Mokele

You do realize that *any* new theory or finding is rigorously examined by the scientific community, right? And that in order to publish a paper, you have to get it past peer review, in which at least two other scientists will read it thoroughly and pick apart every detail from major methodological flaws to the choice of colors for your graphs? If your response to criticism is to take your ball and go home, you're not going to get far in science.

I never watched, so I don't know, but it makes sense. Even modest increased in surface area can allow excellent gliding (such as in gliding frogs, geckos, lizards, snakes, squirrels, etc), and need little in terms of increased muscles.

Oh, there's piles of research, books upon books worth, compiled since Lorenz & Tinbergen began working on animal behavior in the 1930's. A simplified response to your questions: Yes, humans have instincts, and can reproduce, sleep, eat etc without being 'taught'. Our extended infancy and parental dependence may make it *seem* as though we are taught these things, and we probably do learn some finer details (where is best to sleep, what berries are toxic, etc) from parents, but a human is quite capable of these without instruction. Case in point would be the numerous 'feral children' over the centuries who survived perfectly well in the wild without (human) instruction. As for how it's caused, basically, it's evolution. When the nervous system and brain are laid down in development, connections form long before birth, under the guidance of genes. To use my favorite species as an example, before it has even finished emerging from the egg, a baby python can see, smell, feel, move, etc. If you wave a mouse in front of it within minutes of hatching, it will strike with adult-level accuracy, constrict, kill the mouse, and perform the complex and lengthy process of swallowing it. It will then crawl off, able to use any snake locomotion mode available to an adult with full proficiency. The neural patterns for all of these are 'built in' during development, before birth ('premature' pythons are often unable to do any of these, and usually must be euthanized). Over the course of evolutionary time, the genes controlling these patterns can mutate, leading to different patterns. An aquatic species may lose the association between food and the smell of mice, but gain the associate between fish smell and food. Mutations that damage the system are quickly weeded out (even healthy baby pythons have 99%+ mortality rate). Of course, part of the issue is that "instinct" can refer to everything from Fixed Action Patterns (essentially immutable, hard-wired sequences of movements and responses to a given stimuli) to more subtle tendencies such as habitat preferences. Plus, there's learning, which can improve upon or alter some instinctual responses. Unfortunately, some of the truly innovative recent stuff is done on the sea-slug Aplyasia, which is not the sort of neat, sexy thing that gets mention in the popular press, as well as fruit flies and microscopic roundworms (see most studies in behavioral genetics). For more information, google terms like 'ethology', 'fixed action pattern', 'central pattern generator', 'imprinting', and 'behavioral genetics'.

One nice thing about algae for fuel is that it grows just about anywhere. In contrast, fossil fuels are where they are, and you have to build all your mining equipment there (no matter how precarious the situation, as in offshore drilling), then transport all of that fuel to its destinations. The cost of physically moving large amounts of liquid from A to B are not insubstantial (trucks run on gas, trains have limited reach, ships are expensive, and pipelines even more expensive).

Not really - just launch from an elevated location, as modern condors do from clifs, or numerous gliding animals do from trees. Of course, humans can already do this with hang-gliders.

There's a reason we should always check Snopes.

Yes and no. In both cases, you're modifying the genetic structure of an organism to your own ends. With selective breeding, you have to painstakingly select natural variation over the course of many generations, while genetic modification allows you to just implant the traits you want (possibly even traits that could not normally occur). As for intergenus breeding, I know of 3 examples of viable inter-genus hybrids, but all 3 are produced in captivity.

Yes, but that's per algal cell, right? If there are multiple layers of cells, any sunlight missed by the top cells can be picked up by the next layer, and the next, and the next, and so on. We also don't know the conditions used - perhaps they used clear tubes of algae and water (thereby allowing more surface area)? A continuous flush of water should be easy by just pumping water through the pipes, controlling O2 & CO2. Vanes in the pipe can induce any level of turbulence desired (though I'm not sure you're right on this point - I've seen the greatest algal growth in stagnant conditions).

How dependent are we, really, on places likely to have a UHI effect? Sure, there's instrument records from London and New York, but what about records from Nowheresville, Kansas (pop: 45)? How big and how dense does a city have to be before it generates significant UHI effect? It's easy to point to extremes (as I did above), but what about dense but small cities (Key West comes to mind), or cities which are large but low density (with plenty of trees, yards, etc.)?

Basically, for a falling object in the atmosphere, there's two forces, drag and gravity. You already know gravity, but the force of drag has this basic equation: Fd = 0.5 * (density of fluid) * (velocity)^2 * (Coefficient of Drag) * (frontal surface area) Most are pretty self-explanatory except the drag coefficient, which is an empirically determined measure of how much drag a surface produces (it's this term that reflects the change in drag between a ball and a cube of the same size). This is also a bit simplified - there's a lot of little details this glosses over, but it works for a first approximation. Basically, if you double the speed the drag increases fourfold, and the drag on very fast objects is very, very high. Big objects also have more area, thus more drag. And the denser the atmosphere, the greater the drag. Thus, as a meteorite falls from space, at first it's just subject to gravity adding to the initial speed. But as the atmosphere gets denser, it's subject to increasing drag, and due to the high speed, the drag is tremendous. Imagine two spheres, both of the same density, falling at terminal velocity, which means the forces of gravity and drag are equal. If the bigger one is twice the diameter, it has 4 times the frontal surface area (because area is a function of linear dimensions squared), thus 4 times the drag. But it has 8 times the mass, thus 8 times the gravity. As a result, it will have to go a bit over 40% faster to balance the forces (meaning a 40% higher terminal velocity).

