AzurePhoenix

archaeobacteria are the older, simpler form, from which derived eubacteria in one direction and more advanced non-moneran entities from the other. Archaeobacteria are more rare, but thy're usually the types that inhabit extreme environments, like sulfer vents and hotsprings.

It's really a shame thatsomplace as beautiful of yellowstone will one day be burnt off the map, but a place like NYC is pretty safe. Nature should get its priorities straight.

America needs a good pyroclastic explosion. I'm not ashamed to admit that one of my fantasies is that an as-yet-to-be discovered supervolcanic caldera would erupt below New York City. Imagine the total devastation. Nothing short of a comet strike in Tokyo or Honk-Kong could rival something like that, in terms of sheer cataclysmic carnage. The power of such an event is more powerful than thousands of nuclear missiles, the entire face of the planet would be changed, human civilization as we know it would end..... Groovy. Oh, here's Mr.Orderly with my happy pills.... stupid court-order

Yeah, but its possible that less derived hominids, such as Java Man, could have used a combination of gutteral sounds and gestures, and new studies of Flores Man shows that there's a good chance they had the brains to do so. If you don't think body language is a valid language, piss a deaf girl off. Trust me, you'll learn that even if you don't understand it, you get the gist of she wants you to know.

i think the key is to use rocks and minerals that hold a spiritual meaning and an "elemental" origin (as in fire/water/air/earth) and looks good. So smooth river rocks and attractive quartz crystals are good. And, I really like peanuts. But I don't think they can can realign chakras, but if they did, mine would be so frickin' aligned I wouldn't even need need to... oh forget it, I'm done with this thread. Sorry to pester. Bye

or so stoned that he imagined an image of god told him that the entire thing is actually true. Either way, he's a stoner. And pal, excess and unnecessary posts are all that keep this thread goin'

probably just some stoner trying to scam fellow stoners out of a few bucks.

hehehehe, read the site garuntee, it says that if you're not satisfied in the first ninety days, you can return it for full refund. Hehehehe, pretending the concept was in anyway plausible, wouldn't it take at the very least a year to see if it's working? Sweet cheeses, I'm drowning in tears of laughter

wouldn't these supposed "white holes" simply be super-beams of energy? So if they existed, they'd practically be beacons, and immensely easy to locate? I don't know astrophysics, nor regular physics, but still, eh? Damn curiosity...

65,000,000 years ago, the atmospheric oxygen levels were around 35%, today, they're about 21%. What phenomena caused the drop? Was it simply a huge volcanic release of nitrogen? Here's the main question. At what percentage would oxygen levels become detrimental to life (think animals and plants) as we know it? 40%? 50%? 60%? At what point would plants be starved of CO2? At what levels would high O2 levels begin to make nitrogen fixation difficult for plants? Okay, let me narrow it down. Does anyone have a ballpark idea about what the highest O2 levels possible could be and still maintain a healthy ecological equilibrium?

WIthin the next half hour i need to find a peer reviewed article on genetic engineering and its benefits, it doesn't matter what it's about as long as it's interesting and part of a respectable citable site. I don't care if it's about transgenic ducks or disease resistant beans, but it must be proffesional and peer reviewed, HELLLLPPPPP MEEEE!!!!

And yes, mammalia is species poor, but aren't we still relatively young? The other groups have had head starts spanning many tens of milions of years. Sure, mammals were around for a while, but until the big KT disaster, they were an evolutionary dead end. I wouldn't even try to expect them to be even as diverse as they are today. Of course, that's just me, and I'm a hopeless romantic

Really, there are very few diffs 'tween f. panthers and basic cougars, just something about coat color, I was just using that as an example. Mostly I agree, but also, I tend to look forward, and isn't the subspecies simply one of the earliest stages in speciation? Eventually (had we not driven them to near extinction them) Siberian Tigers and Sumatrans (an island bound race) would have inevitably diverged into totally separtate species in matter of however many millenia it takes to notice a substantial change. So, in a case in which the phenotype is clearly different between the races, and in which the said phenotypes are standard to the races, as long as the races are hoplessly separated, aren't they as important to taxonomy and biodiversity as individual species? As for the cougars, I do think they should just go ahead and do what they can to ensure healthy genetic diversity, but I also think that those who make such decisions should be more senstive about it, you know, not just blow it off as insubstantial, because whether subspecies or species, by blending their gene-pool, a unique creature is being mucked-up with, and it's all our own damn fault. There should be a little plaque somewhere in washington commemerating each and every species and subspecies that we as humans have either driven to extinction or muddled up (such as F. panthers and Mexican Red Wolves).

What about other PhDs, like in zoology or other life sciences? Are they less lengthy and soul-consuming?

Don't forget the octopus. For spineless wads of meat, they're pretty smart. Yet they're antisocial (though intensely communicative(or is it cuttlefish and squid that are so communicative?)). Ever see "The Future is Wild" ? I've got the DVD set, and it's awesome. They give a very good picture of a path of development that could lead to arboreal, and eventually, intelligent cephalopods. Frankly, I doubt we could ever surmise the requirements for intelligence until we find at least several intelligent (and all-around advanced) species to compare ourselves with.

Is their any evidence that tachyon particles are real? Cuz if they are, those other theories begin to lose some grip. Or so I've read. I myself know physics about as well as I know the exact diameter of the universe in nanometers.

