Sounding silly but deadly serious?

Here's the headline I read in Salon.com:

Giant Sinkhole Opens in Mexico City

July 09,2007 | MEXICO CITY -- A giant sinkhole swallowed a stretch of street on Mexico City's east side, with one man feared dead and 30 families evacuated, authorities said Monday.

Even in a city where historic buildings regularly lean, crack, collapse or sink below sidewalk level due to excessive water extraction and unstable soil, the 45-foot-deep sinkhole -- which measures about 15 yards in diameter -- came as a shock.

It began as a giant crack late Saturday in the eastern Iztapalapa borough and rapidly worsened. The ground collapsed, swallowing a car, the facade of a one-story brick building and pavement.

A young man who was watching the spectacle also fell in, and emergency workers were digging with hand tools to try to recover his body, authorities said. His age was not immediately known.

"It is very highly unlikely" that the victim could still be found alive, said Mexico City Civil Defense Secretary Elias Moreno. "But as long as that possibility exists, we are digging very carefully to avoid hurting him if he is alive."

Fissures from the sinkhole extend outward for about 500 yards, raising the danger of additional collapses. Thirty families that live near those cracks were taken to shelters.

Moreno said are using cement to try to fill about 200 other cracks, fissures and sinkholes in Iztapalapa.

He blamed them on the city's triple problem of earthquakes, which cause cracks; the excessive extraction of ground water, which causes sinking, and heavy torrential rains, which make surface soil more likely to collapse.

Mexico City sinks an average of 3 to 4 inches each year.

Written by MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press Writer

If it weren't so deadly, it'd be tremendously funny, the stuff of Looney Tunes and laughable silliness.

Can we learn from the ants?

Now that Memorial Day has come and gone, summer is officially here. If you live in Michigan, you know it's also the season of the dreaded ORANGE BARRELS. Time for road construction, lane closures, orange barrels and interminable delays. Read on:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Army ants tired of potholes take one for the team, throwing their bodies into rough spots to make a smoother road for their sisters, British researchers reported on Sunday.

They found that army ants of Central and South America match their own bodies to the size of the hole they want to plug. Several may plunge together to fill in bigger holes, they report in the journal Animal Behaviour.

Scott Powell and Nigel Franks of the University of Bristol studied an army ant species called Eciton burchellii, which march across the forests of Central and South America in swarms of up to 200,000.

These raiders always remain connected to the nest by a trail of other ants. But this highway of living ants can be extremely uneven as it passes over leaves and branches on the forest floor.

So a few of the ants climb into the dips to make a smooth road.

"When it comes to rapid road repairs, the ants have their own do-it-yourself highways agency," Franks said in a statement.

"When the traffic has passed, the down-trodden ants climb out of the potholes and follow their nest mates home," Powell added.

"Broadly, our research demonstrates that a simple but highly specialized behavior performed by a minority of ant workers can improve the performance of the majority, resulting in a clear benefit for the society as a whole."

...

"I think every road user who has ever inwardly cursed as their vehicle bounced across a pothole -- jarring every bone in their body -- will identify with this story," said Franks.

Most ant species are believed to live in large colonies of sisters, all with the same mothers. Males are also sometimes produced, but only under certain circumstances.

From this article.