Mokele

I deleted it - we're here to provide *help*, not just give people the answers. The OP even specifically stated that they just wanted pointers, not full answers.

For #1, you should have a formula or example in your book that lines up with this almost exactly. Read up on how to calculate friction. For #2, try doing a free body diagram, and note that gravity will both pull the shoe against the ramp and slide it down, and the relative proportions of those depends upon the incline. Add in what you know about friction from #1. For #3, look up formulats for ballistic motion. Those apply even in vertical cases.

coke, you are aware that not all gay men are effeminate, right? That many are no less "manly" than most of our society, and a good many are actually more "manly" (look up 'bears'). Consider this a moderator warning - state or imply that again, and you get a 'repeated prejudice' warning.

That would be, effectively, 'cheating', and wouldn't really show much of anything. We're fairly close to being able to deliberately create life, but the point of abiogenesis is how it happened without human intervention. I think what is needed is a suitably long-term experiment, a bathtub of primordial goop left in some back corner of the lab for someone's entire scientific career, and only then opened.

So, by your logic, seasons don't exist? It's all just an illusion or groupthink? After all, today was colder than yesterday, even though it's spring here and supposed to be getting warmer! Surely this means that 'summer' is a lie sold to us by the government, who've invested in sunscreen futures! Wow, a complex, planet-wide system doesn't display simple, linear, monotonic behavior! Next you'll tell me that even though the average height of a US male is 5'9.4", not everyone is exactly the same height! OMG, variability exists! We can never know anything! Black is white! Up is down! Dogs are cats!

Ok, the entire last half of this thread has been furs showing up and posting only once, here, to defend their fandom. I think by this point, the discussion is dead, and watching its corpse twitch every time a fur discovers this thread is getting annoying. Thread closed.

Adult rats are more than capable of devouring their own kind - I've seen it happen, and there's very little left. They even seem to devour the bones. My point is, they aren't exactly poorly equipped to begin with, so modifications would probably only need to be minor. You're probably thinking of the highly modified carnasials of Carnivora, but lots of other mammals manage to do just fine with less specialize molars, especially if you look back among the extinct mammals.

Not from the documentary, and not direct, but over half of US bankruptcies are driven by medical debts.

Something that also bears thinking about - a lot of people have chronic conditions that can cost quite a lot, and if you suddenly wind up without healthcare (such as due to loss of a job), those costs add up fast. Consider my wife, who has two common ailments - serious asthma and coeliac (she can't eat wheat). Were I to lose my health insurance, the former would cost us over $150 per month, and the latter easily doubles our food bill. Neither can be cured, nor can treatment lapse even for a moment. And plenty of other people have chronic ailments that cost a LOT more. HIV treatment can easily come to hundreds of dollars per month. Psych meds aren't cheap, neither is everything you need for diabetes. All of these range from 1% to over 5% of the population, and overall psych disorders have a lifetime prevalence of about 20%.

Part of the problem is speed and size. Most animals have downright crappy vision, and seem to simply bumble along (beetles, for instance) letting reflexes and mechanical properties sort out all but the most severe perturbations. But cars are very big things moving very fast, both of which dramatically increase the level of damage suffered by even a minor collision. The speed also means the operator (computer or human) needs detailed information not just about the current environment, but about the environment several hundred feet ahead, and the ability to rapidly anticipate and predict the movements of other actors (vehicles, pedestrians, falling rocks, etc.). Basically, the only reason cars work at all is because the operator has a HUGE visual cortex and some of the most advanced vision in the animal kingdom (seriously, humans and other primates are up there with hawks, compared to most species). Had we evolved from wolves or possums or lizards, we'd probably consider much slower speeds to be the limit of "safe". However, I think there's still hope. We just need to 'think outside the box'. We could try a system like jumping spiders, with two eyes permanently fixed on long distances, and 6 others set to examine the nearby area. We could implement electromagnetic sensors all around the car, like the lateral line of fish. We could even add super-elastic bumpers to absorb the consequences of errors. IMHO, the bigger problem will be public acceptance.

Actually, there are several, including this one. I can attest from direct, painful experience that the incisors of mice and rats are very capable of penetrating flesh. As for the molars, it depends on the sort of carnivore - if they're taking small prey, it may not matter much. Indeed, most lizards are carnivores, usually feeding on small prey, and most have no molars at all. Also, evolution can rapidly induce changes in tooth shape in mammals - consider whales, which fairly rapidly went from a set of teeth rather similar to modern carnivores to a set of almost reptilian conical teeth.