It's both. The CCR5 deletion mutation gives full or partial resistance to some strains of HIV also gives resistance to Black Death and smallpox, and is found commonly in European populations, but almost vanishingly rarely in other groups (Link). This would mean that a hypothetical 'first contact' between cultures would involve a population of Native Americans with no resistance (acquired or inherited) with a biased sample of Europeans (those with enough inherited and/or acquired immunity to survive childhood and remain healthy enough to sail). In a sense, you're correct that it's lack of exposure, but both on the individual timescale and on an evolutionary one. Without the disease, a population will acquire neither individual nor population-level resistance, while with the disease, a population can potentially show both.

However, there's also not that much difference in gas mileage, either. A bit of googling shows station wagons getting in the teens and low 20's, comparable to an SUV. So why would they be a better choice? It seems as if you're stuck with poor gas mileage if you need to move any appreciably large objects around.

This belongs in politics, not GD. Since the user does not have politics access, the thread is being closed.

Moved to homework help. We'll be happy to discuss the topic with you, or answer your questions, but not to simply do your whole assignment.

OK, we let this thread slide for various reasons, but normally, political threads are confined to the politics area, for users who have access. As such, this thread is getting close. Petebro will just have to wait to accumulate enough posts to get politics access.

We often forget humanity's oldest and most potent enemy - disease. Over the centuries, we've adapted in the face of a never-ending swarm of pathogens, and this is dramatically evidenced by what happens when long-separate cultures interact and pass germs (as happened with the Native Americans and Europeans).

Actually, a math major probably isn't such a good idea for a pre-med, at least not without a LOT of extra coursework in bio and chem. The MCAT (the standardized test for med school admission) focuses heavily of chem and bio, particularly the aspects relevant to medicine (immunology, physiology, organic chemistry, etc.). Of course, that's not to say math isn't necessary - far from it. All the levels of Calculus a school offers are pretty much a necessity, as is Differential Equations (particularly rate functions, which are used all the time to understand how much of a drug is left in the body at a given time after dosage). Statistics are very important, too, for understanding the results of medical studies. Of course, *which* math is most important depends upon the speciality you choose, but since you don't pick until after admission and general coursework, it's best to take a broad sampling, as much as your other classes leave room for.

Depends on the sub-field. For molecular folks, there's always biotech and pharma as swansont suggested. For eco folks, there's environmental consulting. And of course, there's always teaching. Another point worth making: you can be an active, even productive and respected researcher, outside of a major research university. I know of severalwell-respected researchers in my field who teach at smaller colleges, rely on smaller grants, etc, and still do great work. Maybe this is an oddity of my field - you can do entire papers with no more funding than a few hundred for animal care and a video camera - but still, there's more options out there than being a big-shot at a huge research university.

If his hand deflected as a result, perhaps it would just leave a scar.

Is that an accurate figure? That's nearly 30 miles a day. Maybe it's hard for me to imagine, since 30 miles is "out of state" for me in any direction (or 'into the ocean' if headed south), but that's some serious commuting.

Oh, they'd be 'different', if by 'different' you mean 'dead due to chronic lifetime exposure to high levels of radiation'. I suspect that, aside from that, the main differences would be sensory, rather than cognitive.

It depends how it's done. There's nothing wrong with selective breeding per se, but a lot of the time, it's done poorly. Using too few animals, breeding too intensively without out-crossing, inbreeding for desired or recessive traits like albinism, all can compromise the genetic health of the animals, which, IMHO, makes it unethical, since we're harming animals for purely cosmetic reasons. Doing it well is possible, especially if you're a big breeder who can afford to keep and work with hundreds of animals over many generations, and who knows enough about genetics to avoid pitfalls like inbreeding and bottlenecks. I don't know enough about fish breeding to know how representative of the real situation that is, but I know in reptile breeding, it's far from true, resulting in numerous genetic defects in lines bred for particular traits like pattern variations.

Depends how exceptional. One think you should look into is the financial requirements, though. At one point, my wife (fiancee at the time) was looking into studying here (she's from the UK), and she found that a lot of places required a bank statement that showed 1 year's tuition + a full year's expected living expenses before even considering an international student.

Oh, *now* I see what you've labeled a lizard. But it's not a lizard. It's a leaf.

I found it a bit hit and miss, in part because my field is so different (we're relatively new, 'sexy', even really top-level labs graduate few students compared to other fields, and as a result most post-docs I know manage to find jobs within 4 years, often in 2). But, while the details may differ, the essay is broadly right - the path from student to scientist is long, hard, wrought with uncertainty, highly competitive, and leaves those who don't make it without much of a consolation prize. Even once you do make it, it's no land of milk and honey. However, there is one thing that has been omitted, and it's a surprising omission, since it's one of the few absolute rules of the universe - Everything Sucks. Every job has good parts and crappy parts. Sure, as a scientist, you have to deal with annoying academic feuds, applying for grants, etc., but if you go work a regular job, you have to deal with annoying co-workers, mindless paperwork, cramped cubicles, etc. The key is to figure out what you really want. Does money matter? Do you want a family? What do you want out of a job beyond money and benefits? What level of supervision are you comfortable with? What level of competition? How much of a chance are you willing to take on chasing a dream, and do you have a fallback plan? What sort of working environment do you want, and what sort of people do you want to work with? Personally, I decided it's worth it, for a variety of complex reasons, not the least of which being the desire to associate with people who are completely unfazed by the casual use of the phrase "dead baby rhinoceros" in a sentence.