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.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Scientists Pluck Blind Shrimp and Other Strange Life Forms From World’s Deepest Hydrothermal Vent
Mining Company to Start Digging up the Ocean Floor

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.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Urbanization Is Supersizing Spiders
Lying For Sex, Spider Style

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.

More from Smithsonian.com:

How the Football Field Was Designed, from Hash Marks to Goal Posts

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.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Coming to America

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. 

More from Smithsonian.com:

$2 Million in Ivory Seized from Manhattan Jewelers 
New Forensics Tool for Catching Elephant Poachers 

Photo: Regina Holliday

At any given moment, approximately 118,500 people around the U.S. may be waiting for an organ that could save their lives, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Each day, 18 people from that organ wait list die. There simply aren’t enough donors to go around.

Becoming an organ donor normally requires registering or signing up on the back of your driver’s license. One donor can save up to eight lives, so the potential to help others through this decision is significant  Oftentimes, however, would-be donors miss out on signing up simply because they did not think or know about it.

Enter social media. Last May, Facebook began allowing users to post their organ donor status on their profile timelines. When users update their information to include “organ donor,” all of their friends receive a notification of the status change, Time reports.

To see whether Facebook actually helped boost organ donor sign ups, a team of researchers from John Hopkins analyzed how donor registration fluctuated in the weeks following Facebook’s new status launch.

The researchers found that during the weeks after the initiative launched, there was a significant uptick in donor registration in all states. On the first day of the launch, there were 13,054 new online registrations — a 20-fold spike from the prior average of 616. Notably, six times as many people registered on the first day of the Facebook feature in Michigan, and there was a 108-fold increase in Georgia.

As time passed, those sign up rates began to drop, Time reports, but the researchers think the case provides valuable insight into the growing interest in using social media for broadening the scope of public health campaigns.

If you’d like to boast about your own organ donor status on your Facebook page, here’s how to do it, according to Time:

To add organ donor status to Facebook Timeline, create a new “Life Event,” then click “Health & Wellness” and select “Organ Donor.” Users then have the opportunity to add in more details, like when and where they became a donor and any additional anecdotes. Although you cannot officially register to be a donor over Facebook, users are provided with appropriate donor links.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Kickstarter for Surgery Lets You Help Those in Need
In 45 States, It’s Illegal to Keep Your HIV Status Secret 

Mexico’s Popocatépetl volcano—a huge volcano that sits to the southeast of Mexico City—has seen a recent burst of activity. A couple weeks ago the volcano started seeping gas and ash, and yesterday the volcano blew its top in a violent explosion.

The explosion was captured on video, and in this sped up time lapse you can clearly see the shockwave of the explosion fly out from peak—shaking the clouds and racing down the volcano’s slopes. A build-up of pressure from gases seeping out of the volcano’s magma is behind these kinds of explosions. “This is akin to popping the top off a shaken bottle of soda — the dissolved bubbles come out of solution rapidly as the pressure is released and you get an explosion of soda,” says volcanologist Erik Klemmeti. On his his blog, Klemetti describes what we’re seeing:

[T]hese explosions come with a lot of force, and you can see after the initial explosion is how the clouds of water vapor around Popocatepetl shudder as the explosion front moves past. Then quickly, the upper flanks of the volcano turn grey from the rapid raining out of ash and volcanic debris (tephra).

For now, a live stream from the volcano shows that it seems to have died down. Mexico’s National Center for Prevention of Disasters still has Popocatépetl rated at Yellow, Phase 2, meaning that people should avoid the area – the same rating it has had for the past few years.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Descending Into Hawaii’s Haleakala Crater
From Close Up or Far Away, Amazing Volcano Photo
How To Study A Volcano

Photo: piclax

Alternative medicine tends to elicit strong opinions. Some people swear by natural remedies while others insist that traditional medicine isn’t effective and, at worst, can be dangerous. Alternative treatments are gaining popularity in the U.S., where around 50 percent of people say they have used them, but despite the billions of dollars spent on these remedies each year only a third of them have ever been tested.

As USA Today reports, many American consumers cite distrust of big pharmaceutical companies as one of the main reasons they lean towards using traditional therapies. But a new book by Paul Offit, chief of infectious disease at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, argues that the alternative medicine industry is just as focused on profit and business as it is on healing.

