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It could easily be done with instinct, and not involve "intelligence" in any real way. For instance the Golden Ratio is all over the place in plants and animals, but it doesn't mean any of them k...
Weaver ants in Africa use chemicals to communicate, and can work together to make huge colonies with hundreds of nests spanning many trees and containing millions of ants. With a rat sized ant and...
I asked How can I safely brighten my secondary star? because I was looking for a bright night, though not specifically a nebula, for my habitable planet. This answer suggested placing a star in a ...
The hair could contain a combination of chemical substances that changes colour after a given time. If the time needed for that process is long enough to allow the hair to significantly grow, but s...
How can I achieve this[?] Make them cavemen. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) keeps the brain in neutral buoyancy, effectively lessening its weight against itself. This means that the brain can be h...
Most amnesiac drugs only work while they are in your system, making it so that new memories can't be recorded, without messing with old stored memories. This is really useful for anesthetic, since ...
Yes. We can write out the force as $$\mathbf{F}=-k\frac{\sqrt{e_1e_2}}{r^2}\mathbf{u}_r$$ where $\mathbf{u}_r$ is the unit vector in the direction of $\mathbf{r}$, defined as $$\mathbf{u}_r=\frac{...
Hill Valley is, apparently, somewhere in the Sierra Nevada range in Northern California. That fact, as well as its name, should make it clear that the region has an abundance of hills, which are ha...
Realistically, a well-trained backpacking dog can carry up to anywhere between 30% and 50% of its weight on its back. While the dog's spine is possibly going to be a problem, that can be worked aro...
tl;dr: No, it is not possible to have the force proportional to the product of the square roots of the charges. In an alternate universe there is a force known as the emotion force although the...
Like other answers so far, I don't think that we have any chance of establishing a colony on that planet. I would like to add another reason, however, for why this is not possible with current tech...
You said "assume uploaded personalities have been granted the franchise", which I am interpreting as "assume they are both 'persons' and 'citizens' under the constitution", which would be prerequis...
Yes, via panspermia. Panspermia is the idea that extremophiles "hitch a lift", as it were, on ejecta from collisions between celestial bodies. There are a few obstacles, because the microbes would...
When reading "faster than light" one normally thinks of it as faster than the limit speed of relativity, which is the same as the speed of light in relativity, as the photon is massless and therefo...
I see rail being an attractive transportation option, since visibility is less important when you don't have to steer. Plants and Crops would also be effected, and imported warm weather food stuf...
Why do they have the right to live? Serious question. They eat us. It's all they do, and we have a right to defend ourselves from being eaten. If they can be taught to eat something else, fine....
Many animals also prefer to chase their food, but are not allowed to at zoos. And a troll that has to decide between starving and scavenging almost certainly would prefer the latter. Therefore a s...
Chemical castration Cyproterone acetate Cyproterone acetate is one choice for chemical castration. Hormonal Therapy for Male Sexual Dysfunction describes it as a "potent, dose-dependent antiandro...
Not very realistic. HowStuffWorks has an interesting article about generating electricity from lightning. There are several problems with harnessing natural lightning: The logistical problems ...
Well, some mosquitos when flying make a noise that is clearly audible by a human (as everyone who had one in the room at night knows from painful experience). So I assume that ship has the same abi...
As you point out, any large predator should be plenty able to kill a human, given a reason to do it. Hunting for food could certainly be one such reason. Tigers already kill humans directly, and a...
I agree with another answer that, if your cultural values permit it, giving over the dead to the trolls could work. That'd be a tough sell for early-middle-ages Europe, but then, caring about trol...
Not much. I assume that by "14% less gravity" you mean that at the surface, the force of gravity is only 0.86 times its strength on Earth's surface, i.e $g=0.86g_{\oplus}$. You also say that the s...
Yes, and it's being worked on right now. The Above Below project aims to take a disused mine in Arizona and convert it into a underground building. The terraces of the mine will be covered by a la...
First, as JDÅ‚ugosz pointed out, the orbit you've drawn has a very high eccentricity - much higher than any of the planets in the Solar System, or many other planetary systems. To have something th...
