Mokele

It's a brown Kukri snake (Oligodon purpurascens), like this one, but yours is a much more attractive specimen. They're rear-fanged, so technically possess venom, but the venom can't affect humans. Mokele

It depends on the type of bone. Most bones, like ribs, skull bones, vertebrae, the pelvis, etc, don't have marrow. There's a thin layer of connective tissue, a thin layer of compact bone, and then the rest is filled with spongy, trabecular bone. Long bones (leg and arm bones) are different; the center of the shaft (diaphysis) is hollow and free of trabecular bone but rather contains marrow, and the compact bone layer is very thick in the shaft (though not necessarily so in the ends). Oh, it can, and does; your non-long bones (everything but arms and legs) grow too, by adding and remodeling the bone at the celluar scale (via cells within bone which erode it away and deposit more). The epiphyseal disks are just a cheap and easy way of making the long bones longer without as much mucking about. Yep, that's osteoporosis, a common problem in old people. New bone isn't deposited as fast as old bone is eroded, so the skeleton becomes weak and brittle. Their limbs don't shrink, though, just become more easy to break (old people do get shorter, but that's due to vertebral problems). While the facial bones *do* change (and plastic surgery can reverse that), the actual sagging and wrinkling is more due to loss of skin elasticity from collagen. Mokele

Callipygous is correct; the capabilities of an animal are determined by their ecology and evolutionary history. For instance, there are many species with *much* better spatial memory and reasoning than us, because they have to hide and recall hundreds of stashes of winter food. Similarly, we can be pretty sure octopi can't plan on decade-long time scales, because they only live 2-3 years, so such an ability would be useless to them. But they probably can respond to visual input in a much more sophisticated way, given that they change colors to communicate. "Intelligence" is nothing more than a weighted average of abilities we find important as bald apes. Other species, in other circumstances, might have highly sophisticated brains, but simply apply that ability to different tasks. Mokele

That pretty much means fish and invertebrates. Interestingly, I just found a reference that shows that reptiles have parts of their limbic system that are unique to them. Therefore, with the limbic-system-morality, reptiles are morally superior to all other life. And with Global Warming, we're going to put you fuzzballs back in your rightful place in the food chain. One thing that does concern me, though, is octopi; they're clearly capable of advanced learning and problem solving, but their brain is massively different from ours. How would one even make a meaningful comparison between the two? Mokele

There is an age beyond which growth ceases, if that's what you mean. The major limiting factor is our long bones, such as the femur. Rather than being remodeled as a whole, like ribs and such, these bones have two regions at each end, just before the joints, which are essentially just a cartilage disk. These disks, called epiphyseal plates, are why kids break bones so often (it's a natural weak point), but also allow the bone to simply add material at those points, thereby lengthening rather simply. After a certain age, the epiphyseal disks are completely replaced by bone, and no more growth occurs. What age that is varies, but is usually somewhere between 21-25. Mokele

That doesn't sound accurate. While there will be a brief period as your lungs and heart gear up in which you're running on energy and oxygen stored in the muscle, 2 minutes is definitely not the case, even for a hard start. Furthermore, fat is constantly metabolized, just as sugar is, including in muscular activity; the concept of a "cardio zone" vs a "fat-burning zone" is nonsense without a firm basis in science. Honestly, it's really as simple as "calories burned > calories consumed". How you get to that state, and the degree of the difference is details; if you burn more than you ingest, you'll lose weight. Mokele

While insects aren't common food in the US, marine inverts are: lobster, shrimp, crabs, clams, conch, scallop, for which the same conditions (namely having a brain that's little more than an enlarged ganglion) hold true. No real contribution here beyond just putting the question in terms of more commonly eaten invertebrates. Mokele

Very good, swimming will give you quite the workout too. Walking also is fine. The calories burned per unit distance don't change between walking and running; you just burn them faster in running because you cover the distance in a shorter time. Running a mile and walking a mile will both burn the same number of calories. Pretty much everything burns fat, the question is how much for how long. HIIT seem to be good for cardiovascular conditioning (and may help you run longer as an effect), and boost your basal metabolic rate for a while. It has to do with the compliance of the tread vs the ground. Treadmills are better for your knees and ankles than running on concrete or asphalt, but worse than running on dirt. During running and walking (but forces are higher in running), your legs are acting as shock absorbers. Some of the energy is absorbed by the muscles, but some is absorbed by the joints, and hard surfaces mean the joints have to take up extra the energy that would otherwise be dissipated by the deformation of the ground. Caloric expenditure in Yoga is minimal, and won't significantly help loss of weight compared to active exercises like running or swimming. Mokele

Damn, guess they must've taken it down.

