Posts tagged biology
Lots of human cells are constantly dying and being replaced. How different would a human-like creature be if most cells (excluding brain cells) had longer lifespans (5 times longer, or even more)? ...
A planet much like Earth orbits a star much like the Sun, but with one difference: the energy from the star is magically transformed into sound within the planet's atmosphere. There is no longer st...
In my world there is a race of humans who are disproportionately female. They are closely derived from and very similar to real-world humans, but are unable to interbreed with the other races as th...
It's around the mid-2300s. Earth is, to put it simply, in trouble. Climate change has resulted in flooding of major coastal cities, displacing billions, which ultimately led to widespread conflict ...
I like to take inspiration for new fantasy creatures from my dreams, so I get some weird ideas sometimes. Last night I found this species. If milk gets on their skin, the creature looks as if it we...
One common way sci-fi writers try to make their aliens seem more 'alien' is to give them an extra heart. This has been done for example in Babylon 5, Dr. Who and Alien Nation among others. But:...
Hypothetically there is a large-ish planet, which is extremely dense due to its high metal content. This planet has relatively high gravity as a result. The fauna and flora have adapted to the high...
I mean literally not sleeping for the rest of their life, not like giraffes that only require short rests, or dolphins that can sleep with half of their brain at a time, or like otters and sharks t...
A quite common idea to provide "gravitation" in space stations is to make them rotate, so the centrifugal force gives an effective gravitation. A possible design is a ring-shaped space station. No...
One of the races in my sci-fi universe is the Ceratons a race of bipedal (more hunched build) that look similar to triceratops. Their race is well known as skilled geneticists having a hand in dis...
I have a species of early primates (lemur-like but not lemurs) developing into an intelligent species like humans (and yes, there is some influence from an intelligent species, it's not 100% natura...
The fossil record indicates they evolved far back in their ancestry from something not dissimilar in appearance to a lobe finned fish, but with an extra pair of bilaterally symmetrical fins, though...
If a human somehow managed to change their body in such a way that self sustaining was possible and they did not need any outside sources to maintain themselves, does that mean that they cannot gro...
Some follow-up thoughts on this question... Hydrogen isn't very soluble in water. Oxygen is more so, but still sufficiently insoluble that most oxygen-breathing Earth creatures use special oxygen ...
Trying to figure out how much a 1 foot tall fairy would realistically weigh using these 2 guidelines Fairies are just scaled down humans. Their bones are not hollow because their flight is assist...
A friend of mine has a race of creatures in her headworld and has been wondering about a biological answer to justify the color of her race's blood even though magic is a bit sprinkled in there. ...
Have a creature that doesn't really need vitamins or minerals, it only requires energy which goes through a energy-matter conversion to build what it needs. Radioactive materials would be great sou...
We have all heard what too much CO2 can lead to, but so far the biosphere have never been exposed to too low levels of CO2. But what if it did? And please, this topic has nothing to do with the ong...
Inspired from people walking on water using cornstarch plus myths such as monkey king, several gods in heaven/celestial palace, and other fiction works. (image from Dragon Ball by Akira Toriyama) ...
Gray skin and red eyes is a common look for Dark Elves, and I have a similar race in my own world. But what would physically cause such an appearance? Hard Requirements: Must not be the result o...
Gravity does exist in this world, and so does air and clouds. But this creature only has enough weight to stay in the air without falling or being lifted up. It's big like a whale and it does have ...
On this parallel earth all vertebrates received the ability to efficiently produce super strong materials from readily available minerals/nutrients in the mid Triassic. The specifics of these comp...
The main character in my setting is a human with red irises. I know that severe cases of albinism can cause somebody's eyes to appear red, but that's actually caused by light reflecting off the blo...
I'm writing a short story about space faring race of people. I want to emphasize how technology has allowed a casual approach to space, making it seem like only a minor inconvenience or hazard. O...
In my understanding bacteria is a simple thing to grow as it requires: a Nutrition concentration at the right Temperature with the right Gaseous concentration at the right pH with additional Ions a...
