Posts by JohnWDailey
This is the classic winter picture of a boreal forest, or taiga. This habitat exists only on subpolar latitudes, where the climate is too extreme for broad-leaved angiosperms to take root, thus ...
It turns out that a single strand of human hair measures 17 to 181 millionths of a meter wide. But anyone who creates or reinvents a fictional species of humanoid has the freedom to change the dim...
I'll confess that I have a real issue with iron--it rusts quickly. In fact, the History Channel program Life After People constantly states that, left to its own devices, the iron that makes up a ...
Let me clarify on the title, because this is important. In recent years, people have been feeling less comfortable calling the only natural satellite orbiting Earth a moon. It may not be the larg...
There seems to be a connection between orbital revolution (one year) and distance from the star the body orbits. For example, Earth orbits the sun at a distance of 93 million miles and completes o...
Believability of a fantasy creature can go so far. Case in point--the title feature. I have first seen it on a Ringwraith's winged mount... ...then on Smaug... ...and finally on the dragons...
In the History Channel program Clash of the Gods, some of the highlit characters have been given some interesting physical liberties. The episode "Minotaur" features King Minos with a meerkat-like...
Let me clarify on that title, because this question focuses specifically on vegetables that have not been cultivated for their fruits--like tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers and pumpkins--or ...
Back home, the Tibetan Plateau averages 4,950 meters above sea level with its highest point being Mount Everest, 8,848 meters--29,029 feet--above sea level. At such heights, problems are resulted ...
In a hibernating speculative evolution project called The Speculative Dinosaur Project, the "speccers" feature a species of shark called Jasconius pelaganax, the Gigamouth, which is basically a meg...
It's common knowledge that the atmosphere of Venus is too inhospitable for a proper landing. The most concerning problem with that is pressure. Venus's atmospheric pressure is said to be 92 times...
In the great apes, there are two worlds--ground and treetop. Representing the ground is the largest primate on Earth, the genus Gorilla. Representing the treetops is genus Pongo, the orangutan. ...
One of the oddest of cryptids is an octopus haunting the lakes of Oklahoma, a landlocked state. The reason this is odd is that although freshwater mollusks are common, Cephalopoda (the class consi...
Bradypodidae is the family consisting of the three-toed sloths, the one we most associate the word "sloth" with. As far as we know, they exist only in the tropical forests of Latin America and nev...
Certain anatomical features distinguish the alligators, crocodiles, gharials and caimen from the other reptiles. A four-chambered heart, something also found in birds and mammals A unidirectional...
A Milankovitch cycle is defined in Universe Today as a cyclical movement related to the Earth's orbit around the Sun. There are three elements to a Milankovitch cycle that affects the amount ...
A large, visible set of rings is the most conspicuous element that sets Saturn apart from the other planets. The whole system is 175,000 miles (280,000 km) wide but only two-thirds of a mile thi...
This question is based on a scenario on DeviantArt. The presented image is here: The description is as follows: By the start of the Cryocene, bamboo has become one of Serina's most successf...
It has become accepted knowledge that the planet Earth was birthed via a swirling cloud of dust and gravel clumping into larger and larger pieces of rock. It began 4.54 billion years ago, and 100 ...
Ecologically, when you're within the latitudes of 23.5 degrees, you'd find yourself in rainforests rich in diversity but poor in nutrition. The forest floor is a barren mess simply because the can...
Word on the street is that carbon nanotubes may be the future of construction. Apparently, a skeleton of this material would be stronger yet lighter than a skeleton of steel, which could mean exte...
Our planet's best line of defense against the worst of the sun is the ozone layer. It is no thicker than 0.01 millimeters. It absorbs 97 to 99% of the sun's medium UV light (200-315 nanometers). ...
Let's say that a patient is in hospital suffering a terminal disease or at least a physical injury that's very expensive to treat. The only hope of salvation is to have artificial, or cybernetic, ...
Anytime one thinks "flightless bird" and "aquatic bird" put together, one would immediately think of Sphenisciformes, the penguins. But during the Late Cretaceous, there swam a different kind of f...