Fungus reproduces via spores, which get *everywhere*. They're in the food you eat and the air you breathe. The only different between moldy bread and fresh is that the spores haven't had time to hatch yet and grow to a visible size. Mokele

What about liquid forms of noble gasses, like liquid Helium? I mean, the atoms don't bond to anything or really interact at all, so would there be any surface tension? Mokele

Something else to note: While with any major you have required classes, you usually also have numerous elective slots to fill. You can 'mix it up' a bit and get whatever you want with these, from things that will actually help getting in to med school to things that just catch your fancy. Mokele

Tree is correct. We got rid of creationism not because it's a load of shit, but because it gives rise to HUGE threads that consume an inordinate amount of time and effort that could be better spent elsewhere. Just like the Philosophy & Religion forum, creationism has been given the boot in part because of the tremendous headaches it causes all around. We offloaded it into another forum, and that's where it stays. Mokele

You'd think, but mine does the same thing when I'm in the middle of a room. Some recent research indicates that salmonella concentrations decline pretty fast on captive reptiles. Nothing else they have can be spread to humans, due to the huge differences between us and them. Mokele

Diet and exercise. Seriously, the idea that fat can be preferentially lost from certain parts of the body is a myth long refuted by actual studies. While your genes (including your gender) determine how you store fat (males often have a pattern your describe, myself included), your metabolism treats it all the same and burns fat from everywhere. The best thing for you would be more running, since you do that already. It's actually far more metabolically expensive than boxing (don't be fooled by tiredness; big muscles in your legs can last longer before crapping out, but burn a lot more too), and can consume lots of calories quickly. IMHO, you should try restricting calories a bit more than currently, upping your running a bit (but to something you can sustain and do regularly), and patience. It took time to put that weight on, and it'll take time for it to go away. Mokele

It's actually vertical orientation that's the issue. Long-ass backstory: Crabs can do some neat stuff for an animal with a lump of ganglia that barely count as a brain. One of these tricks is path integration. As the crab moves about on the beach, it keeps adding up the distance vectors, so that if you disturb it, it can make a straight-line run to it's burrow, even if the burrow isn't visible. They detect their orientation by means of polarized light. However, we don't know how they deal with vertical distances. We're pretty sure they can do path integration vertically too; if they climb over an object one way and then it's removed, they'll likely return to the burrow at the correct distance. What's not clear is how. It's likely they detect slope using an organ called a statocyst, which is basically a hollow ball of sensory cells with a grain of sand inside, so wherever the sand is, that's 'down'. The sand gets in when they molt, which gives us a unique opportunity: if they molt while on iron filings, they'll get *those* in their statocysts, and we can use a magnet to influence what they think is up and down. As swansont correctly noted, powerful enough magnets are expensive and non-uniform, and the field needs to simulate a slope over an extensive area to make the results detectable (since there will always be error due to the fact they are astonishingly stupid creatures). Non-uniformities over a distance of a few cm are also a problem because the crabs have two statocysts, and we don't know what will happen if they get contradictory 'gravity vectors' from left and right organs. So the idea is to use Helmholtz coils to generate a large, mostly-uniform field that'll make them think they're going up or down an incline as they forage, then turning it off and scaring them to see how they run back to their burrow. If the statocysts are used to find the horizontal components of a 3-D path, they'll screw up and either overshoot or undershoot (depending on the situation). If they don't use the statocysts, they'll just go home as per usual. If they do use them, though, we may be able to find out the exact neural control mechanism, how they add things up in their tiny little brains, by using this setup to decouple actual surface moved over from perceived surface moved over. 81 gauss is actually the number got testing how much is needed for filings to jump up, and thus the field strength that will exert 1g or so (remember, in biology there's a lot more slop, so +- even 10% is pretty tolerable for this sort of experiment due to all the usual variation). So if we've got a field of 1g running parallel to the ground, and gravity as usual, then the vectors add up and the crabs will see a 45 degree slope (we're reasonably sure the crabs just detect the direction of 'down', not the magnitude of the force, so the greater magnitude shouldn't be an issue). Mokele