In his book, Offit paints a picture of an aggressive, $34 billion a year industry whose key players are adept at using lawsuits, lobbyists and legislation to protect their market.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who has long fought for stricter regulation of supplements, says the alternative medicine industry is “as tough as any industry I’ve seen lobby in Washington. They have a lot of money at stake. They want to maximize their profits and they want as little regulation as possible.”

There’s even a Congressional Dietary Supplement Caucus, composed of legislators who look favorably on the industry.

Moreover, USA Today continues, only about one-third of alternative therapies have ever been tested for their safety and efficacy. In other words, the people selling those supplements, powders or teas can’t really say whether the treatments actually improve a patient’s ailments, and they can’t guarantee their products’ safety, either.   

For the most part, people are free to take whatever alternative therapies they want, but Offit wants consumers to know that they are contributing to a profit-driven industry and may be investing in nothing but empty promises, and in the worst case, could wind up in the hospital.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Ten Threatened and Endangered Species Used in Traditional Medicine 
Can Tattoos Be Medicinal? 

A Chinese farm worker sprays pesticides. Photo: IFPRI-Images

“All things are poison, and nothing is without poison: the dose alone makes a thing not poison.” The wisdom of Paracelsus, a 16th-century physician and alchemist, has formed the backbone of modern toxicology. There is a safe dose of radiation, and you can be poisoned by water. Some substances, like medicine, can be incredibly helpful at low levels but deadly at high ones. A modern toxicologist’s job is to find this line, and it’s a government’s job to put limits on exposure levels to keep everything safe.

For some compounds, however, the balance between safe and deadly may not be possible. The European Union seems to believe this is the case for one set of pesticides, the so-called neonicotinoids. The EU has recently banned their use. Writing for Nature, Sharon Oosthoek says that when it comes to certain pesticides, including these now-banned neonicotinoids, we may have missed the mark—at least in Europe and Australia.

Citing two recent studies, Oosthoek says that even when pesticides like neonicotinoids are used at a level that is deemed “safe,” there may still be deadly effects on local wildlife. Looking at streams in Germany, France and Australia, scientists found that “there were up to 42% fewer species in highly contaminated than in uncontaminated streams in Europe. Highly contaminated streams in Australia showed a decrease in the number of invertebrate families by up to 27% when contrasted with uncontaminated streams.” Pesticides can have outsized effects on some species, while others endure them just fine. And year-after-year applications can cause the pesticides to build up in the environment, making them deadly after a few years even if the amount sprayed each year is within guidelines. It’s not clear whether such strong losses are the case everywhere, but they were for the studied streams.

As Paracelsus taught us, there is a safe level for everything—even pesticides. The trick is finding the right balance such that we can still derive their benefits without the unintended consequences.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Another Downside to Your Classic Green Lawn
Crazy Lies Haters Threw at Rachel Carson

Image: LilyWhitesParty

Bullying has been around forever, but it’s taken on a whole new tenor in recent years. With a new set of tools to use, bullies are no longer just roughing kids up and taking their lunch money—they’re causing serious, permanent problems for bullied kids. From internet stalking and blackmail, to using chemical warfare in the form of food allergies, bullies today aren’t like they used to be.

In today’s New York Times, Catherine Saint Louis has a story about bullies using kids’ foods allergies against them. She spoke with Dr. Hement P. Sharma, the head of the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington:

Every few months, a child recounts being force-fed an allergen, Dr. Sharma said, adding, “Even if it’s just a child who feels singled out because of their food allergy, it compounds the emotional burden.”

Many kids, Saint Louis writes, don’t really understand how serious food allergies can be. This PSA from Food Allergy Research & Education, a nonprofit group, depicts how food bullying can seriously harm children:

In one study published in the Journal of Pediatrics, 251 families were polled about their children’s allergies, and the bullying they might have experienced. Over 30 percent of kids in the survey reported being bullied because of their allergies—bullying that frequently included threats from their classmates. The study also found that about half of the bullying goes unnoticed and unreported.

Many schools are aware that this is an issue. About 15 states, including Texas and Arizona, have specific guidelines for their cafeterias that tackle food bullying specifically.

From food to Facebook, bullies have seriously stepped up their game since the days of wedgies—so much so that several government organizations have started campaigns to address it. And now, not even the lunch room is safe.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Bullying Really Does Mess You Up Later in Life
Too Popular to Bother With Bullying

Photo: Hélène Courtois, Daniel Pomarède, R. Brent Tully, Yehuda Hoffman, and Denis Courtois.

