"there is not an iota of confusion regarding where “gas giant” ends and everything else in the solar system"

1) Because we only have one complete solar system to look at. It's hard to create a taxonomy from only a small subset of data.

I prefer the original.

Like all labels in life, they are best self identified. There are no actual hard divisions. There are categories in place for marketing and awards.

I'd still like the journal process to be more open. Right now I have to search in Google Scholar, and then go through several hoops on my University library website to get access to the article, assuming they subscribe and assuming it is online. If I wasn't affiliated with the University I'd have to physically go…

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

If Primeval can do decent beastie CGI on a budget I don't see why this has to be ridiculously expensive. Pans Labyrinth was $19 million, Hellboy was $66. You could do it for anywhere in that range depending on how you shot it.

Well she wasn't the protagonist.

Why the hell do people keep writing about the particular thing they find boring to post about on social networks?

Having studied both psychology and horror film, pure evil just comes across as cartoonish and unbelievable to me. I don't think there is any way to write it well.

Io9 does science too, so I was hoping this was going to be real world examples!

I thought they wouldn't mention transwarp beaming after the first movie but it was a major plot point in the second, so, there's hope.

Hmm, I feel like there is a distinction between being used figuratively and being defined as "figuratively".

If I'm stuck in a dome and will die otherwise, I'd probably be willing to give it a try.

Generators. Very common in Maine.

I don't consider a program scanning the email for ads and filtering purposes to be the equivalent of it being read. If actual people can read it, that's another story.

I was thinking the exact same thing lol. But although he is a commentator to some extent, I'm not sure he counts as a thinker per se. I suppose to qualify, someone should have a large body of original published creative or research work to their name.

I'd like to see them start trying to make their own insulin. It wasn't until the 80s that we stopped using animal sources.

Even if the dome itself isn't sentient, whoever put it there is. Effectively equivalent story wise.