Mokele

And what are they going to anaerobically metabolize? They need food.

The bigger issue is food and oxygen. Any animal needs both, and in space, it can get neither. Even a plant couldn't work, as they need nutrients and gasses.

There's a reason we closed the religion forum, and it wasn't so the topics could just be moved to the rest of the forum. Thread closed.

The birth itself should be very possible; many animals give birth in water, which has some of the same properties in terms of lack of noticable gravity. Development would be the problem - even inside the van Allen belts, there's enough radiation to serious screw up a developing fetus.

Yeah, ornithopters are pretty neat. The trick is that they can use materials unavailable to biological organisms, such as metal that's stronger than bone, or motors that have better properties thank muscles.

Oh, I agree, and some 'fudging' is inevitable. It bothers me most, however, when the fudging is totally unnecessary. Like a movie I just watched, where they mis-quoted the age of the animal *horribly* in a throw-away line that would have been *just* as good if it was accurate. Of course, when it's *really* bad is when it turns up in educational documentaries. Jurassic Fight Club is just awful, loaded full of blatant factual errors.

Anything involving any prehistorical animal makes me cringe, as it's almost invariably wrong. Sometimes it's minor, like animals from different continents or slightly different times in the same place. Sometimes, however, it's so horrific, I can't help but yell at the TV.

So, I've been going through wikipedia, reforming articles on my speciality (organismal biomechanics) because so many are just awful, and I got to wondering, how many people here contribute? On one hand, I know a lot of people have disdain for it, due to the ease of vandalism. On the other, it's frequency of use as a reference makes it a potentially valuable educational tool, and I like being able to personally vouch for sections that I've written. So, does anyone else here contribute regularly?

So, anyone else? What would happen in a black hole's gravitational field were "turned off"? Would the accumulated mass explode?

Oh, it'll rise a LOT more than 20 feet - the actual estimate is 60 meters. The discrepancy is because the seasonal change is nowhere near 50% over the whole continent. I think that figure is just for a subset of ice (such as 'pack ice' formed from seawater), but I can't find good figures for the life of me.

Mitosis produces two identical cells. Meiosis produces 4 cells with 1/2 the usual genetic material, such as sperm and eggs. Thus when the sperm and egg combine, each contributes their half of the genetic material to get a full complement. Most microbes (bacteria, archaea, protists) are asexual, and many plants and fungi can reproduce both sexually and asexually. In animals, sexual reproduction is the norm, but quite a few species can manage asexual reproduction too. Most of those are invertebrates, but a few vertebrates can do it too.

Oh bone density plays a role, don't be get wrong. But it can only go so far. It's a problem of scaling. Imagine you have a cube. Now double it's linear size, so each edge is 2x as long as before. That means the cube has 4x the surface area, and 8x the weight. The same thing happens as flying animals get bigger. Even with hollow bones, double the size means 8x the mass (which means 8x the gravitational force) but only 4x the surface area (which means only 4x the lift). Wings can get disproportionately bigger to support bigger mass, but you need bigger muscles to move bigger wings, which means more mass. And to make matters worse, maximum muscle force depends upon cross-sectional area, so it has the same scaling problem as wing area does. All of this adds up to mean that even in the fossil record, there's no flying animal bigger than about 200lb, and all of those were so extensively modified for flight that to change a human to that degree...well, you might as well just transfer the brain to a new body.

It depends on what you mean. The 'talking heads' and technical consultants on most Discovery Channel shows and the like are all professional academics. The narrators, when they're always off-screen, are frequently famous actors, as in . On-screen presenters like David Attenborough aren't common, and the odds of getting that position are pretty long without special skills in animal handling, a willingness to get really mucky, or a total blatant disregard for safety and common sense (as in Steve Irwin). As far as personal annecodotes, all I know is that several of the faculty here have stopped working with TV shows, because the shows are more interested in ratings than in accuracy (this is especially the complaint of the paleontologists). Plus, a friend of mine had to kick Jeff Corwin out because he kept making big gestures on set...right next to her (rather ill-tempered) 14 foot king Cobra. Apparently, showmanship was a stronger drive than the warning "This snake can kill everyone in this room 10 times over, and will do so at the drop of a hat."

IMHO, it depends on what you're good at. Physics requires a lot of really complex, high-level math, but very little in the way of memorization, since, after all, any electron is identical to any other electron. Biology, on the other hand, doesn't require anywhere near the level of math skills, but requires a VAST amount of memorization due to the tremendous level of variation in the millions of species.

No, sperm are produced from cells in your body going through a special form of division called meiosis.