I've been working on this concept where a deadly new fungus starts spreading from two central locations. One in Europe and one outside of a major city in the United States. Over the course of 16 da...
Can we make a human brain and body the size of a mouse's while still retaining the same level, if not more intelligence? Like how tech has evolved to be smaller but more efficient or how cars are...
Many science fiction stories, movies, and shows involve characters undergoing explosive decompression, the technical term for a rapid drop in pressure, usually all the way to a vacuum. Frequently,...
This question's information is based on the answer in my previous question about what the aquatic creature need in order to live or survive in my acid water? The thing that's not in the descriptio...
Inspired by the Paycheck and Minority Report movies. So far as I can tell, physical time travel is impossible for humans, and so I searched to see the future possible scientific or theoretical pos...
Human sight uses about 500 megapixels. Now, imagine someone who uses more than 500 megapixels (with the same width), I assume that he would see things more accurately. So my question is : - how man...
Edit: Okay, truth be known that this question was part of a set of 5 related questions that I was recommended to break up into individual posts (in their original form, the comments had no trouble ...
This post about a tidally-locked planet got me thinking about plants and wind. Let's say plants evolve on a perpetually windy, tidally-locked earth-like planet around a sun-like star at about 1 AU...
I'm writing a murder mystery set on an interstellar starship. Context: The victim was found dead in a zero-gee chamber inside the ship. The ship is in interstellar space and traveling at around h...
I'm writing a book that involves having a space station that acts as a way point between Earth and a new planet. (Hard"ish" SF, or as "Hard" as I can make it...) The Station sits at the mouth of a...
So, as one of the many, many consequences of modern day humanity being given access to a runic magic system by an unknown party, nearly the entire human race discovers one morning that they've been...
Recently I've been imagining living on a terraformed Venus in a distant future. I've a pretty good idea of how this can be done, having gone through many articles on how to terraform venus, so my q...
What would it take for humans to survive on mars, without shelters, akin to the Martian, in terms of genetic engineering? Is it even remotely viable, or would some mechanical assistance (oxygen tan...
Say we're in a world where it is possible to tinker with biology as easily as it is to tinker with programming nowadays. For feasibility, refer to How soon will tinkering with biology be as simple ...
If I genetically modified a human to have a foxtail of roughly 1 metre length through the use of handwaved genetical engineering - would this have an effect on his diet? Of course an additional ap...
Would a "working deer" living in cities with hard paved or cobbled stone ground need "deershoes"? The deer are mainly used for light work: no heavy lifting or pulling. Would unchanged deer feet an...
If germs from the past was brought to the present/future on a person (or by some other means of transportation) and we have immunity to its descendants, like the modern germs for example, would we ...
It is a known fact that magnesium is a very important part of photosynthesis and chlorophyll. I have looked everywhere to try to find out this question but I have never really gotten a solid answer...
Form follows function, or that's how the saying goes. Which isn't true for some things. That is to say, a large reason why humans use a base 10 numbering system is because we have 10 fingers, not t...
inspire by xenomorph acid blood from alien movies. so the water either rivers, lakes, and oceans in my world or some of the regions is highly acidic because some of the dirt or stone minerals cont...
So I've been working on a low magic world where magic is actually just another form of energy that can be actualized, similar to alchemy in Full Metal Alchemist. Although development has taken a di...
I was hypothesizing an organism that could create it's own fire with the use of a flamethrower-like organ. I was thinking that this animal has a oxygen-free organ that hold diethylzinc and when the...
The year of this planet is 1,000 earth-days-long around its star, and its night lasts half a year. Can it support life such as Earth? With humans and lush forests and liquid water and good tempe...
The popular image of a mermaid is a half-fish, half-human creature breathing fine above and below the surface. The only real-life analogy to this are the amphibians - frogs, toads and salamanders. ...
Technological approaches to refrigeration tend to involve either high compression ratios of fairly exotic (from a biochemical point of view, anyway) volatile substances, or high-power, low-efficien...
