Antarctica’s amazing wilderness where spiders are as big as dinner plates

 

More than a mile below the icy surface of Antarctic waters scientists have discovered an amazing world of giant sea creatures, including spiders as large as dinner plates and jellyfish with tentacles that stretch more than half the length of a London bus.

They live in a dark and mysterious wilderness of thick sea grasses and coral gardens that are teeming with creatures never seen before – huge worms, giant prawns and massive, creepy crabs.

Many of the marine animals hauled to the surface and landed on the decks of the research ship Aurora Australis have never been seen before and will now be sent to universities and museums around the world so their relationship to other known creatures can be assessed.

Tissue sampling and DNA will be used in the tests, but voyage leader Martin Riddle said when he arrived back in Hobart, Tasmania, yesterday that he believed much of his catch would be totally new species.

“With us we had some of the world’s experts on Antarctic fish and they were completely, completely flabbergasted at the sight of some of the fish that came on board – they were unable to name them,” said Dr Riddle after the census of the South Pole’s marine life.

“The fish had fins in various places. They had funny, dangly bits around their mouths.

“Many of them had very large eyes, although what they are going to use them for where this is no light I couldn’t tell you. But they are very strange-looking fish.”

In some places, he said “every inch of the sea floor is covered in life”.

Giantism, he said, was “very common in Antarctic waters”, where his team had even found deep gouges in the sea floor, caused by icebergs scraping the coral” as they floated by.

“Some of the video footage we have collected is really stunning – it’s amazing to be able to navigate undersea mountains and valleys and actually see what the animals look like in their undisturbed state.”

The scientific team used three ships to trawl for life in 30,000 square miles off the east of the Antarctic continent.

Dr Riddle said he and his team made the voyage “with certain expectations” but they were totally exceeded.

“What we found just blew me away and made me realise just how really important it is to document all this before the changes that we’re seeing take effect, ocean acidification among them.”
Source: DailyMail

The towns where people live the longest

The quest to live longer is one of humanity’s oldest dreams and three isolated communities seem to have stumbled across the answer. So what can they teach us about a longer life?

Something remarkable links the remote Japanese island of Okinawa, the small Sardinian mountain town of Ovodda and Loma Linda in the US. People live longer in these three places than anywhere else on earth. …

Oranges calm criminals!

Tough criminals in Holland became less aggressive and had fewer fights when exposed to the scent of oranges, a new study found.

Rotterdam police said the four week study suggested that criminals, many of them violent drug pushers, were calmer and more malleable when the perfumes were circulated through cell air vents.

The head of police social services, Herma Heester, told the Daily Telegraph: “It’s amazing, fighting in the cells has been dramatically reduced and we are using 10 per cent fewer sedation drugs.”

Rotterdam has one of the highest crime rates in the Netherlands, with violent drug-related crimes accounting for more than half of arrests.

Source: Ananova

Grad Student Invents Gravity Lamp

A U.S. graduate student won second place in a “Greener Gadgets Conference” competition inventing a floor lamp powered by gravity.The LED lamp, named Gravia, is an acrylic column a little more than 4 feet high. The entire column glows when activated by electricity generated by the slow, silent fall of a mass that spins a rotor.

The light output of 600-800 lumens lasts about four hours.

To “turn on” the lamp, the user moves weights from the bottom to the top of the lamp and into a mass sled near the top. The sled begins its gentle glide down and, within a few seconds, the LEDs are illuminated.

“It’s more complicated than flipping a switch,” said Moulton, “but can be an acceptable, even enjoyable routine, like winding a beautiful clock or making good coffee.”

Moulton estimates Gravia’s mechanisms will last more than 200 years.

A patent is pending on the Gravia lamp.

Source: Physorg

Xenophilia Blog Still Recovering

If you do a google search and find something cool that was previously on Xenophilia.com, it may link to a broken page for now.

My ISP lost some tables after taking my site xenophilia.com off line for becoming too popular.  I’m working to recover over four years of strange news blog entries.

The Massive Toad Who Liked To Eat Dinosaurs For Breakfast

Scientists working in Madagascar have found what may be the largest frog that ever lived.

The frog, dubbed Beelzebufo, resembles the family of horned toads that are now unique to South America. But, at more than 40 centimetres in length, it would have been more than twice the size of its nearest living relative.

Beelzebufo would have weighed around four kilograms with a squat body and a huge head. These features are characteristic of horned toads of the ceratophryine family, also known as “Pac-man frogs” because of their large mouths.

Evans says that the frog would have been the size of a slightly squashed beach-ball. “If it shared the aggressive temperament and ’sit-and-wait’ ambush tactics of living horned toads, it would have been a formidable predator,” she says, adding that Beelzebufo might even have munched on hatchling or juvenile dinosaurs.

Source: National Geographic & New Scientist