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Considering that Hydrothermal Vents are teeming with animal life, in absolute darkness, in conditions that are outright hostile to most surface life (most notably the complete lack of air), there i...
Other than for hiding,sexual selection ,make the merfolk look bigger or making people think they are humans Filtring plankton is an option too. The hair could also mimic some plants to trap the...
The problem with stellar nebulae (mostly dark molecular clouds yes, but even some reflection nebulae) is that they happen to also be stellar nurseries and thus tend to have short-lived supermassive...
The classic example here is Venus, with a sidereal day of 245 Earth days and a sidereal year of 224.7 Earth days - clearly less than its sidereal day. I wrote an answer related to this on Astronomy...
The cat above glows because it was exposed to a virus that carried a suitable gene: US researcher Eric Poeschla has produced three glowing GM cats by using a virus to carry a gene, called gre...
In a hard science milieu, there is only one real consideration among spacecraft in contention with each other: orbital superiority. Spacecraft within a star system that are available to contend wi...
This one's fun and easy. No biased coin needed. Assumptions: Matter attracts itself and if it hits its opposite it becomes energy. If you have energy $E=2mc^2$ pass by a particle you get another...
Current research shows that mate selection happens based on traits that we think will provide the best chance for the production and survival of offspring. Men choose women who we think will prod...
I'm surprised no one said it yet: Pheromones! One of the things that make you attractive is pheromones! This will pan out in two ways: People will just find the "best" sequence and everyone wil...
personality, and intellect, to name a few important criteria. Physical appearance is only one of many factors we use when choosing a mate, and arguably in the modern era it is less important to th...
I think a conflict of circadian rhythms alone would pose significant social and economic difficulties for a human population settling there. Since the day-night cycle is only 12 hours, by day 2 ev...
6 hours of daylight, 6 hours of night, twice a 'day'. Mapped to our 24 hour days from midnight to 6am, it's darkness. From 6am to noon it's daylight. From noon to 6pm it's dark. Daylight from 6p...
Others have suggested a sleep schedule of sleeping every alternate night which is not too different from our current 24h cycle however an alternative (and perhaps more natural to these people who h...
OK, so we have two sun-like stars (I'll just write "suns" from now on) at $100\,\rm AU$ distance, and a (probably earth-like) planet at $1\,\rm AU$ distance from one of the suns. I'll call the sun ...
Don't remove the moon. A large moon relative to the planet (Say 1:6 mass ratio as our is) stabilizes the axis of rotation, making for a stable set of repeating seasons that the animal and plant lif...
Firstly, with regard to possibility and the planet size and rotational period, note that Jupiter and a radius more than 10x that of the Earth, but a day of only 9.8 hours. Note also that the Earth'...
If this is pretty much Earth in every other respect, as long as the planet rotates regularly, it should be okay. Too little and it heats unevenly, burning sunside and freezing nightside. I'd imagin...
I don't see how any negative effects could result from having a shortened day. From my understanding it would make the daily temperature fluctuate much less. They have huge planets that don't rotat...
There is no need to go for a different planet size. Just change the rotation rate of the planet. Since the current models suggest that, just after the moon was formed, the length of a day was about...
Is the light from the distant star significant? Does it illuminate the planet as much as, say, the earth's moon does at night when full, or is this basically just another bright star in the nigh...
What if the other star was not all by itself, but had its light magnified? One way to do that is to put it in a reflection nebula. Reflection nebulae are clouds of dust that reflect light from a st...
Roughly, to get the brightness from that of the full moon to an overcast midday, you need to increase the luminosity about 4000 times (Wikipedia: Daylight). Thus you would have to bring in the sec...
Stellar engineering is going to be quite difficult and expensive, but there are a few ways to increase the apparent light output of the secondary star in the binary system if the civilization is ad...
Quick point: An orbit with that level of eccentricity is going to have summers that literally melt everything, so I'm going to assume a circular (or at least much less eccentric) set of orbits. I'm...
In order for an orbit to be stable in the short term, it needs to be within the Hill sphere of its primary. For a circular orbit, the radius of this sphere is approximately: $$r = a\sqrt[3]{\frac...
