It has been argued that the intertidal zone provided a kind of 'stepping stone' for creatures transitioning from aquatic life to land life. With only solar tides, the zone would be much smaller and the incentive to forage there - and eventually start a new life on land - would be significantly less.

You had me at "banana-hiding weasel".

New Scientist once proposed an SI unit called the helen, which is the amount of beauty necessary to launch a thousand ships. A milli-helen would be sufficient to launch one ship, and you then get down into progressively smaller units, sufficient to launch one plank, one matchstick, and so on.

Orgasm is a "limited resource" - does that mean that we may already have reached Peak Orgasm? Will the imminent Orgasm Wars devastate the planet?

I'd be curious to know whether analysis of the other pyramids at Giza - and the step pyramid at Saqqara, and the Red and Bent Pyramids at Dahshur - reveal similar structures. If not, does that indicate that different techniques were used to build those?

+1 for the Tom Waits voiceover. The most eerie and unnerving thing about it, though, is that Val Kilmer now looks like Steven Seagal.

Maybe we should focus our energy on reliably creating humans with human-like intelligence first. Once we've cracked that, we can move on to the animals.

Is it just me, or does "hairless vibrissal crypt" sound like something from an HP Lovecraft story?

Sir, I am going to steal the concept of you stealing the synopsis to write a book trilogy to write a screenplay to write a side-scrolling platform videogame, with an accompanying graphic novel and a set of collectible figurines. Also, a brand of slimming tea, a partially-submerged theme park, and a line of designer…

I can buy the 'bigger eyes to see better in dim light' reasoning. At the same time, I'd think that many people in the tropics have historically lived in or on the fringes of tropical forests, which might be an even more challenging visual environment: not only can forests be extremely dim, but resolving objects…

The synopsis reads like the output from a fantasy blurb generator I once wrote. I'd love to see a movie that captured the feel of Frazetta's art - really captured it, which is to say not just just acres of rippling muscle, thrusting bosoms and crotch-chafing chainmail underwear, but also FF's sense for light and…

It subsequently emerged that the Higgs boson was living with three of its wives in a suburban development in Pakistan. The so-called "God particle" had evaded detection for years by not using cellphones or the Internet. In the end, intercepted phone calls made by one of the elusive particle's trusted couriers led…

That would get my vote, although the "What could possibly go wrong?" lobby requires me to remind you that when it inevitably runs out of control, it's going to digest most of our civilization. But that's cool, because then we'll have to fall back on polished wood, lacquer and bronze, and the Steampunk Future will…

In the unlikely event that anyone does discover a crashed alien spaceship, the odds are overwhelming that initial reports of the discovery will be dismissed as just another viral video promoting a videogame or a new J.J. Abrams movie.

One of the things I enjoyed about "Pitch Black" was the way they used light and dark to make it immersive: when the characters emerge from the darkness of the wrecked ship into the glare of the planet, your eyes actually narrow reflexively.

eregyrn wrote: "But then... honestly, nobody saw the bad one."

Someone already tried to make a film from Susan Cooper's excellent "Dark is Rising" series (which is really proto-Potter in some senses) and turned out a real stinker, so I guess that one's out for the time being.

Gravybees? Dammit, we need bourbonbees now.

Try watching a typical trailer with the sound off sometime: it's very disorienting, because it's just a sequence of quick cuts, one after another. The soundtrack is the only thing that holds it together as a consistent narrative, so if you take away the soundtrack it becomes unintelligible.

'Voldemort', not 'Voldermort'