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You can definitely train for ability to score highly in IQ tests, so you should be able to breed for it. That's not going to make anybody "smarter" - all it will do is increase the ability to score...
If the cataclysm focuses on the center of Europe, and the landmasses surrounding it pull in to fill the gap of what was destroyed, then you should have surviving people, animals, plants, etc in tho...
What little waste remains after digestion is excreted through superficial tissues, like hair, toenails, and the skin. Elves are so much better at breaking down food that they can produce new cells...
Scientifically speaking, plants are Autotrophs, and they do not require life to thrive. They don't need DNA, proteins, or anything else produced by life. After all, life must have begun with somet...
If the ink knocks them out for only a week, then perhaps the Ko'dor don't want the victim dead, they wish to temporarily impersonate a person of power or influence and make some momentous decision ...
Well, since vibrations can't propagate through a vacuum, the 'shaking' would have to be something that can propagate through spacetime. Something like a Gravitational Wave fits the bill. However, ...
The Earth has some excellent examples of ecosystems that thrive on the underside of sea-ice in the polar regions. Convection in the Europan ocean could conceivably bring nutrients up to the base of...
The big problem I see for survival is not energy, it is growing plants for food and feed. The dark side is going to turn into a desert, no grass or crops or trees or any photo-synthetic life is goi...
I will add that, in addition to all the Western Medical readings you can have, you can also do ones from Traditional Chinese Medicine. The pulses provide a lot of information about the state of th...
The big problem here is that the organism has to be able to decode its own DNA. Therefore the "decryption mechanism" has to be built-in in the organism. You can make it more obscure by hiding the ...
I would go with commmunal pods, just out of financial and space efficiency. Consider the difference between 250 individual cars, and ten buses. Most city buses have 55 seats; you could have just 5 ...
If you are concerned for only the safety of the crew, and not about re-using the Shuttle, you don't have to do a precision re-entry. You can re-enter anywhere and then bail out once the shuttle is ...
I think this would be do-able - it might take them a bit longer (in terms of generations certainly!) but it would be do-able, partly because I'd anticipate such a society adapting to their limitati...
Biology cannot predict lifetimes ahead accurately enough to make this work. If I have a population of 500 adult males and 500 adult females in a field, and resources to support another 100 persons...
M. A. Golding's answer is correct, I think, but it's also a bit incomplete, because the exoplanets in the TRAPPIST-1 system are not equally unsuitable for hosting exomoons. In particular, their ind...
I don't think you can extrapolate from centenarians. As Jimmy Stewart once said about age, "after 70 it's patch, patch, patch." I don't know anybody that has made it to 100, but several in their 80...
If the only point is to have 1G somewhere, don't vary the speed. Make a circular disc about a hundred yards across and a maybe five yards high; and spin it horizontally. You then have two vectors t...
Alien Transportation System OK, this one sounds a bit "space opera"-ish, but you can probably dress it up and make it pretty. Aliens from an alternate dimension/universe/what-have-you use "our" d...
Size, space, the room to breathe, and the necessity of dirt. They don't just want to be underwater (for protection from storms and radiation), they actually want to be in million-strong cities on l...
Humans are yummy They prefer the taste of human flesh over the flesh of rodents that crawl around everywhere. Especially when munching on humans that are well off and can therefore afford to be cl...
I'm adding to Separatrix answer: Escape to the ground I'd rather be in a tunnel than inside some giant internal organ digesting me, so a solution could be opening a way through the Tayan tissues ...
It's a commonly held misconception, but you really don't need a lot of gravity to retain an appreciable atmosphere. Conversely, gravity alone is no guarantee that a body will have an appreciable at...
Isaac Asimov's oeuvre contains an example of this involving our very own planet and satellite. Humans terraformed the Moon, and then later a nuclear war left Earth uninhabitable. If high radiation ...
Instill a terror of fire. Either all fire or anything more than a cookfire (if some fire is necessary due to climate, wild animals, etc). If it's all fire, food is either eaten raw or lightly coo...
Calculating flux I think a slightly more helpful quantity to calculate is the flux received by the planet - the power per unit area from the star. The mean flux on Earth is the solar constant, $F_...