“It is no exaggeration to say that almost everything we know about the universe today has grown out of the effort to see past the flat, 2-D appearance of the sky and discern the true depths behind it,” Discover News writes. In the 1920s, maps helped Edwin Hubble discern that the universe is expanding; they clued Fritz Zwicky in on the presence of dark matter in the 1930s; and they helped tease out details supporting the Big Bang Theory in the 1990s.

Now, a new map captures not only the 3D structure of the universe, but the positioning and movement of invisible dark matter, too. The University of Hawaii describes the significance:

The video captures with precision not only the distribution of visible matter concentrated in galaxies, but also the invisible components, the voids and the dark matter. Dark matter constitutes 80 percent of the total matter of our universe and is the main cause of the motions of galaxies with respect to each other. This precision 3-D cartography of all matter (luminous and dark) is a substantial advance.

The correspondence between wells of dark matter and the positions of galaxies (luminous matter) is clearly established, providing a confirmation of the standard cosmological model. Through zooms and displacements of the viewing position, this video follows structures in three dimensions and helps the viewer grasp relations between features on different scales, while retaining a sense of orientation.

To celebrate astronomer Brent Tully’s 70th birthday, Discover writes, he and his friends hosted a conference at which they revealed this and one other new map of the universe that the group created together.

One is the color coded one, above, which depicts the exact location of every galaxy out to a distance of 300 million light-years. But the even more amazing one–the one that truly made my head spin, as I hope it will do to yours–is the 3D video, which shows not only all the visible structures but also the unseen dark matter, and illustrates the dynamic behavior of the whole thing.

The video maps 100 million light-years, or, as Discover rephrases, 6,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles. It shows the structures of galaxy clusters, thread-like dark matter and open patches of lonely space.

This is the structure and evolution of the cosmos laid bare, covering distances and times and velocities that are, in a fundamental way, beyond human comprehension. And yet they are not truly beyond the reach of the intellect, because Tully has brought it all into view, with a little help from his friends. Give him 17 minutes and he will give you the universe. Happy birthday to you, and to all of us.

Here, you can take that journey with Tully and the birthday crew:

More from Smithsonian.com:

A Guided Tour of the Universe 
A 3D Map of the Universe, No Glasses Required 

Photo: Doug Wheller

A coffee in hand as you pore over the news. A coffee in hand as you ride the subway to your co-working hub. A coffee to get the juices flowing while you brainstorm, sticking colorful Post-Its on the board. Ask nearly anyone in a creative profession the three things they can’t do without, and aside from a computer and smartphone, the top response is probably going to be coffee. But Maria Konnikova has some bad news for you, caffeine-loving creative professional: you’re doing it wrong.

Writing for the New Yorker, Konnikova surveyed the science of creative thinking:

Science is only beginning to unravel the full complexity behind different forms of creative accomplishment; creativity is notoriously difficult to study in a laboratory setting…

Still, we do know that much of what we associate with creativity—whether writing a sonnet or a mathematical proof—has to do with the ability to link ideas, entities, and concepts in novel ways.

Challenging problems can be cracked in different ways—through hard work and a systematic slog, or through a flash of creative insight. But if you’re waiting for your eureka moment, says Konnikova, you may want to lay off the coffee.

Caffeine “boosts energy and decreases fatigue; enhances physical, cognitive, and motor performance; and aids short-term memory, problem solving, decision making, and concentration,” says Konnikova. But to string together seemingly unconnected ideas to spur a creative insight, you need your brain to relax. Creativity, says Konnikova, “depends in part on the very thing that caffeine seeks to prevent: a wandering, unfocussed mind.”

Coffee can still play a role in your work flow, helping you to really get down to business when you know what needs to be done and all that’s left is to crack it out. But when you’re relying on that next flash of insight, trade out the double espresso for something that lets you relax and gets your mind wandering.

More from Smithsonian.com:

From Elephant Poop Coffee Comes Elephant Poop Coffee Beer
360-Year-Old Advertisement Extolls Coffee’s Virtues

Image: briancweed

Men say a lot of strange things when they encounter a woman they find attractive, most of which we will not print here. But one safe-for-work phrase is particularly strange: “hubba hubba.” Where did this odd little set of sounds come from, and how did it become associated with pretty ladies?

Like many expressions, the origin of “hubba hubba” is debated. Neatorama explains four of the most common theories, many of them beginning with the military. The first says that it came from the Chinese “ni hao pu hao,” and was picked up by Army Air Corps members while they were training with Chinese pilots in Florida during World War II. This version of history claims that the phrase spread through Bob Hope, the host of a weekly radio show broadcast from military bases. The problem with this theory that “hao pu hao” was completely mistranslated. It actually means “are you well,” but was mistranslated to “it is good under heaven when boy meets girl.”

