Smithsonian.com

Nearly a mile and a half beneath the waves, the Endeavour Hydrothermal Vents are home to an array of weird deep-sea creatures, and they’re one of the birthplaces of the planet’s crust. Located 155 miles southwest of Canada’s Vancouver Island, the Endeavour Hydrothermal Vents are a site of sea floor spreading, where volcanic activity produces the new rock that will line the expanding Pacific Ocean floor. Now you can see exactly what that looks like, thanks to a live webcam affixed to a submarine. Launched from a port in Seattle last week a research ship equipped with a robotic deep-sea submarine is headed out to the Endeavour vents for the next few weeks. As part of the research cruise, the team is streaming back live footage of their robot’s journeys.

The cruise’s main goal is to repair and install some new cabling at research sites around the northeast Pacific, but the live stream should prove to be far more exciting than the task. The Endeavour site is stuffed with billowing hydrothermal vents, specialized tube worms, and deep-sea spiders.

You can check out the live stream, which includes video and sometimes even audio commentary.

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A female dark fishing spider. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Sex is a dangerous business. In the animal world, it’s not altogether uncommon for females to eat their mates post-coitus—I mean, she doesn’t need the male any more, and he’s like right there. One of the most famous examples of a lady eating her man is the famed black widow, but there’s another type of spider for which sex is even more treacherous. You see, if a male black widow is quick enough, or if the lady is stuffed from having eaten already, he can usually get away. For the male dark fishing spider, though, sex means death. Guaranteed.

“New research shows that the male Dolomedes tenebrosus expires just after the height of passion, despite no visible assault by his partner,” says Science reporting on a new study.

For the male dark fishing spider, they only get one shot at love, says Nadia Drake for Wired. Sex begins an irreversible process that only ends with them laying nearly lifeless, legs curled under their now-still corpse. Wired:

The reason is an unusual quirk of the male dark fishing spider’s physiology. During mating, a male inflates what’s called a hematodochal bulb inside the pedipalp, the appendage he uses to deposit sperm in the female. In most species, the bulb can be deflated after mating. In dark fishing spiders, it’s irreversibly inflated, resulting in a sudden shift in blood pressure that causes the male to curl up and leaves him immobilized and stuck to the female – doomed but not immediately dead.

“The act of sperm transfer is triggering this cascade of death,” said one of the study’s authors to Drake. “Once that button is pushed, it’s lights out.”

With the male spider just laying there dying, the female dark fishing spider figures hey, what the heck, and eats him alive. Gives another meaning to the French euphemism for orgasm “la petit morte,” or “the little death.”

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Image: Doug88888

Home-field advantage is a long-running idea in sports. The home team knows the turf, they’ve got more fans in the stands, and they got to sleep in their own beds rather than some bedbug-infested hotel. But is home-field advantage really all it’s cracked up to be?

Whether or not home-field advantage exists is a pretty easy thing to test. Broadly, the answer is yes: teams tend to win at home more than they win away. This applies in women’s sports, and some Olympic sports (when the judging is subjective). But it seems to fall apart when the games are really important.

At SB Nation, they wondered whether people were too reliant on the home-field advantage. Jon Bois crunched some numbers, and found that had they played all their games at home, NBA teams would have won 10 percent more games, NFL teams 6.4 percent more, MLB teams 5.46 percent more and NHL teams 5.22 percent more. Bois writes:

I’ll leave it for you to decide why there is a significantly greater home advantage in the NBA than in other leagues, but I do find it interesting. The NBA’s environments don’t vary in playing dimensions, as is the case in baseball, and weather isn’t a factor. The only significant variables I can think of are the quality of the crowd, and the distance teams have to travel when they’re on the road.

This jives with the research available on why the home-field advantage might exist. One study tried to figure out just what created home-field advantage, and found that while a few things seem to impact the home team, the biggest factor pushing them to win is the crowd. Another study found that booing the away team actually worked, boosting the home team’s performance and hurting the away team’s. This might not be true in soccer though – where research suggests that it is familiarity with the field and conditions and referee bias that has the biggest effect on winning at home.

Bois goes on to analyze different sports and cities, concluding that Miami teams have a terrible time at home while San Fransisco and Minneapolis–St. Paul are nightmares for away teams. Overall, despite Miami, the home-field advantage stands, and it’s probably because of the fans. So keep rooting for the home team, because you could really make a difference.

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The ongoing Syrian conflict has driven at last 725,000 people from their country. Photo: Safa Kutlu

In the past year alone, 7.6 million people were driven from their homes due to “conflict or persecution,” says a new report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the highest number of new refugees in more than a decade. The jump in people seeking shelter—roughly 23,000 people each day—adds to an upward trend in displacement that has gone on for at least the past decade.

The surge in displaced people has been part of a long-term upward trend. Photo: UNHCR

The surge in people fleeing their homes, says the Guardian, was driven by fighting in Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Mali. According to the Associated Press, the 45.2 million known displaced people worldwide “are the highest numbers since 1994, when people fled genocide in Rwanda and bloodshed in former Yugoslavia.”

Technically, not all 45.2 million people are refugees—differing definitions make it a bit tricky. By the UN’s definitions, a refugee is someone who leaves their country, while someone who is “internally displaced” is essentially a refugee within their own country. An asylum seeker, meanwhile, is a would-be refugee who hasn’t yet been deemed a refugee by the relevant authorities. Of the 45.2 million displaced people worldwide, says the Guardian, 15.4 million are refugees, 28.8 million are internally displaced, and 937,000 are asylum seekers.

Phot: UNHCR

Though the ongoing Syrian conflict is driving millions to flee both within their country and to elsewhere, the UN report shows that many more people are still fleeing Afghanistan and Somalia.

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Photo: kibuyu

Last year, Gabon made international headlines when the country held a giant bonfire of 10,000 pounds of elephant ivory worth around $1.3 million. The stunt, National Geographic reported, was intended to ensure those tusks never made their way to black markets and to deter would-be poachers.

This month, the Philippines – where many illegal wildlife products pass through or end up – decided to hold its own tusk-burning demonstration of a cache of confiscated ivory worth around $10 million. But almost immediately, Scientific American reports, environmental groups began to protest on the grounds of clean air.

Objections emerged almost immediately after Page’s announcement. The EcoWaste Coalition and other environmental groups filed a complaint that burning the ivory would be illegal under the country’s Clean Air Act and that the event would send a message that open burning of trash is acceptable. Secretary Page accommodated that request.

As for the 5 tons of tusks, they’re scheduled to be crushed by road rollers on June 21. But now, yet another protest is in motion. A governmental representative argues that the tusks’ shouldn’t be destroyed but instead donated to schools, museums and other educational institutions, Inquirer News reports.

According to the lawmaker, ivory tusks should not be likened to other contraband such as illegal drugs and pirated CDs, since the latter bring no benefit to the public and could not be used for educational purposes.

“These are priceless treasures that will be put to waste if we destroy them,” he said.

With the recent rampant theft of ivory and rhino horns carried out by professional criminals throughout Europe’s museums, however, it is unlikely that the elephant tusks would remain in elementary schools’ show-and-tell boxes for long before they wound up back on the black market. 

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