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A rare golden lion tamarin monkey at the Bristol Zoo Gardens fell into a lake and was eaten by otters, a whistleblower told the Bristol Post. The incident is just one in a series of traumas that have befallen endangered species at the zoo in recent months.

The tamarin fell into the lake surrounding the island enclosure in which it was living, zoo officials confirmed to the Post, and floated towards the otter enclosure. "It was trapped in a drainage valve and then eaten by American otters," the whistleblower said.

In December, a female Visaryan warty pig named Manilla unexpectedly gave birth to piglets, which were then eaten by a male Visaryan warty pig named Elvis, who had been brought to the zoo to mate with Manilla in September.

"On the day the female gave birth to piglets the male immediately ate them all, and then also attacked the mother by eating her rear end. She was so badly injured she had to be put down," the whistleblower told the Post. "This meant the loss of a family of rare warty pigs that could have been avoided by keeping the male separate."

Zoo officials said the incident was unavoidable, as Manilla had not displayed any signs that she was pregnant. If she had, they would have kept Elvis in a separate enclosure. The critically endangered warty pigs are so rare, the Daily Mail reports, that it is not known exactly how many there even are.

A spokesperson for the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums told the Bristol Post that the organization was "extremely proud" of the zoo's standards and track record in keeping and protecting its animals.

Last week, the Post reports, three rainbow lorikeets escaped from their enclosure into the city. Two of the lorikeets have been recovered; one is still at large.

[Images via Shutterstock/Flickr/Jeroen Kransen]

In a disturbing lesson about not talking to strangers, a six-year-old boy was forced to endure four terrifying hours of being "kidnapped" by his family members. The boy's mother, aunt, and grandmother allegedly conspired with a gas station employee to abduct the child, hold him at gunpoint, and threaten to sell him into sex slavery.

According to the St. Louis Dispatch, Denise Kroutil, the boy's aunt, enlisted the help of Nathan Firoved, 23, whom she worked with at a gas station. Firoved, police say, lured the boy into his pickup truck on his walk home from school this past Monday. He allegedly told the boy he would "never see his mommy again" and that he was going to be "nailed to the wall of a shed." The horrifying story goes on:

As the boy started to cry, Firoved showed him a handgun and told the child if he didn't stop crying he would hurt him, authorities said.

Firoved continued driving the boy around in his truck, then because he would not stop crying, Firoved bound the boy's hands and feet with plastic bags and covered his face with an adult-sized jacket so he couldn't see, police said.

Later, Firoved took the boy — still blindfolded — to the basement of the boy's home and left him there, authorities said. The boy's aunt, Kroutil, removed his pants and told him he could be sold into "sex slavery." She also chastised him because he did not try to resist her. He did not recognize her voice.

The boy's grandmother, Rose Brewer, apparently listened in on the events transpiring in the basement with a baby monitor.

After being kept in the basement of his home for "an undetermined amount of time," authorities say, the boy's restraints were removed and he was told to go upstairs, where his family "lectured him about staying away from strangers."

The four involved in the plot were arrested by Lincoln County, Mo. police Wednesday after the boy told the story of his "lesson" at school.

"They have no idea that what they've done is outside boundaries of law," Lt. Andy Binder with the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office told KMOV.

The boy has since been placed in protective custody. Firoved, Kroutil, and Brewer were charged by police with felony kidnapping, felonious restraint, and felony abuse and neglect of a child; his mother, Elizabeth Hupp, was charged with felony kidnapping and felony abuse and neglect of a child.

[Clockwise from top left: Elizabeth Hupp, Nathan Firoved, Denise Kroutil, Rose Brewer // Image via Lincoln County police]

This is not a drill, people. Remember when Lego's crowdsourced set-pitching site nominated Doctor Who to get its own Lego set ? Well, now it's official: The Doctor is coming to Lego this year.

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As any cat owner who's ever received a package can attest, cats fucking love boxes. But why? Why can't I open an Amazon package without my cat parking his furry ass inside his new cardboard castle and staring up at me like, "What're you gonna do about it, loser?"

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Part of the allure of tabletop gaming is its physicality - being surrounded by friends and playing with tangible, physical tools. But that doesn't mean you can't use technology to make your gaming sessions a little easier, like this awesome projected map set up by Redditor Silverlight.

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Major national retailers are selling bullshit herbal supplements that don't actually contain the ingredients they promise on the bottle, the New York State attorney general's office alleged on Monday. That "gingko biloba" is actually a unique blend of powdered asparagus and deception.

The AG's office ordered tests on supplements from GNC, Target, Walmart, and Walgreens, and the results were disheartening: "[R]oughly four out of five of the products contained none of the herbs listed on their labels," the New York Times reports.

The attorney general sent cease-and-desist letters to the four companies, ordering them to take the deceptive products—which contained mostly fillers like powdered rice, a houseplant called dracaena, and the aforementioned asparagus—off of New York shelves.