The second military theory stays in the military but loses the Chinese. This one says the word “hubbub” was taken up by a military leader, who forced his troops to shout the words. The third military history says is that it’s a shortened and mutated version of the “hup hup hup” used by drill sergeants.

It might not be all soldiers’ faults though—other theories that Neatorama provides involve baseball (“haba haba” meaning “hurry hurry”) and television (one character on The Honeymooners used to say “hamina hamina” when confused or excited). The Honeymooners explanation doesn’t hold up to Oxford English Dictionary, however, as it point to 1944 as the first reference to the word, when in the journal American Speech the following sentence was published: “The inevitable fact is that the cry ‘Haba-Haba’ is spreading like a scourge through the land.”

But none of these get us to the sexual connotation of the word. For a theory on that we have to turn to Playboy, where Margaret Atwood suggests that “hubba hubba” actually came from the German word “hubsche,” which means beautiful. But linguist Anatoly Liberman, writing in the Oxford University Press’s Language blog, says that looking far beyond our borders for the origins of this word is fruitless:

Hubbub, as already mentioned, has come to English from Irish, so that hubba-hubba may be a loanword. Yet attempts to trace it to some foreign source (Chinese, Spanish, and Yiddish) carry no conviction and have been abandoned. In all probability, hubba-hubba is English.

So, as with many etymological mysteries, the origin is still pretty mysterious. And while the phrase is slowly fading into the distance when it comes to cultural relevance, it still pops up here and there. In 2004, New Zealand launched a safe sex campaign with the slogan “No Rubba, No Hubba Hubba.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Etymology of Food, Part I: Why Nothing Rhymes With Orange

The Etymology of Food, Part II: Meaty Stories

Photo: David Flores

Smell is chemistry, and the chemistry of old books gives your cherished tomes their scent. As a book ages, the chemical compounds used—the glue, the paper, the ink–begin to break down. And, as they do, they release volatile compounds—the source of the smell. A common smell of old books, says the International League for Antiquarian Booksellers, is a hint of vanilla: “Lignin, which is present in all wood-based paper, is closely related to vanillin. As it breaks down, the lignin grants old books that faint vanilla scent.”

A study in 2009 looked into the smell of old books, finding that the complex scent was a mix of “hundreds of so-called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released into the air from the paper,” says the Telegraph. Here’s how Matija Strlic, the lead scientist behind that study, described the smell of an old book:

A combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness, this unmistakable smell is as much a part of the book as its contents.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Why Do Flowers Smell Good?
What Makes Rain Smell So Good?
Why Asparagus Makes Your Urine Smell

Photo: Alexi Kostibas

China’s pidan, or preserved eggs, go by many names: preserved egg, hundred-year egg, century egg, thousand-year egg, thousand-year-old egg, and millennium egg. You get the idea—these eggs look like they’ve been sitting around for years and years.

While their putrid-looking greenish-grey yolk and transparent, brown egg white may appear to be the furthest thing from appetizing to Western palettes, for the Chinese, these things are a common delicacy. But now, even Chinese consumers have a reason to avoid 1,000-year-old eggs. Thirty preserved egg companies are being shut down for using industrial copper sulphate, a toxic chemical, to expedite the egg-festering process. South China Morning Post reports:

Industrial copper sulphate usually contains high levels of toxic heavy metals, including arsenic, lead and cadmium, so is banned for use as a food additive.

The eggs are usually preserved with baking soda, salt, and quicklime for about two months. The process turns yolks dark green and the egg white into a stiff, dark jelly. Using copper sulphate could significantly reduce the processing time while achieving the same effect.

For now, the companies—one of which produces 300,000 tons of preserved eggs per year—are on hiatus as investigations continue. One official remarked that nearly all the preserved egg companies used this chemical, and he doesn’t consider it such a big deal. ”There won’t be a problem if you don’t eat too many of them,” he told South China Morning Post.

In other Chinese cuisine news, Quartz reports, watch out for chewing on suspect pork knuckles and chicken legs in the country. Some of those chewy treats were sold more than a year past their expiration date after being washed with detergent to cover up their foulness.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Why Did Jewish Communities Take to Chinese Food?
China Acknowledges It Has a Problem With Pollution-Laden ‘Cancer Villages’