London has the most rigorous requirements for cab drivers in the world. I would absolutely respect someone for undertaking (and succeeding at) something that difficult.

No legs on Anomalocaris, although it's face-claw things are routinely called "arms".

Fish evolving into land-dwelling beings is a powerful idea in science fiction, but that's probably where the idea will have to stay. Our bodies have reached an evolutionary "sweet spot", and we can't get much more land-borne without making major trade-offs.

[xkcd.com]

I thought Star Trek's most iconic movie villain was Rick Berman and Brannon Braga.

For N bug-steps, there are two things to consider: how many total possible paths of N steps the bug has available to it, and how many of those N-step paths lead home.

Based on the number of paragraphs I've typed and deleted over the last . . . hour, apparently . . . I clearly have much more to get out than anybody else wants (or needs) to read. But in summary:

But it has always worked out so well for those who did have the power to go back and change what they had already done (*cough* Lucas *cough*).

Good point, thank you.

I can't see their facial expression to gauge whether they're a friend or a foe, a threat or of no consequence. They can see my face, but I can't see theirs, and so I am at the strategic disadvantage.

1) It was about "territories", not just countries, so it applied to ANY map with differently-colored areas. Any county map, congressional district map, or world map was covered by the Theorem.

Yes, it's certainly not unique to Fox News. Even io9 is no stranger to mixing-up terminologies, only to be corrected afterwards by readers.

I thought "Solar System" referred only to our *own* star and the objects orbiting it. Aren't all the other ones called planetary systems or star systems?

". . . may have . . ." is used twice in just that excerpt alone. "More likely" is used in Alasdair's analysis. Neither Alasdair nor the paper's author has proposed that you "buy it" as Truth. It is an interesting theory presented only as an interesting theory, nothing more.

Oh yes. Once you hit about a gigapascal of pressure, the melting temperature of ice starts climbing fast. At ~10 GPa of pressure (10,000 atm), the ice won't melt until you get it up to ~340 C (~640 F). And as you keep raising the pressure, the melting point keeps climbing with it.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha oh my GOSH I laughed waaaaay too hard at "NYANdertal". Awesome.

A great many forms of synesthesia involve spoken/written language, letters, or numerals, things that are brand-spanking new from an evolutionary perspective.

Homo neanderthalensis is named after the Neander valley in Germany. In 1864, when Homo neanderthalensis was named, the spelling of the German word for "valley" was "thal", and so the Germans wrote "Neander valley" as "Neanderthal".

Thank you for steering me in the right direction.

I did go see the link. I didn't get to page 20 of it, though. The data table is much more meaningful than the "agree/disagree" presented both at the top of the Pew Report and in the summary of the report here on this site. It's also not quite the same question as what's presented in either place, as the actual…