Oh, jesus haploid christ, this is retarded! Wrong. Creationism may have been a theory, but it was never scientific one, since it cannot be tested (since God is *defined* as unknowable) and cannot be falsified (since there's always the 'God of the gaps'). It fails to fulfill these, it's not science, end of story. Semantic debate is the lowest form of debate. We all know perfectly well what "creationism" means, thanks the the actions of religious zealots in the US. Other definitions have lapsed into obscurity, and invoking them is effectively the fallacy of equivocation. Bullshit. I believe there's a teacup orbiting between the Earth and Mars. Where's the evidence for it? I believe Godzilla is real. Where's the evidence for it? That assertion is so mind-bogglingly stupid I can barely wrap my head around it. No, there isn't. The only way to claim this is to expand the definition of "evidence" to the point that it's utterly meaningless. Philosophy is a waste of time. We outgrew it the moment it gave birth to the scientific method. Nobody's unconsciously invoking any worthless mental masturbation that passes for "philosophy". We're flat-out stating that there is no evidence that supports creationism. None, Nada, zip. None has even been presented. If you want to challenge this, show evidence. If you want to philosophize, use a tissue then flush it like normal people. Wrong. A theory without evidence for it is worthless. Look at string theory. No, their "evidence" was misinterpretation, mistakes. Why call it anything less. Call bullshit bullshit. Since this thread has degenerated into more pointless creationist crap, it will be closed. If you want to discuss fake science, use the link to originsdebate. This forum is for real science. Mokele

Genetic drift is *always* in effect in a non-infinite population; it's just usually overwhelmed to the point of utter insignificance. But chance is *ALWAYS* there, and gene frequencies will always fluctuate slightly due to possum w37083 getting hit by a meteor. And remember, if a mutation occurs, there's a period at the beginning when only *one* animal has it. If that happens to be the animal that got hit by the meteor, well, it drifted to fixation all right, just to zero. Finally, "small population" may be the normal state, depending on species. What about something like a large mammal carnivore? A stable population may only be a few thousand individuals covering thousands or tens of thousands of square miles of range. At those numbers, drift can *definitely* have an effect. Mokele

There's a difference between jokes that make fun of something and jokes that do so in a way that perpetuates damaging stereotypes. How would you react if the joke had two white kids accidentally doing something typically 'black' and then saying 'Quick, act intelligent and hard-working'? Believe me, I'm not humorless about it; my friends and I are constantly joking about cliches of queer culture like the lesbian 3rd-date U-Haul or 'queer standard time' (= 'an hour late'). So Hitler's wasn't a bad man, he was just a good marketer? Um, are you seriously this stupid? In Cincinnati, there used to be an ordinance written into the city charter that expressly allowed discrimination based on sexual orientation in loans, housing, employment, anything. Do you know when this was overturned? the 80's? the 90's? Try 2004. And the margin was only 55% vs 45%. Oh, and since it's just a few old fogies behind the discrimination, I suppose I'm just imagining things when I see news reports that the local American Taliban (here known as "Citizens for Community Values") has started a petition to put this discrimination *back* into the city charter, and has already amassed 30,000 signatures? Yeah, there's nothing to march about. We can marry - oh, wait, we can't. We can still inherit from long time partners- ...oh, wait, no, the family can overturn the will with easy and leave us with nothing. Well, we can still see our loved ones in hospital - oh, wait, nevermind, we can't do that either. Well, we can still fight to defend our country and prove our patriot- wait, we can't do that either? I guess I'll go be a teacher - oh, wait, no dice there either in certain regions. But why am I fussing, since it's not like the US Congress came very close to writing hatred and discrimination towards gays into the very Constitution, did they? Oh, wait, they almost did.... I'd love it if you were right. I really, really would. I'd LOVE for it not to matter, for there to be true equality, for the entire US to not give a shit who I'm sleeping with, for it to be a total non-issue. But that's not the way things are. While I applaud you not caring who I ****, there are many, many people out there who DO care, and who will fight to make sure I am a second-class citizen because of it. Nobody is saying this is some sort of abusive hate-speech, just slightly in bad taste. It's not like the sandwich is rotten through-and-through, it's mostly OK but the cheese tastes a bit funny and the bread is just on the verge of going stale. See above. Yeah, all those tiny basic rights don't matter. Same thing for feminism - all those minor things like having control over your own body are just trivial details. Mokele

