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If Santa ate all that, he'd be packing on the pounds way more than he already is (and Santa is not a lightweight now). Since nobody's reported a 2-ton Santa, there must be another explanation. Sa...
They probably wouldn't be blind/eyeless, since there is light from fungus and creatures. Also, unlike a cave fish, they would probably at times go to the surface just to see what is happening, mayb...
There could be desirable traits that are wanted. For instance, many with European ancestors have Neanderthal DNA. Neanderthals were believed to have been bigger and stronger, though possibly not as...
Climate change Let's say that a species lives in a world that used to be temperature. Over time, though, greenhouse gases were released from deposits in the soil, thus increasing the temperature o...
I think plants would get into trouble. Plants need nitrogen compounds, which many of them get from bacteria that take the nitrogen from the air. Without nitrogen in the air, those bacteria cannot c...
You say that you want "present-day technology at the start of the super-spending spree". I'm going to take this to mean basically our current world. Wikipedia has a pretty decent article on the ec...
One possibility is that the brains have implanted hardware that controls the brain to machine to wormhole interface. The way I understand the science, a wormhole would be a sub-atomic, quantum ...
Some basic statistics: Number of humans on Earth: ~7.3 billion people CO2 output per day per human: ~1.0 kilograms CO2 output per year by vertebrates: ~220 gigatonnes (=220 trillion kilograms) ...
Congratulations! You've solved the energy crisis! Place Portal B some distance above Portal A. Now place a turbine blade in between the two of them. Slowly insert a steady stream of water, stoppin...
The way the moon formed was that something big collided with early Earth when things were still pretty gooey, and knocked a big chunk out, which then fell into orbit instead of drifting away or fal...
The retention of gases such as oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water depends on the mass and radius of the planet, via its surface gravity. It also depends on the effective temperature, something we ca...
With regard to your edit of using the biological scanners to infect a computer system... In the movie Gattaca people are identified every day when entering work by a blood/dna scan. The protagonis...
I wonder if you would even have a "sky", or if you'd just see the other side of the world through a haze? We can see the moon in the daytime if it's in the right phase after all. The entire surface...
The thing with laser is that you won't be able to detect it unless you're right in the beam, or you see reflected light off of dust and other things. That is to say, it would be harder to detect th...
Xi Boötis Basic statistics: Distance from the Solar System: 22 light-years Spectral types: G8 Ve and K4 Ve Masses: 0.86 and 0.70 solar masses Semi-major axis: 33.14 AU Maximum semi-major axis f...
One way is if colonies keep failing because of something on the planets. For instance, the colonists could arrive on planet only to find there is low level biological life (like prions) that is a...
It could be a moon of a class L brown dwarf. Some class L stars are large enough to support hydrogen fusion, and are red dwarfs. But there are many that are of substellar mass, and so are brown d...
A liquid based approach could be done. There are a number of biologically produced substances that are flammable. The dragon would just need to produce a quantity of it and store it in a gland of s...
50 nanometers is awfully small. In fact, this is on the same order as many viruses, which can be 20-300 nm in size; to a first order approximation, this figure seems a good fit for Cort Ammon's est...
One idea is that a really cold world doesn't have to be a dead world. Bowlturner is right that moisture in the air or snow is going to knock out the dust pretty fast, and so you'll have to replenis...
To me, it is clear we need to start with a bird and evolve human-like features, as opposed to vice-versa. I will start with a bird whose name already implies where we are going- the harpy eagle (H...
This is an exceedingly tricky question. Determining the stability of this system is akin to determining the stability of the Solar System, a difficult - and currently unfinished, as far as I know -...
So brushing away the problems with making a spider big enough to be "half human": What kind of world changes are necessary to make giant spiders feasible? Biology wise It could still have the same...
Inject him with a small explosive device near the brain stem. The device is constantly listening for a radio signal that is being transmitted around his cell, like a dead mans switch. The device c...
Cat pee glows under a black light. Cats on this world use their pee as a defense mechanism against other cats, and are constantly spraying each other. They also have evolved very porous fur. Th...
