Mokele

Smart animals with few neurons is far from unusual. Octopi are astonishingly smart, but don't have terribly high neuron counts either. Less extreme, New Guinea tree monitor lizards have a brain the size of a large lima bean but are *frighteningly* intelligent, and Cuban crocodiles, with a brain the size of a small cigar, display pack-hunting behavior. A lot of the human brain is sensory, after all, in part due to our phenomenally good vison (seriously, primates are up there with hawks at the top of the list for vision)

Well, I think that pretty conclusively wraps it up for this topic. Tune in next week for more of this fine program, "Desperate Conservatives Grasping At Straws".

Those are great for just general science, but what about your particular interests and specialty? Like how, as a kid, I subscribed to a lot of reptile magazines, even those directed at captive care, and this continues to benefit me throughout my career in science.

Wait, how can there be a majority approval for those who sought genetic counseling, but 90% disapproval? If the 90% from a different study? If so, what study, what sample size, and what questions?

Yeah, I'm not really clear on how much of our perception of the GD is real and how much is based on B&W photos of homeless kids and lines for soup kitchens. Of course, the other side of the coin is that we *love* doomsaying. The end of _______ is always right around the corner. Maybe it's because without that imminent threat, most people would be bored.

I prefer Terry Pratchett's description: "Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is."

Don't rush too much, and be patient. I know there've been plenty of times when I've been impatient over how long it'll take for me to even finish school, but then I look back and remember feeling the same way when I had much further to come. As they say in Zen, "The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step."

Well, let's not forget that part of what made the Great Depression suck so much was how long it lasted. Perhaps it was similar to now at a comparable time in? Or perhaps the social safety nets we have in place now are slowing the descent?

Actually, if you google around, you'll find that there have been several studies done which show that only a tiny handful of schools (less than half a dozen) actually make money on atheltics, even considering alumni donations. They're a net loss for vast majority of schools.

Not actually. Most of them are anticipatory, rather than as a direct result of any observed decline in enrollment or donations. Even my school has a freeze on (in more ways than one right now due to the damn snow), mostly due to projected lower returns from the endowment. An important thing to consider is that classes are not isolated things that can simply be cut or added. If you cut too many, students graduate unprepared, and the status of a degree from your school goes down, affecting long-term earnings. Furthermore, cutting classes doesn't save money. Tenured faculty members and their TAs are still employed whether they teach or not, so by having classes, all you're doing is making them work more for that money. At most, you could fire adjuncts faculty and cancel their classes, but they're a miniscule portion of the budget, and some are hired out of *necessity* in order to coordinate & manage high-demand classes (at my last school, we had two adjunct faculty whose *sole* job was managing the monstrous, 800+ student Intro to A&P course). If the schools were *really* serious about saving money, they'd close down the athletics programs and fire the horrendously over-paid coaches.

Well, it takes a lot of work to discover something. For instance, I'm recognized in the scientific community as an expert in snake locomotion, in large part because the entire field consists of less than a dozen active researchers and there are a LOT of gaps in our knowledge, but it still took me about 5 years of constant work (often 60-70 hours a week) to reach that point. In a field where it's a bit more crowded, like molecular biology, it may take decades to become 'known for something', and plenty of faculty never really even reach that level after a 40-year career. It's also worth noting that there's no shortcuts. I'm working on a project now that someone *technically* did before, but they did it so badly that I'm going to be able to repeat it and snag all the credit. And these were full faculty members who did it, too. The most important thing is *why* you're doing it. If you just want to be known for something, you've got better odds in pro sports. If you aren't doing science because it's what you absolutely *love*, you'll never make it through grad school and all the study you need.

It's also largely a matter of human perception. We see 'caused' things, deliberate acts such as terrorism, as a far worse threat and give it far more attention than 'uncaused' things like accidents or disease. If we can put a face, a mind behind it, it seems much more immediate and dangerous.

The way I figure it, you have to eat and piss anyway, so if the car can go for much longer on battery power alone, it's not a big deal to plug the car in at the station while you take a leak and eat a burger. Batteries. I suspect that solar will almost always be a sort of backup or surplus power, to be used to supplement existing power sources and reduce demand. Could just be routed to the nearest town for their power needs. Depends, if it meant free power during the day, probably. Besides, in most places there isn't exactly much to look at anyway.

Eh, it's kinda hard to know without a LOT of knowledge of the field, but every so often, these odd little gaps pop up, often centered around a weird organism that nobody's bothered to study some aspect of. Like how nobody knows how sirens (a weird, primitive salamander) breed. Also, don't be afraid to look up faculty in your area of interest at a local college - I've had dedicated HS students working with me who were more reliable and were a bigger help than the juniors and seniors in college.

It's astrological bullshit. Moved to Pseudoscience.

It's all a steaming load of horseshit. Nostradamus was a bad poet that people claim predicts the future if you hold the pages upside-down at arm's length and squint while hopping on one foot. And this "galactic alignment" shit is based in astrology - and we all know how reliable *that* is. You want us to take any of this crap seriously? Post evidence.

I find it amusing that you come into a place called SCIENCEforums and are surprised when people are skeptical and demand proof.

Pretty much everything outside of the basic natural sciences. Psych gets in as natural because for much of it, there's controlled experimentation (rats pulling levers, subjecting freshmen to weird tests, etc).

Actually, the fossil record provides such detailed records of evolution that we can actually time it and watch one species become another. IMHO, it's simply a case of 'different', not better/worse. Genetics can show what's related to what, but has great difficulty with long-separated lineages and is highly sensitive to included/excluded taxa. It can even yeild flat-out incorrect results due to omission of fossil taxa (as it did when the phylogeny of mammals was revised). Also, remember that genetics can only show us what's related, not how the change happened. For instance, we know via genetics that snakes evolved from lizards, but we still don't know *how* - there's evidence for a marine origin, and evidence for a burrowing origin. Genetics cannot help with this, so we have to simply keep digging until we find the right fossil snake.

Next to the road is often people's property, or is otherwise in use. Plus, by using the space above the road, it has the auxiliary benefits of shade and shelter for the road, reducing the need for A/C on hot days, and most likely reducing accidents on snowy or rainy ones. As far as power, I was actually thinking more in terms of just wiring it to intermittent power stations along the road, much like modern gas stations. The difficulties of tethered power, especially with lane-changing etc, are just not worth it.

He's just jealous because his dorky brother got to fight evil wizards, and all he got to do was teach sociology.

It might just be easier to put a roof over the road, with solar panels on it. It could harness energy, and simultaneously would make driving easier by deflecting rain and snow.

Since when? In fact, when have they ever had any breakthrough at all, or contributed anything useful? Maybe a drip and drop here and there, but nothing to compare to electronics, plastic or vaccines.

How about "How can you willfully ignore 150 years of scientific evidence and still not violate the commandment to not bear false witness?" Or "You do realize we have *watched* one species evolve from another in both lab and natural settings, right?" Or, my favorite, just punch him in the balls.

While the media can distort things, why are they even asking a sociologist about infectious diseases at all? Or why is he even saying anything about them? And honestly, there are prior patterns of behavior that lead me to treat such reports as more probable than otherwise.