They can reproduce, but not on their own, and they don't have a metabolism. Prions, which are nothing more than a protein, fit the bill almost as well as viri do. Thing is, "life" is like "species" - we've got a definition that works for most cases, but there's always challenging exceptions and nobody can ever agree on a 100% ironclad definition.

We're actually very sure that environment has nothing to do with which mutations show up or don't. For a start, there's no possible mechanism. More importantly, animals with deleterious mutations all the time - consider white alligators, which stick out like a sore thumb. White alligators are also a good example for another reason - most die, and die soon, usually picked off by predators. Selection can be very intense, and even weak selection can push a beneficial mutation to 100% prevalence in a few dozen generations. Mutations also don't show up when needed. An excellent example is the Dodo tree, eaten by everyone's favorite extinct bird until their extinction. Now it's highly endangered because nothing else can eat it without destroying the seed. Clearly, a mutation could solve this problem, but one hasn't happened in 300 years.

As I pointed out earlier in this thread, hollow bones aren't enough - we're still way too heavy, and lack anything close to the needed muscle power. Adding wings big enough, and muscles big enough would put us far above the maximum possible weight for a biological flyer.

I'm highly skeptical - what if these people were going to develop cancer *anyway*, and the underlying cause reduced sensitivity in their throats, which is what allowed them to drink such hot tea in the first place? And what's the putative mechanism? Heat as a mutagen? Increased strain on the cells repairing damage to the throat? Has it been tested in vitro?

You can also compare quantum physics to popcorn. Most of the comparison would be nonsense, and it would offer no insight whatsoever. Same thing here. It's pointless.

Actually, it's precisely in line with the point - to discourage others, or, in this case, to make sure everyone else behind the joystick sits down and thinks about whether they could react calmly. I'm not precisely sure (I can't quote a source beyond word-of-mouth), but at my first university, there were a lot of flight majors (whose goal was commercial aviation) and training for problems and to react to them properly is actually a large part of their training. Hell, at one point, due to a control tower error, one of the university's small planes landed on top of another, and the front wheel poked down into the passenger area. But both pilots kept their heads and landed the mess safely. I both agree and disagree. If this was some random guy off the street, then I'd agree. But in certain professions / acitvities, there is a considerable level of danger to both one's self and others, and in those cases, people are usually either trained at responding to crisis situations or have to consider their own background before even attempting the activity. After all, it's entirely possible to train out someone's alarm response, albeit only to a very restricted set of circumstances, by simply making them so familiar with the system that they're sure they can deal with anything. Not to be egotistical, but to use myself as an example, most people would freak the hell out at having a 9-foot, 50-lb boa constrictor lashing around with mouth agape mere inches from their face, but because I've spent so long around these animals, when that happened in a public place, I was able to just grab it and stuff it back in the cage without anyone getting hurt. Now, put me in a crisis situation on the road and I'll freak out even faster than most, because I'm a poor driver, lack confidence in my driving, and I'm aware of both (and trying to improve my self-control in this regard, for the sake of safety). The point is, while crises happen, people can be trained to deal with them without panic, and if you doubt your training, you shouldn't put yourself in a situation where other people's lives depend upon your ability in the case of a crisis.

Yes. Maybe his training wasn't up to snuff, maybe he was just feeling extra jittery that day, maybe any of 100 other explanations could have come into play. But that doesn't change his fundamental responsibility to: 1) Sit down before getting a pilot's license and really, deeply, thoroughly think about whether he will freak out in an emergency, making strong conscious effort to avoid just fooling himself to get what he wants. 2) Stop and think before even getting on the plan that day about whether or not he could handle an emergency on that particular flights. If the answer to #1 was 'no' or he didn't do it, he was criminally negligent in even continuing his flight training and getting a license. If #2 was 'no', he could have gotten someone else to fly, or cancelled the flight. If he didn't think of #2, he was criminally negligent. I'm familiar with this sort of stuff by analogy, mostly through venomous reptile keeping, but the principle applies - one day, something WILL go wrong, and if you don't stop and think about whether you can handle that, you shouldn't even try.

I actually try to avoid explanations at all, and it's fairly easy, since in my current Work In Progress, the only characters with any experience with alien/superhuman/magic phenomena are a moron and a musician. That way, the focus and be on the plot and characters, not on awkward, 3-page expositions of technology.

He supposed to be trained, and has other people's lives in his hands. If he will panic in an emergency, he should never be piloting, period. Ditto goes for surgeons, or soldiers. Yes, it's a high standard to require, but they train for this and we entrust them with our lives. Asking that they can keep a cool head is not too much to ask.

Ever watch the recent Transformers movie? As one of my favorite webcomics put it, "...Did the black robot just die?..."