10 gauge wire, 20 amps. IIRC, i used 1.72 * 10^-8 Ohm/meter Yep, but right now, we only have one test arena, and it's 4 feet across. We'll need to do behavioral trials to see what the crabs will do in smaller arenas, since, after all, a spiffy Helmholtz coil is wasted if the animals refuse to behave for us due to a small test arena. Yeah, we're probably just gonna have an assload of coils at low amperage. Makes me glad it's not my thesis - poor Mike will have to spend all that time wrapping wire. Unfortunately, MRIs aren't big enough. The experiment deals with path navigation in crabs, so the test arena has to be big enough for them to move around appeciably in order for us to get good results. Plus if it's too small, they just hide in the sand. Plus we want to be able to control the field strength. Mokele

Thanks for all the responses so far! Rocketman, I definitely think we'll use the heat fins idea, since we're using DC, and we're probably going to move towards lower current and more coils. swansont, thanks for the info, we'll definitely use the power-transmission rating as a guide so we don't burn down the lab. externet, it's going to be a constant magnetic field, so that makes things a bit simpler. Forced ventilation, especially with the fins, is definitely something we'll consider. Of course, the real determining factor, before we can do any of this, is going to be how big of an arena we need for the crabs to behave properly. Mokele

My first thought: "They paid for a Superbowl spot and that's the best they could do with it? Someone's getting fired." Beyond that, my reactions are mixed. On one hand, it's a huge step that two guys kissing can actually be shown on broadcast TV, and frankly I'm surprised that the American Taliban hasn't been screaming bloody murder over it. However, I am not even remotely happy about the ending and the "do something manly", as if kissing another guy somehow diminishes your masculinity. True, it shows the idiotic crap that insecure men will do when forced to question their sexuality, but at the same time, it feeds into the stereotype that there's something 'unmasculine' about being gay. Now, showing the football players jeering is a step beyond, basically saying that it's OK to be a hate-filled bigot because your idol Mr. Overpaid Linebacker #42 is. However, I wasn't able to find that footage on the snickers site as Fox claims, so either Fox screwed up, or they realized it was a bad move. Overall, it was tasteless, but not on the level of the sort of hateful bile that we see on TV during modern political discourse or whenever Pat Robertson opens his mouth. Mokele

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz5mvOpCnvI Not me, but I own a big male of that species, and he's just as wonderful. Mokele

Ok, I've been drafted into the crab-lab here to help with some experiments involving magnetism, and we've decided we need a very large Helmholtz coil system. Since the cheapest one at the size we need (2 meter diameter, possibly bigger) costs as much as a new Lexus, we're going to build one, and have found plenty of resources on how to do so. However, I've hit a snag: wire temperature. We're going to have a *LOT* of wire in this thing (image 2 wheels 2 meters in diameter each with about 500 wire wraps around each), and field strength is proportionate to current strength. Now, I know the equation for power (P=RI^2), and I found the right equation to covert that into heat generation in degrees C per second, but the numbers are *really* wonky. Stuff like saying 10 gauge copper with 10 amps wire will rise in temperature by 7 C per *second*. Now, I'm no electrician, but I *know* that ain't right. And I know why it's wrong: that's the heat generated, not counting the heat *lost* to the air. But I don't have the thermodynamic wherewithal to actually calculate that. I saw something on a wiring site about "rated to 90 Amps" (this was for 6 gauge), and I was wondering if there was any standard I could use to find out how high we can push the current for a given wire diameter without burning the lab down in the process. If, for example, I find a wire that says "rated to 30 amps", make a huge coil of it (which, I figure, will reduce the heat dispersion per unit length since the coils overlap), and only put 15 amps through, will I be safe? I've got a tradeoff: I can either increase amps and use less wire (fewer coils) and worry about heat from straight amperage or use more coils and less amps and worry about heat disipation because the wires are overlapping. For those interested, I need a field of 81 Gauss. Mokele

None at all; the entire "scientific" thing is a ruse deliberately affected in order to slip past the 1982 Edwards v Aguiliard (sp?) ruling that found creationism to be religion and therefore inadmissible in science class. The immediate reaction by creationists was to dress it up in the clothing of 'intelligent design' and start using bigger words, but not to actually do anything differently. Mokele