Mokele

And, with that sort of armor, it will also sink like a stone.

The problem is, quite simply, that AFAIK nobody here has anywhere near the level of technical knowledge of the subject necessary to discuss the subject's complexity in sufficient detail, or with sufficient knowledge of the literature. To use a poor analogy, if this was a discussion about "how do we walk", we could maybe get as far as the Hildebrand gaits, inverted pendulum, and central pattern generators, and maybe address some of the shortcomings of each of these, but without someone who's genuinely familiar with the literature, technology, etc., it'd be impossible to really get anywhere. I'm not saying we should just abandon any hope of meaningful discussion. But rather, we should be mindful that if someone here doesn't know the answer to something, in either direction, doesn't mean it's not known, only that *we* don't know it. I'd also like to quote a climatologist I saw speak once: "Just because we don't understand *everything* about climate change doesn't mean we don't understand *anything* about it." I'm sure there are unresolved issues, just as there are in my own field. But just as our incomplete knowledge of muscle physiology doesn't mean I can't make quite accurate predictions based on what we *do* know, our incomplete knowledge of all aspects of climate change does not prevent us being quite confident in what we *do* know.

If that's the case, you're fine. I'd still recommend the blood tests if you get the chance, though - obesity's correlation to things like cholesterol and high blood pressure is pretty weak - but it's probably not absolutely necessary if you're under 35 and have an even halfway health diet.

Because visceral fat isn't what *causes* high cholesterol and insulin resistance, it's merely correlated with it.

It's more on a continuum. A given muscle or joint may primarily function in one direction, but be capable of other actions, especially when other muscles stabilize the joint. A good example of it is your biceps. Because it inserts onto your radius, it can function both as an elbow flexor *and* as a supinator, rotating the forearm. It's not really appropriate to call either one "primary" unless there's a good anatomical reason, such as a major difference in the moment-arm about the joint. An example of that would be the gastrocnemius, which has a powerful ankle-extensor function, but a weak knee-flexor function due to the positions of the muscle attachments (long lever arm at the ankle, short lever arm at the knee).

It's basically because your body 'feels' the time of your original time zone, meaning you wind up either getting to sleep later or being sleepy very early. Sleeping on the plane would help, but isn't always possible due to cramped seating.

You could use wooden or metal spars along the length of the wing, either driven through the center or around the edge.

So people don't *need* to be alive? Because last time I checked, healthcare was pretty much essential to the whole "not dying" thing. And we're not just talking about emergency care, but things like regular cancer screenings. The result is over 20,000 deaths per year. Did those people not *need* to be alive?

I disagree - I find he's more useful than any of the other talking heads, and can be quite insightful, in large part *because* he's a comedian and is unfettered by the strictures of journalism (such as referring to other journalists as 'douchebags').

Ok, I still have no idea what you mean by "tanking of a ship", and google isn't helping.

Upon thinking about it, I'm rather lucky due to my field - talking about my science to people involves stories about 20 foot snakes, traipsing through tropical jungles catching things I wouldn't touch if I had any sense, and funny stories of me being mauled by various exotic creatures. As a result, I tend to give off this "crazy scientist-adventurer" vibe, which I think gets me a bit more 'street cred' than folks who work on obscure stuff or stuff it's hard to really get the public jazzed about.

Yep. To reach escape velocity it would have to be very long, possibly over a mile. It's not a matter of disrupting people, but of the shock wave's interaction with the ground and the resultant forces and potential damage to the projectile. Depends upon the railgun system - some do require it, others don't. Also, it's entirely possible to simply mount the projectile to a detachable carrier that has the needed properties.

You want complete honesty? By skipping high school science courses (and related math courses, presumabily), you've set yourself back substantially, to the point where it would be next to impossible for you to graduate with any science-based degree, even pharmacy technician, in the usual time. If HS science is too complicated and too "butt-in-chair", I suggest the wine-making angle. College science is much, much more complicated, and primarily lecture-based. There are a labs, of course, but these aren't going to be anything close to the majority of your time. Hell, even now, as a PhD student in science, I spend much more of my time reading papers and staring at the computer while I process data or write papers than I do on my own experiments. Actual professors spend even *less* time in the lab. I don't mean to be discouraging, but if you aren't enthralled enough to attend every lecture and memorize every note, you have zero chance of making it in science. That's just the way it is, sorry.

I know what you're talking about, though in my field we tend to talk about "key innovations / adaptations" - traits which, once they show up, allow the descendants of that population to move into an entirely new niche, diversify rapidly, etc. For instance, flight would be a key innovation for insects, or venom in colubroid snakes. However, I'm not sure it really qualifies as "stages", in part because that sort of implies a very linear view of things. Sure, you could map out the stages to humans, highlighting key innovations like jaws, paired appendages, lungs, warm blood, etc., but that would require ignoring the many species that do without these traits just fine (especially ray-finned fish whose official clade motto is "I got your species diversity right here, pal!"). Key innovations are certainly an aspect of evolution, but I'm not sure you can really translate that to 'stages'.

