You can learn a lot from animal scat, even using very simple techniques. Wildlife biologists regularly pick through it to see what animals are eating. And the techniques these people were using aren’t simple - it takes a lot of training and a broad education in molecular genetics, which itself isn’t simple.

Indeed.

MacLeod seems to keep falling back on totalizing ideologies. The True Knowledge in his Fall Revolution is an example, and something like that motivated the protagonists in the Corporation Wars books. I wish he’d stick with pragmatic progressivism - he obviously has thought a lot about left-wing politics, and when he…

“Kai Kornhuber” - an excellent bit of nominative determinism for someone publishing on the effects of climate change on crops.

Are you sure about that? Making soup out of them would stretch things out, I’d think. Or else slicing them very very thin, like the ham filling you get in a truckstop vending machine sandwich.

...these animals are difficult and dangerous to observe from up-close...

What wonders the onward march of technology will bring us.

Methane is only absorbing sunlight in the infra-red portion of the spectrum. Since that’s the portion of the spectrum to which the Webb is sensitive, it makes sense that Saturn will appear dark in its images. /pedant

Ah, that’s Sir Brian May, my good man.

Look at the British Royal Arms. Reproduceability isn’t so much of a concern when you’re royal.

A new Mike Carey, the second volume of Abraham’s Kithamar series, and a new Ken MacLeod - second volume in a series that I hadn’t seen yet, hope that it’s better than The Corporation Wars.

Now tell us what kind of vocalizations they use when they’re interacting with humans.

They don’t have teeth. They are edentulous.

Indeed.

He is a giant among octopusologists.

It depends on the species - body size and egg size vary among them. Big octopuses lay huge clutches, smaller ones lay smaller clutches, but I believe that it’s frequently thousands of eggs. And species that lay larger eggs, which hatch out into more developed, larger young, will lay fewer of them.

No, the fires were clearly caused by Jewish space lasers.

We’re sorry about that.

+1 for planet-appropriate reference.