One note on the second illusion: We have many more cortical cells devoted to processing vertical and horizontal lines than we have devoted to oblique lines. Diagonal structures (like the one observed by rotating the illusion 45 degrees) are less finely resolved, so we're not seeing the checkerboard pattern quite as…

This is what the Purple Yoda would look like as a human being. Yikes.

Only problem was the dogs always ended up paralyzed from the neck down, as there was no way to reconnect the spinal cords.

It's downright humanitarian, it is.

Indeed they did! Catheters have actually been around since the ancient Syrians, but even the modern flexible variety has been around since Ben Franklin's brother had the misfortune of contracting both bladder stones and an inventive brother with access to small pieces of metal. Flexible catheters and Voltaire only…

Catheters are the way of the productive man with no time for urinterruptions.

Warning: the following reply is from a completely USA-centric POV.

At the very least, there could be some consideration for terrain. Why is my Dugtrio using Dig against a Tentacruel when I'm swimming in the ocean?

You're looking at this the wrong way, I think. The enslaved workers were and are reproductively sterile, as are all the non-enslaved workers. All the workers are sterile. So if the sacrifice of one worker means that the other workers live, it means jack-diddly-squat for the genes of the martyr and the genes of the…

What would be hilarious would be to call it by the placeholder name for a different atomic numbered element. Make its permanent name something like "ununseptium" just to screw with chemistry students 30 years from now.

EMPs can operate across the entire EM spectrum, producing anything from power waves to gamma waves, and everything in between. Gamma waves would obviously hurt people, lethally so. Power waves would go right through them. EMPs operating at frequencies that would damage electronics (likely the kind of "EMP" you're…

That only matters if you're jumping to a different point in time . . . which wouldn't be any easier than jumping to a different point in space. Instantaneous teleportation is gonna be super hard for space or time.

Plus speedbumps kill many more people than they save, by slowing emergency response vehicles.

I agree.

Yes, really.

Or to go at it a second way: even "pure" pigments are nearly always dependent on a structure. Vermillion (mercuric sulfide, HgS) is a gorgeous red, and no matter how finely you grind it, it's still red . . . unless you can get the hexagonal HgS crystals to realign themselves into zincblende-cubic HgS crystals. Then…

That's precisely the difference between pigment color and structural color, though. Both pigment color and structural color take in a broad spectrum of light and reflect back only select light wavelengths (and which wavelengths determines their color.) Pigments remain pigmented if you blend them up. Structural…

If, when exposed to the spectrum of visible light, an object reflects primarily blue light, then by my understanding of the adjective blue the thing is blue, regardless of the mechanism by which it reflects that light. It may be structural color rather than pigment color, but the object is colored nonetheless.

I have a 4 mile walk to work, and a few years back I somehow pissed off a particular crow along the way. I still don't know what I did to instigate. But the thing hated me, and followed me for about a half mile every day, screaming at the top of its got-danged crow lungs at me. (It would ignore other walkers going…

How has Dr. Lizardo not yet been awarded some kind of io9 medal or something?