scientists find. The spider, named Nephila jurassica, was discovered buried in ancient volcanic ash in Inner Mongolia, China. Tufts of hairlike fibers seen on its legs showed this 165-million-year-old arachnid to be the oldest known species of the largest web-weaving spiders alive today — the golden orb-weavers, or Nephila, which are big enough to catch birds and bats, and use silk that shines like gold in the sunlight. The fossil was about as large as its modern relatives, with a body one inch (2.5...

The poisonous brown recluse spider is a very rare sight in New York City. So imagine one woman's surprise upon finding the venomous creature in her sink. Gail Ingram claims she found the first recluse spider in the sink of her apartment on Gramercy Park in Manhattan. And despite the wave of bedbugs sweeping through the city -- the latest such infestation was discovered in shock jock Howard Stern's office -- poisonous spiders are a different story entirely. Yet there it was. "I discovered a brown recluse spider in my kitchen sink,"

Students in a San Diego elementary school are getting a lesson in arachnophobia. Dozens of venomous black widow spiders have been found infesting classrooms in Pete W. Ross Elementary School, San Diego's KGTV reported. "The spiders... are coming out now from the bookshelves and the doorways and even up in the rafters," April Robertson, a third grade teacher at the school, told the station.

Scientists figure humans may be born with a fear of spiders and snakes, healthy phobias that up the odds of survival in the wild. It's not known how such an inborn fear might develop, however. Now researchers have proven that unborn crickets can gain a fear of spiders based on their mother's harrowing experiences. Scientists put pregnant crickets into terrariums containing a wolf spider. The spiders' fangs were covered with wax so the spiders could stalk but not kill the pregnant crickets. After the crickets laid their eggs, the researchers compared the behavior of the offspring with offspring whose mothers...

A man spent three days in hospital after being bitten by a venomous spider now spreading across the country because of global warming. The false widow spider, a relative of the black widow, bit Jason Fricker, 34, three times on the chest and stomach after it fell down the front of his shirt a week ago. By Sunday, after treatment as an outpatient the previous day, Mr Fricker, a father of two from Dorchester, was admitted as an emergency by doctors who believed the venom was attacking his nervous system, causing a heart attack. The creature that caused such damage,...

An Iraqi sheik claims Allah sent giant spiders to the town of Fallujah to help its residents fend off attacks by U.S. military forces. Sheik Mahdi Saleh Al-Sumide'i spoke to Syrian TV on Monday, claiming several Arab television stations videotaped the helpful arachnids. The interview is featured on the website of the Middle East Media Research Institute TV Monitor Project, or MEMRI TV. The organization translated the conversation into English. "They [the Americans] attacked Fallujah and tried to cause great damage to its residents," he explained. "They destroyed mosques and homes, killed women, children and youths, and spread corruption in...