Walgreens has agreed to pull the allegedly deceptive supplements nationwide, and Walmart and GNC both said they would take "appropriate" action.

The NYT's Well blog has a full list of useless pills to look out for, but here's the short version: Nobody's gingko biloba, ginseng or St. John's Wort is any good, garlic is only 50/50 in garlic pills (but it shows up in plenty of unrelated supplements), and Target had the only echinacea that contained echinacea (but still not in every sample).

The Times' Anahad O'Connor also runs down how we got here: Ancient Republican senator Orrin Hatch—lover of supplements and recipient of hundreds of thousands of the supplement industry's dollars—pushed a federal law back in 1994 that exempts them from FDA review. It's basically just the "honor system" (and now New York's Attorney General) keeping herbal pill manufacturers from pushing placebos made of peas and rice.

[Photo: AP Images]

The gang's (mostly) all here.

Pursuant to Jimmy Fallon's desire to wear wigs and make funny voices, The Tonight Show hosted a mini-Saved By the Bell reunion last night, and Zack, Kelly, Jessie, and Slater all came back to Bayside High. (Mr. Belding also showed up.) Notably absent: Lisa Turtle and Screech, both of whom are probably preoccupied with more pressing matters than reliving the NBC sitcom that brought them fame. Elizabeth Berkley and Mario Lopez basically haven't aged.

Timothy Norris paid the $600 he owed in property taxes last week with 600 folded one dollar bills. And after he refused to leave the tax office in Wichita Falls, Texas, he was hauled out by police.

According to Norris' arrest affidavit obtained by the Times Record News, Wichita County Tax Assessor Collector Tommy Smyth asked the 27-year-old to leave the office after delivering the stack of tightly folded bills because he was "disrupting the operation and efficiency of the tax office."

When Norris refused, he was arrested and charged with criminal trespass. As the deputy grabbed Norris' arm to place him in handcuffs, Norris pulled away. He pulled away again when the deputy went to grab his arm a second time, causing the deputy and Smyth to wrestle Norris to the ground to detain him — bringing an additional charge of resisting arrest.

The dollar bills were so intricately folded, Smyth claims, that it "required tax office personnel approximately six minutes to unfold each bill."

[H/T NY Daily News // Image via Wichita County Sheriff's Office]

A certain degree of dedication isn't unusual among comics fans, but one Venezuelan man's devotion to the Marvel supervillain Red Skull apparently exceeded his devotion to having a sense of smell.

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Today, a jury found Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht guilty of seven charges related to his alleged role in running the deep-web bazaar for drugs and other contraband. Ulbricht admitted in court to creating the site, but insisted that he sold it to another operator and left the business before the FBI arrested him in 2013.

Ulbricht's trial has been a spectacle befitting an internet drug lord: in recent weeks, attorneys have presented transcripts with apparent Hell's Angels about murderers-for hire, given wild theories about a fallen Bitcoin entrepreneur, and argued about the lexical power of emoji. Ulbricht's defense hinged on the claim that he had been framed as Dread Pirate Roberts—the online pseudonym adopted by The Silk Road's leader—because he made a "perfect fall guy" as the avowed founder of the site. (The defense attorney claimed that Ulbricht created The Silk Road as an innocuous "economic experiment" before the real kingpins took over.)

In the end, Ulbricht was found guilty on all charges leveled against him, including money laundering and drug trafficking. He will be sentenced on May 15. According to reporter Patrick O'Neill, Ulbricht faces 20 years to life in prison.

As we left, an activist shouted, "Ross is a hero!" #SilkRoadTrial

— Sarah Jeong (@sarahjeong) February 4, 2015

Family is devastated. Mother said something about not being able to bring witnesses— doesn't think this trial was fair. #SilkRoadTrial

— Sarah Jeong (@sarahjeong) February 4, 2015

Ross Ulbricht now faces 20 years to life in prison, sentencing takes place in May

— Patrick O'Neill (@HowellONeill) February 4, 2015

[Image via AP]

The army of volunteers that keeps Wikipedia running is comprised mostly of men, many of whom are often obsessively devoted to its upkeep. One such man is Bryan Henderson, known on the encyclopedia as Giraffedata, who would take strong issue with the way he's introduced here.

Henderson, as detailed in a delightful profile by Andrew McMillen at Medium, is among Wikipedia's 1,000 most active editors. He got there by zeroing in on a single innocuous grammatical error and working tirelessly to exorcise it entirely from the site. So, with apologies to Henderson, let's start again: The army of volunteers that keeps Wikipedia running is composed mostly of men, and surely Bryan Henderson is among the encyclopedia's most obsessive devotees.

According to McMillen's profile, Henderson has made 47,000 edits to Wikipedia, and nearly all of them are meant to fix instances of "comprised of," replacing it with a more acceptable variant like "consists of" or "composed of." If you didn't realize that "comprised of" isn't strictly correct, fear not: Henderson wrote a 6,000-word essay about it on his Wikipedia user page to educate you.

