You're not the only one with trouble fathoming that. This critter existed about 20,000,000 years prior to the extinction of the dinosaurs, which is roughly 100 times longer than anatomically-modern humans have existed.

You know, I've had thoughts along this line myself. The biggest problem seems to be that there was a 'Snowball Earth' era for a good 150,000 years, not too long after humans became anatomically modern. This would have been long before we had anywhere near the population density required to sustain innovation.

Uh... I'm pretty sure that face is modeled on Katee Sackhoff.

Same here. I was sure it faced right, although that makes little sense given the angle of the speaker housing in the background. Watching the video, my eyes kept involuntarily switching from seeing it as concave and convex, which made me a little sick to my stomach. :/

I imagine the sound of the Hypno-toad in the background...

I take perverse delight in posting links to snopes.com on peoples' stupid Facebook posts and re-shares. I know I shouldn't, but it's too good to resist...

Touché. I occasionally forget (or maybe I just wish I did) that the vast majority of this benighted country doesn't hold discourse at the level of io9.

I'm as firmly in the pro-stem-cell camp as you are. However, for completeness' sake, people usually oppose the embryonic stem cell research. The ones to make this trachea were taken from her bone marrow, which doesn't usually engender the same frothing-blind-rage.

Oh, that's Cabbage, isn't it?!

Hah! I was wondering if it was a reference to the film.

We're talking about The Core, not The Matrix. I know it's a little confusing, seeing as they both have "The" in the title.

Why would you ever, ever want more than one viewing of The Core?

Yeah, seems to have been a common mistake. We'll never forget it now, thanks to public shaming on the Internets! =)

Well, Far Cry 5 will probably feature the tech as an option sometime in 2017, but you won't be able to both enable the tech and use the Oculus Rift simultaneously due to catastrophic GPU overheating.

Same thought. Literally. Probably Elder Scrolls VII though before the GPU hardware catches up with this level of computation, so... 2022? Give or take?

Me too. I questioned myself on the 'atmosphere' question, and instead of picking the one I knew was right, I doubted myself and picked the wrong one. :/

As I saw it put by someone on this very site: the man's a walking spoiler!

Re: Percy Jackson... is it bad that I might have to watch the first movie, so I can watch the second one, just to see how it is they're going to give Zeus a death scene? =)

I have to ask: is that the opening to a Discworld (or similar) novel, or did you write that off-the-cuff? Because it's awesome.

I rewatched Futurama via Netflix. I specifically DID NOT rewatch that episode.