Well, if they're currently dating their crater to 300-600 mya, and the carboniferous rainforest collapse was 305 mya, it's well within the time zone, as is the Carboniferous-Permian transition.

Actually, there are desalination start-ups, but it's always going to be an energy-intensive process. The real question to ask is why funding for desalination and water purification declined something like 95% over the last two decades.

Eta beta pi, as Terry Pratchett put it. I was watching the Naval Observatory clock so closely I nearly missed my chance, but I was eating pie at 3/14/15 9:26:53 A.M. Store bought pie, I'm ashamed to say. Congratulations to everyone who rolled their own. Crust, that is.

I've actually heard of a nastier trick. One rule is that you can only name one species in a genus after a person, for fairly obvious reasons: it would be hard to have two Rattus smithii species lying around.

Well, as a member of the California Native Plant Society (CNPS), I can tell you that we've been fighting this battle for a bit more than 50 years, trying to get southern Californians especially to use more native plants, because they need less water and care.

Portland on the banks of the Columbia River is only 28 ft above sea level. If there was a large enough tsunami, it could send waves up the Columbia, sort of like the Amazon's pororoca but caused by the quake.

Well, since even the US National Academy of Sciences is saying* that Syria's a water war (or properly, that drought is implicated in causing the current unpleasantness), I think this should be a bit of a warning for every other place in the world where water's being overused.

Note also that this isn't just a natural…

For the lazy people out there, Archimedes' cattle problem has its own Wikipedia page. Let's just say that my copy of excel returned #num! when I tried to do the math in Roman numeral notation.

Gee, hundreds of generations of Mongols and other nomads can't be all that wrong.

I'd personally suggest the iterated prisoner's dilemma solution, which is that everyone take 10 pieces and call it even.

There's always the possibility of simply lacing all your food with as much hot peppers as you can stand—that is, if you like your food to be that spicy all the time.

The bigger problem with this approach, as Thomas Lovejoy and other biologists identified in Saving a Million Species, is that we don't know precisely what climate change scenario we're going to get (because that's a political and economic issue as much as a climatological one), and we don't know which species we're…

In many places, women don't have much control. I think it's possible for technology to give them the possibility for that control, and I'm hoping we find ways to enable that technology.

Yes, I agree it's a current problem. I would point out that, even in periods when contraception was illegal, there was a fairly widespread underground set of technologies and practitioners. I'm intensively cynical, but to me, fundamentalism and hypocrisy go hand in hand. Making something illegal doesn't necessarily…

I'd like to agree, but unfortunately, there are a lot of intergradations between slavery and freedom. There are indentures, bond slavery, serfdom, peasantry, illegal migrant labor, migrant labor, sharecropping, and so forth. Human trafficking and sex slavery are alive and well, despite our loud outlawing of slavery.…

Yes.

I'd add that there's another side to "technically." So far as I can tell, technology has enabled women's rights. For example, contraception allows women control over how many children they have (and whose children they have). Pediatric medicine means more children survive, and that, coupled with things like social…

Let's see. Christmas this year: spiral-cut ham? Check. The bones went into a pot of collards later, so we got two meals out of one ham.

Here's the dumb, naive idea: it's natural. After all, we're already going quiet in the radio spectrum, aside from radar blasts designed to map the surface of the asteroids and similar stuff.

Well the titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum), to me, looks and smells like a rotting elephant, although admittedly, I've never had the, erm, pleasure of smelling a rotting elephant. Still, I've been in the room with a titan arum in its full olfactory glory, and it's certainly strong enough.