The "comprised of" project began in earnest in 2007, and now Henderson spends every Sunday night working on it. McMillen reports on the editor's process:

He begins by running a software program that he wrote himself, which sends a request to Wikipedia's server for articles containing the phrase 'comprised of.' His program parses the HTML code from the search results page to extract a list of dozens of article titles: 'PlayStation 4,' for example, in addition to 'High Court (Ireland),' and 'British Armoured formations of World War II.' The program then compares these titles against an offline database of articles that Henderson has edited within the last six months. Any matches get removed from the list. (He does this to avoid hitting the same article too often and pissing off overprotective editors who claim 'ownership' of certain articles.)

Next, a simple Web page is generated on the giraffe-data.com Web server, which contains a list of links to the edit page for each remaining article. Henderson can now easily click on each entry and make the necessary changes. Finally, the program updates the database of recently edited pages. "An edit typically takes about ten seconds, but that's because I've gotten really, really good at it," he says. "I'm actually putting a lot of thought into those ten seconds. Some of them take a lot longer; some of them take minutes."

You can visit the web page Henderson's software generates to pinpoint instances (next articles on the docket: American Chamber of Commerce in Turkey, apportionment in the European Parliament, the band Animals as Leaders) and his edit history is indeed filled with fixes to the error.

The profile is useful both as a window into a strange personality and a reminder about Wikipedia itself. Though it has the appearance of omniscient authority—and that appearance isn't wholly undeserved—the site is created by human beings, each of whom is biased and fallible just like everyone else.

And most of them are weird as hell.

A small TransAsia flight crashed into a Taipei harbor Wednesday, injuring "a number" of the estimated 53 passengers who are still reportedly awaiting rescue.

Flight GE 235 crashed shortly after takeoff, via the Straits Times:

The ATR-72 turboprop aircraft with 58 onboard was flying from Taipei to the offshore island of Kinmen when it crashed into the Keelung River after apparently ramming into a highway viaduct, Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA) said. Taiwan's United Daily News said about 10 people have been sent to hospital, and more than 40 are still awaiting rescue.

The New Taipei City Fire Department has despatched five rescue teams, equipped with speed boats, to the accident site near the Nanyang Bridge in Xizhi district, CNA said.

It's also the second TransAsia crash this year—48 people died in July when Flight 222 crashed in a storm just outside of Penghu.

#Transasia #ATR72 - dashcam via @Missxoxo168 correlates w/wider pics of scene. Bloomberg: http://t.co/BOpbjokhfa pic.twitter.com/5AliUZ5TJs

— Tom Grundy (@tomgrundy) February 4, 2015

10 injured but so far looks like none dead in #Transaia #GE235 crash pic.twitter.com/Cg6PD04B6w

— Jonathan Levine (@LevineJonathan) February 4, 2015

TVBS: Taxi cab was clipped by #GE235 as it descended into river in Taipei. #Taiwan #TransAsia pic.twitter.com/YuvtTl9xUP

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) February 4, 2015

Update—2/4 12:15 am:

Several news outlets are reporting fatalities—anywhere from two to eight or nine passengers were reportedly killed in the crash, while dozens of survivors were hospitalized, say Reuters, the BBC and the Straits Times.

The Guardian is reporting that the taxi driver whose car was clipped by the plane suffered a head injury and concussion but was hospitalized with stable vital signs.

[image via Twitter]

Two employees of Christchurch, New Zealand insurance company Marsh, Ltd., engaged in an affair and in the throes of passion, started having sex in their office last Friday night. They apparently thought the building's tinted windows prevented others from seeing inside their well-lit sexscape. They were wrong.

In fact, the couple was in full view of the packed pub across the street, Carlton Bar and Eatery.

"Everyone knew about it," Alex Wilton, who was at the bar and uploaded photos and videos of the tryst to Facebook, told 3news. "The band that was playing at the time stopped because everyone else was more interested in watching them, and they finished up and had some wine. We all had a good laugh. It was the highlight of the night."

According to the New Zealand Herald, the man is married with children and the woman is recently engaged. The man's wife apparently found out about the affair after photos from the late night office rendezvous started spreading online.

Marsh confirmed the affair, with chief executive Grant Milne saying in a statement, "Marsh is very disappointed by the conduct of two colleagues at our Christchurch premises." Neither were seen at work Tuesday.

It was apparently quite the display for pub patrons, who claim the show across the street went on for about an hour. The band playing the bar reportedly honored them afterward with a rendition of Kings of Leon's "Sex On Fire."

[Images via 3news]

Superman has to pull out all the stops in his battle against Ulysses this week - and that means a whole new superpower and some shiny new threads . Elsewhere, Luke and Darth Vader go toe-to-toe as Marvel's Star Wars continues, The Goon begins its final arc, and Image starts two intriguing new series!

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