Yeah . . . the spin isn't "holding it together" so much as it's preventing the firing pin from reaching the detonator.

At 1500 calories of potatoes a day, you've started substantially crowding out other foods from your diet. So there are two variables in this experiment: eat more potatoes, and eat less of whatever else you were eating beforehand.

Whatever the first pre-cellular life on earth was like, as far as it's concerned the world DID end in green goo.

Privacy is important. People (and groups) need a certain amount of space that is "theirs" and no one else's, at the very least because we need time to be "off", to make mistakes, practice and learn.

"This first meal on Mars was brought to you by: Taco Bell! Think outside the bun!"

But before vaccines were invented, NOBODY was vaccinated, and almost everybody got it. 50 cases of measles is bad by today's standards, but considering that measles infects 90% of (unvaccinated, haven't-already-had-it) people exposed to it, 50 cases of measles is still way better than in the past (unless the school…

A) People don't always assume that, and

A dictionary might be a better reference than an encyclopedia, with regards to a word's technical meaning:

For sufficiently low v, a static .jpeg is indistinguishable from live video.

The first few "Webcomics" features were comics I was already reading, but lately they've been digging into a bunch of work I would never have come across on my own. So thanks for that.

It is the natural follow-up to shark week.

There should be another checkoff at the end of the 1040 that asks "Do you want $3 of your Federal tax to go to NASA for the production of some truly kickin' space explosion videos?"

This is like the perfect article. Informative, interesting, a big pretty picture (with a scale reference in the corner, even!) and no hyperbole . . . perfect! Thank you.

Isn't it standard procedure to prototype with off-the-shelf parts? Why is the assumption that this was representative of a finished, production unit, instead of an early proof-of-concept design?

Your initial suspicion is correct. There is no (reputable) claim that Archaeopteryx is the direct ancestor of modern birds, nor that Archaeopteryx was the "first" bird. (First "yet discovered" bird, maybe.) By definition, the first "bird" was "the most recent common ancestor of both Archaeopteryx AND modern birds.

Archaeopteryx can't be "discovered" to be not a bird, because Archaeopteryx is LITERALLY a bird by *definition*:

Yes! "Less energy efficient" is not the same as "makes no sense", and this isn't the first io9 article to conflate the two (the "plate armor" article a few days ago made the same nonsensical assertion).

Does this mean I can start making and selling copies of printed Harry Potter books, since they were mass-produced and have a utilitarian role (the book is just there to allow you to read the story)?

Not that Jurassic Park has ever hinged on its rich continuity, but it would be kinda tough to explain how featherless animals evolved into fully-feathered creatures in only 10 or so years.

From Wikipedia, horizontal gene transfer is "any process in which an organism incorporates genetic material from another organism without being the offspring of that organism. By contrast, vertical transfer occurs when an organism receives genetic material from its ancestor, e.g., its parent or a species from which it…