Firstly, while I appreciate the value of simplicity for home use, I cannot condone it for research papers, yet BMI is used repeatedly by those too lazy to do real, direct measurements. NIH grants are rarely less than $200k, and you can get a high quality ultrasound for $10k. I know, a friend just bought one for his lab. Second, you can even improve things without more equipment. Make the cutoffs based on data, not arbitrary social norms. Change the formula to one that actually at least makes some sort of sense (using height cubed, rather than squared, for instance). Add additional measurements to account for build, such as intraclavicular distance to measure shoulder width. Hell, you can even include a rough measure of approximate muscle mass. Reach as high as you can and mark that. Now jump as high as you can (no run-up) and mark that. Subtract the two for jump height, which depends only upon leg length and relative mass of hind-limb muscles as a fraction of the total body mass. This requires the incredibly high-tech setup of a wall and 2 post-it notes. The point is, it's not *that* hard, and adding even one of these aspects would be a vast improvement with little to no additional technology required. Way to miss the point. The point is that the cutoffs do not correspond to anything remotely approaching reality, and that people who look perfectly "normal/thin" are labeled overweight or obese due to the irrationally defined and fundamentally incorrect cutoffs.

Um, frankly, I'd rather go without any sort of health insurance or plan than deal with the abomination of military health care.

True, plus the reduced gravity and therefore reduced escape velocity. Of course, constructing something like that on either the moon or Mars would also be quite difficult.

Actually, the idea of rail-gun-only launch has pretty much fallen apart, mostly due to the immense length needed to keep accelerations within human tolerances, but also because of some rather nasty problems when anything close to the ground goes supersonic. However, the spirit of the idea lives on in the idea of rail-assisted launch, where the craft is accelerated to just below Mach 1 before being released to continue on its own power. It seems modest, but it gets around a lot of the difficulties and apparently saves a LOT of fuel (and therefore weight).

I'm not actually referring to protein families (which can also arise from much more common single-gene duplications), but rather the (annoyingly persistent) claims that whole-genome duplication allowed a diversification of developmental genes, leading to the major innovations of most vertebrates, namely jaws and fins/limbs. The problem isn't that it can't happen (clearly it did), but rather the tendency to then assert that therefore such duplications are a major driving force in the evolution of body plans while conveniently ignoring the 95% of whole genome duplications which have failed to produce any such drastic change.

it's been suggested that major "leaps" can occur due to instances of genome duplication (which allows the organism lots more genes to play around with, including important developmental genes), but I've always been suspicious of this idea, mostly on account of how frequently whole-genome duplication occurs *without* corresponding "leaps".

IIRC, some humans are born without an appendix (just as some are born with other internal oddities), but it's not that common. It should be noted that the above is a mere hypothesis - there is no actual empirical evidence that this function is correct. The same goes for all the other suggested uses. There's plenty of suggestions, none of which have any supporting data.

Some home scales have bio-impedance functions (though I cannot attest to their accuracy). If you have access to your own pool, you could also weigh yourself in the pool to get an idea of your overall density (fat is less dense than fresh water, while muscle, bone, and just about everything else is more dense). Honestly, though, a doctor's visit may well be worth it. I just had one for bloodwork because my wife was worried about my cholesterol (on account of my belief that bacon is a food group), and I found out I actually have low cholesterol, so no diet for me. After all, you need initial data, right? Plus, IME, it's not very expensive for most of the important stuff.

It's ridiculous nonsense.

Pretty much *anything* gives better results than the BMI - skin-fold calipers, densiometry, bioelectrical impedance, all superior. Of course, nothing beats ultrasound, CAT scans, and MRIs, but those are quite expensive. And it's vastly inferior to the half-dozen methods listed above. It gets used because it's easier to just download a database of patient records, do some quick math, and then go data-mining than to actually do things properly with superior methods (and, most especially, with multiple methods to check the accuracy of one against the other). And it fails, miserably. People who are long-term anorexics have been told their weight is OK or even a bit high based on the BMI, while perfectly healthy people have needlessly had invasive surgery to fix a body that didn't fit in the narrow little numerical range. Take a look at how utterly the BMI fails to reflect reality. And remember, aside from the intrinsic failures of the BMI as a method, the cutoffs are defined in entirely arbitrary ways, and have been repeatedly "revised" in order to manufacture an imaginary health crisis out of thin air. I thought the point of science wasn't to half-ass it? The BMI is like trying to measure the speed of light using two guys in a hallway with stopwatches. In light of all the other potential methods, why continue using the worst? Yep, and the mortality is consistently lowest at the BMI category "overweight", which should tell us something right away. Except nobody wants to face up to it.

Flying animals also have reduced genome size, compared to their non-flying relatives, possibly due to either the metabolic cost of copying large amounts of DNA, or due to correlated changes in cell size and effects of metabolism.