Mokele

People say those things because they don't want to explain sex to kids. And no, the penis does not enter the uterus. The barrier between the uterus and vagina is a ring of tissue called the cervix, which has only a small hole. Attempting to push anything through the cervix is incredibly painful (see childbirth), even moreso if it's not prepared.

No, they grow between divisions. In fact, growth is what triggers division.

Each daughter cell is half the mass of the parent cell.

Could you at least try to use coherent sentences?

Positive? Dominant? Neither of those have any real meaning for this. We're definitely not the most dominant in the only definition I know of, ecological dominance, due to being vastly outnumbered by beetles and worms. Do you mean "What other species, post-human-extinction, is most likely to develop high intelligence and civilization?"

Maybe I'm spoiled by being a lab-based guy, but IMHO if the predictions haven't been tested, it's still a hypothesis. So is the idea "Oh, the rules of science are inconvenient, so let's change them?"

Do you have any actual *evidence* of this?

Does it even qualify as a theory? Last time a checked, theories had experimental evidence.

No, they aren't. Put down the bong and step away from the keyboard.

Do you have references? Actual scientific studies on *humans*? AFAIK, calorie restriction is only known to increase lifespan in small, r-selected organisms such as flies and mice. I'm skeptical as to any benefit for a large, k-selected organism like a human.

To my knowledge, there is only one "Triangle" that's actually associated with statistically significant increases in the disappearances and deaths of humans within it, namely the Red Triangle. The mechanism, however, is well-understood. Mostly because this particular mechanism has a habit of taking nearly meter-wide bites out of anything its little fishy brain interprets as even remotely resembling a seal.

You also sound like you're about 7 years old, at least mentally.

Incorrect - plate tectonics has *exactly* the same prediction. An experiment which cannot distinguish between the two hypotheses is worthless. Try again.

There's a simple solution: Flash memory is unaffected by X-rays. Buy a digital camera. You'll save the cost of the camera in film within 2 months.

"Man [has] always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much-the wheel, New York, wars and so on-while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man-for precisely the same reason." -Douglas Adams

Why would trophic level matter? Why is a predator any more or less successful than its prey? Again, it's imposing a subjective judgment standard based on little more than our own preferences. Plus, top predators are inevitably the first to go extinct in any major extinction event - they have small numbers, massive energy requirements, and often have become 'locked in' to their niche and are unable to make ends meet by hunting smaller prey.

iNow said what I was going to. Even if you restrict it to animals, there's several quadrillion beetles that would disagree with you. Remember, technically any organism alive is 'successful'. Claims of any species being "more successful" than another are usually based on subjective biases about range, species number, behavioral flexibility, etc.

That sounds like BS. Source?

Welcome back. 2 years without computer access? Is South Dakota really *that* bad?

If they use anything like the fluoroscopes we use in lab, maybe 8-9 layers or a thick baking sheet style foil should prevent most of the damage. But film? Who uses film anymore?

The same reason people vanish over other areas of ocean - storms, mechanical failures, pilot error, etc. The number of missing ships and planes is not statistically greater than any other random patch of ocean.

The key is that respiration isn't just about oxygen - it's about disposing of exactly the right amount of CO2 to regulate blood pH. Dump too little CO2, and your blood becomes too acidic. Dump too much CO2 (as in hyperventilation), and your blood becomes too basic. Because we're ultra-high-metabolism endotherms, when our respiration is lower than normal, we feel the oxygen debt long before the CO2 excess. But in hyperventilation, we can feel the importance of CO2 in blood pH regulation.

Ok, this is getting assinine. Time for hardcore science: Bombus, you have a hypothesis. In order for it to be even remotely useful, it must make predictions about the natural world, predictions we can test. The hypothesis must also have a criterion for falsification - some piece of data which could not possibly occur if your hypothesis is right, thus if we find it, the hypothesis is wrong. These are the entire basis of science. 1) What are your predictions? And how do they differ from the predictions of plate tectonics? 2) What would test your theory? What experiment or study could be done that would yield different results if your hypothesis is true vs if plate tectonics is true? 3) What would falsify your hypothesis? Without good answers to all 3 of the above, we're wasting time on pseudoscience. If it cannot make predictions, or the predictions cannot be tested, or there is no criterion for falsification, it simply isn't science.

Well, there is the alternative resolution: Kim Jong Il suddenly vanishes in a flash of light, shortly followed by Obama's historic "Oh, by the way, we have death rays on satellites" speech.

This is a science forum, and as such, in a lot of debates, we ask each other for sources to back up assertions or claims. And the gold standard is, as it rightly should be, papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. But that shouldn't be where it stops. Just because a source is in a peer-reviewed journal *doesn't* mean it's correct, or even that it's not embarrassingly wrong. Like any website, book, or article, you should read the paper and make sure that it actually says what the person citing it claims, and that it's not complete crap. Consider a recent example: Chatterjee, Templin & Campbell. The aerodynamics of Argentavis, the world's largest flying bird from the Miocene of Argentina. PNAS doi.10.1073/pnas.0702040104. On the surface, it seems pretty plausible. Even the paper itself seems OK, until you ask "where did they get those numbers?". A quick trip to the Supplementary material reveals that their calculated maximal power of the animal in a way that's not just wrong, it's embarrassingly wrong - they're calculating from basal (=resting) metabolic rate, and as a result, they get a power output that's pretty pathetic. Even a low-balled estimate I made showed the paper to be off by more than an order of magnitude, completely demolishing their central claim. Now, obviously, not everyone even has access to anything more than the abstract, nor does everyone have the experience or knowledge to check a paper's methods in detail. But still, one should be cautious in simply assuming that any given paper that turns up on google scholar is definitive. Hell, the paper above is in PNAS, a very well-respected journal. A key part of the scientific process is skepticism towards everything, even other publications. Keep that skepticism alive, no matter what the source. Mokele