The former - the cells look normal, with one nucleus, but have twice as many chromosomes as normal during division.

SL, this whole cluster**** of a thread is due to you dragging something totally unrelated into a thread started to answer a very simple question. Furthermore, *nobody* asserted that the entirety of the polar ice caps would melt any time soon until *you* brought it up (without any reference for who's making this claim) in post #21. That's the problem - from that point on, the whole thread devolved into your strawman and us trying to figure out what the hell you're gibbering about. Thread closed.

If they worked it off, yes, because you'd have the gene from your parents. If they luckily escaped the gene, then they could not pass it on to you, so you would have no more risk than normal.

The whole "odds" thing takes on a new perspective when you consider just how big the oceans are and how long it took. Sure, life is improbable, but it took over 1.5 billion years to show up at all. Think of the probability that any set of grains of sand will form a particular geometry, but then consider the size of the beach. No matter how unusual the geometry, odds are it's there somewhere. Anyhow, as far as multiple origins, this has been suggested (we can't know without fossilized microbes, a very, very rare find, and even those aren't informative about biochemistry), and the idea is that the common ancestor of modern life either survived extinction more effectively, or actively devoured the others. That's basically it - anything that didn't reproduce would have died without offspring. Life may have originated many times, only to die off again. Our ancestor is merely the one that "got it right". Pretty much. It's like the idea that if you have infinite monkeys with typewriters and infinite time, eventually they'll write Hamlet. Set the bar lower (say, write 20 pages of text), but give several quadrillion monkeys over a billion years, and you'll see lots of results. It's also important to note that reactions aren't random - certain atoms and molecules preferentially stick together, and we can replicate abiogenetic development of important biochemicals like Cytosine and Uracil in the lab, in much shorter time with much smaller volumes. Remember, modern oceans don't have many life-precursor molecules because living things quickly find and eat those molecules, but in the past, the whole ocean would have been a veritable soup of the precursors of life.

None? That's flat-out wrong. Antarctica is *not* cold just because of where it is - 30 million years ago, it was in the same spot give or take a few degrees, and it had temperate forests and no permanent ice caps. Antarctica is mostly cold due to the structure of ocean currents, the same currents that explain why the UK is so unseasonably warm for its latitude. If the currents are disrupted by climate change (either directly, or via disruptions of other currents), Antarctica *could* warm quite quickly. How quickly? I don't know, but I'm sure someone, somewhere has run a simulation. The point is, look to the past - climate can change, and change fast, even without major forcing events such as extensive volcanism or asteroid impact.

Not as far as I know. From what I know, most "giant" veggies and fruits are produced by inducing polyploidy (duplication of the entire genome) via colchicine.

The issue is that everyone starts out with a certain natural size, muscle mass, tan level, etc. You can alter any of these, but what gets passed on to your offspring is your natural level, not the improved version.

Muscle gain due to exercise isn't actually passed on to your kids, nor is tanning. However, different people have different ability to tan or build muscle, and different natural levels of muscle or melanin. So if being dark-skinned or muscular is an advantage, individuals who start at a higher baseline (due to genetics) will have an advantage, even if everyone can 'improve'.

No, actually, you missed the point - you should be able to find a reference saying "This will not happen for the following reasons". If it's fairly basic, you might have to go digging in the literature fairly deeply, but there should be some mention somewhere explaining it.

I've never seen a live platypus, either. Doesn't mean such a thing doesn't exist. This cannot possibly be this hard to find a reference for, especially with Google Scholar and Google Books.

True, but even I could grow the species I had outside, the neighbors might complain about my plants eating the local squirrels.

True, but in fairness, our system has a lot more checks and balances than the analogy.

I actually prefer compact fluorescents to metal halides and sodium bulbs, mostly due to the heat issue. Back when I had my plants (they all died in the move, sadly), bulb heat was a big issue, because they were vines which could grow quite large, quite fast.

Except, in a democratic society, the 'state' is really 'us'. When 'the state decides' something, what's *actually* happening is that, according to the rules, the people agreed on a course of action. We pay taxes and use those to fund various projects by collective agreement - it's no more a conflict of equality than a group of people deciding where to go to dinner.