Exactly how is a subspecies defined? And how importat are they to science?How does one go about deciding if two individuals are entirely separate species or less distinct subspecies? I for one support subspecies with a whole-hearted conviction, but I am of the understanding that many do not. I mean, a Siberian/Amur/Manchurian Tiger is obviously a different kind of animal from a Sumatran Tiger. Some people dismiss subspecies as unimportant. For instance, my bio teacher thinks we should just carelessly breed more common cougars with florida panthers to replenish their numbers, beause it doesn't matter if their distinguishing traits are flushed out because they're nothing more important than a sub-species.

okay, maybe this is far off, but i'm just thinkig out loud..... early African humans faced a tough environment, so their numbers didn't get high enough to threaten the species that evolved alongside them. That's another factor. The african species evolved alongside them, so were better able to react to them in such a way as to avoid death. when people left africa, they entered less harsh environennts, and flourished. Their numbers grew large enough to do severe damage, bringing harm to new species, unprepared to deal with these hairless little monsters. Also, the foreign disease thing would apply here. ..... go ahead, cut me down where I stand. Just be quick about it, I would rather not have to suffer.

I've seen that, apparently he believes that we can travel along or send messages across a "time machine," but only as far back as te first moments of that particulr session with that machine. He says that explains why we haven't seen any evidence of chrononauts from the future, which otherwise should have existed forever if time travel were possible. So, if he turned his on and it worked, and if he and subsequent owners were able to keep it powered up a substantial time into the future, we should be able to receive and get messages. Is that the one? He also claims that as soon as he turns it on, he'll start getting messages from the future. Frankly, I think he's high. Stoned. Smashed. Bombed. Trippin'.

don't forget, he'd need some way to ensure high oxygen throughout at least some of the pool. Wouldn't be so much of a problem if you have a waterfall i suppose

it would have to be some newfangled solar-feeding that has no comparitive form on earth

yeah, but photsynthesis requires carbon dioxide and liquid water

Stars thrive on the paparazzi, controversy, and scandal. Without all that crap, without all the money, the uber-sex appeal, and without all the Gucci doggy sweaters, what are you left with? People dumber than any of us who would otherwise be utterly unsuccessful in life. Let us bask in the U.V. rays of our superiority.

Okay, here are some of my thoughts. Keep in mind, I'm a sub-adult rookie with an education limited to discovery science, a few books, and a coupla highschool college-bio course, so you professionals with doctorates, don't be too tough on me. Deep breath, here I go As for the balloon things, i doubt it could happen. Photosynthesis is breathing, so you can't avoid variations in gas quantities. Anyway, i doubt any spores would survive falling back to the planet (maybe as charcoal) no matter how well armored. And besides, to evolve that way at all, the spores would have to be pre-evolved for the plunge and burn the first time around, or else no generations would be selected for to continue in the first place. Something might be able to create a similar life cycle in the upper atmosphere, but little more than that, and they would have to be very lightweight to be pulled so high in the first place. If your vacuum balloons were going to be pulled out by the moon, they'd probably have to be very light as well, and so would be iradiated before they could ever hope to build up a thick, protective shield. If life were to evolve in open space it would probably have to be in the Oort cloud, as someone already pointed out with the Dyson reference (the same Dyson who thought up the preliminary ideas for Dyson Spheres?) And anyway, it would probably have to originate in the environment for which it evolved, rather than on the surface of a planet or moon. Comets have plenty of water and carbon, and far less solar radiation, the problem is, they're frozen solid, and we're confident that life would not normally evolve under such conditions (we can never be positive, not until we literaly search every square inch of the universe with electron microscopes once a year, just to be sure something doesn't start up just after we pass by.) Anyway, I think that maybe, possibly electricity might be a component of the genesis of life, and I'm not sure if such a phenomenon occurs in open space, or the oort cloud. But supposing it did, it would probably have to be very slow growing, with a metabolic rate so slow we might not even recognize it as alive, even with years to study it. Eventually, after many billions of years, it might become macroscopic, if their was some advantage, but it would probably remain within the comet's crust, limited to a crystalline root-type structure, except to bud, and send spores careening into the clouds to someday infect new comets. Definately asexual. Sadly, sex would just waste too much energy in such a cold environment. And I imagine the energy needed to launch the spores would have to be stored up over centuries, or even millenia, and by actually letting it go might kill the parent organism, or just as easily do no harm to its insenstive structure, and so would just slowly start budding all over again. The launch tubes might possibly be a crystalline structure simialr to certain sponges, using small packets of hydrogen gas to launch the spores out from the comet, igniting the gas with an electric spark. Finally, I doubt anything would evolve on a comet with a solar orbit. Sure, the environment of the comet would heat up and provide a rich broth of gasses and water that life could certainly thrive on, but remeber that as it careens through its orbit, it's very likely to actually get pulled into the star, or strike a gas giant, or even a little rocky world. And then, even if it wasn't obliterated, long before life could even start to evolve, the comet would be back in the cold zone, frozen over again. Nothing could have evolved in such a brief period anyway,and even assuming it did, and assuming it wasn't shed with the comet's ejecta as it neared the star, it would almost certainly not be adapted to deal with the cold after the first circuit was completed, and so would freeze into extinction, unless small pockets of heat could somehow surive in the interior of the comet. I doubt it, but i suppose it might be possible. Wait, none of this orbiting comet stuff matters, cause even if it did happen, the life would be evolving in an atmosphere, not open space. Look at me, being all cute and stupid.

Oh, and Admiral, the Yuuzhan Vong use biotech, the Ssi-Ruuvi use entenchment to power their technology with the souls of sentient beings. No big, I just though you should know . I'm a huge fan of Star Wars myself. And don't even try to convince Navajo to read them. I know, I've tried, and he's hopeless. Guess he just doesn't have the refined taste in literature that you and I share.