244
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Accepted
Everything alive in the world dies this instant. Without bacteria to decompose anything, what happens to the remains? What does this look like?
They weather.
https://www.livescience.com/18343-seal-mummies-antarctic-microbes.html
Antarctica has dry valleys where, for some reasons, seals sometimes went. It is a bad place for seals, and they ...
- 303k
226
votes
Can a substance be more lethal in smaller doses?
What you're looking for is an emetic - a substance that induces vomiting. This is the specific reason why, as @Alberto Yagos already stated in his answer, suicide-by-pills doesn't always work - many ...
- 14.1k
158
votes
How can waste from the body be removed without being expelled from the anus?
Wastes are incorporated into hair.
Wonder how the elves accomplish their flowing locks? How an elf seems able to try a new hairstyle every week? It is all about the hair. The elven keratinocytes ...
- 303k
139
votes
Is there an evolutionary advantage to having two heads?
In this world, bodies are more durable than intelligence.
Imagine mineral creatures who accumulate bodies of crystals, metals and minerals. It takes a really long time to grow a good body and lots ...
- 303k
130
votes
Everything alive in the world dies this instant. Without bacteria to decompose anything, what happens to the remains? What does this look like?
The remains would mummify, petrify, erode, and eventually become just another mineral layer.
Where water is available the organic remains will dissolve and be replaced with inorganic minerals to ...
- 17k
127
votes
Accepted
Lembas bread (2000 kCalories per bite)
It just doesn't add up if you only consider real world nutritional chemistry.
The most calorie-dense food available is fat at 9 calories/gram. That's 220 grams to hit 2000 calories, nearly a quarter ...
- 3,312
126
votes
Accepted
Given immortality can animals become intelligent?
Evidence suggests that no creature becomes more intelligent than it needs to be, intelligence is expensive of calories, for example, human brains are about 2% of our overall mass but require 20% of ...
- 44.7k
122
votes
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Why would vampires be incapable of entering a non-vampire human’s house uninvited?
I think you can approach it from three different avenues, depending on the tone of your setting:
Psychological: Perhaps the root cause of vampirism in this world (such as a virus), inflicts an ...
- 6,798
121
votes
How would predation work in an empathic universe?
You’re neglecting an important arena in the predator/prey dynamic:
Thought.
If your predators can feel the thoughts of things around them and the prey can detect predatory intent, what’s to stop the ...
- 66.1k
119
votes
Why Do My Super-Soldiers Constantly Mutter Their Thoughts Out Loud?
The engineers were not concerned about their creations rebelling
Hmm
... engineers ... their creations ...
These soldiers are clearly machines, even if not electronic in anyway. Let's say ...
- 131k
112
votes
What could cause sugary rain?
The rain is actually the blood of billions.
A species on a nearby planet is being harvested by a technologically advanced alien civilization and the specimens are drained of all their internal ...
- 2,790
107
votes
Accepted
Does a grenade kill you the same way a gun does?
What a wonderfully macabre question! This calls for cited sources!
First off, I'd like to point out that you are correct to notice the similarities between a grenade and a rifle round. Both have ...
- 131k
105
votes
Accepted
Why don't future civilizations develop their A.I. to integrate with biology so they can make a sustainable world?
I work in the AI field. The fictional shows are not realistic, the authors do that for the sake of creating a powerful enemy that seems unstoppable, so the puny humans can be heroic in the eyes of the ...
- 34.2k
104
votes
How can a person be kept alive while being periodically drained of blood?
Open a blood bank and pay people for blood. People can give half a litre per donation and then go home.
It's much cheaper than trying to keep them alive using machines.
Build it in the poor areas ...
- 45.1k
104
votes
Accepted
How could elves survive without any fat cell in their body?
Instead of fat, elves store energy as ethanol.
Fats are the most dense form of food calories. Ethanol is a close second. From
https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/28511/what-is-the-most-...
- 303k
103
votes
Accepted
Suppose the Orcs are mammals, why is their skin green?
Flamingos are originally born grey but become pink due to eating brine shrimp, which have a natural dye called Canthaxanthin from their diet brine shrimp and blue-green algae. If an orc was like a ...
- 781
102
votes
Accepted
What mechanism can prevent super-healing heroes from accidentally budding?
Quorum sensing would be a very effective mechanism. This is a real life biological mechanism which is used by many small creatures like bacteria. Basically, it's a way of detecting how many similar ...
- 131k
102
votes
Why can't my huge trees be chopped down?
Underneath the outer cork-like layer of bark, the trees have a second foam-like layer. The cells of this layer are filled with a volatile liquid (in the chemistry sense - meaning it evaporates easily)...
- 15.2k
101
votes
Accepted
Can a substance be more lethal in smaller doses?
Related to cmaster's solution:
The "poison" is actually harmless A.
The body converts A to B, also harmless.
The body converts B to C, deadly.
Once the A->B path has saturated you get an A->D path....
- 30k
101
votes
Accepted
For what reasons would an animal species NOT cross a *horizontal* land bridge?
One obvious answer is that the land bridge itself lacks food.
Nothumans can cross the Bridge because they're smart and pack a lunch. Nothorses can't cross the Bridge because that region lacks fodder ...
- 38.8k
100
votes
How would trees communicate?
Plants already communicate, we simply ignore or are just now starting to discover most of the mechanisms they use.
An African tree has been found capable of communicating with its neighbors to warn ...
- 266k
95
votes
Lifeform - resistant to gunfire but vulnerable to melee
The thing is, bullets don't actually do that much damage. They punch a small hole through things.
That's bad for humans (and most other animals) because:
We start leaking bodily fluids (primarily ...
- 76.8k
94
votes
Accepted
How to replace a fictional element to the periodic table?
Unfortunately no, you can't replace an element of the periodic table because the ordering of the elements on the periodic table are based on the number protons found in the nucleus of the atom. ...
- 17k
94
votes
How many generations would it take until the noble and peasant classes become different species and cannot interbreed?
This speciation will never occur.
Why? A condition Robert A. Heinlein once described as "common bastardy."
People don't always keep their genes to themselves. Humans are well known as what I think ...
- 45.3k
93
votes
Would a 'World Tree' be feasible in real life?
Water Basins
If every 300ft or so the tree grew water basins to catch rain, (or maybe as a place to deposit water that it had already pulled up from below?) the higher parts could draw from these ...
- 1,803
93
votes
Accepted
Would it be possible to have a GMO that produces chocolate?
Ok, so this seems pretty simple. There are three basic things that happen to turn cocoa beans into something reasonably approximating chocolate.
1: Fermentation
Counterintuitively, the first step ...
- 16.8k
92
votes
Is it harder for an intelligent octopus to live on land, or a human to live in space?
You can see octopodes crawl out of a tide pool and into a neighboring pool with little difficulty. octopodes have been known to crawl out of a tank in an aquarium and have the crab in the tank next ...
- 4,427
92
votes
What would birds look like if they used buoyancy to fight gravity?
They would be round, because that's the best format for storing gas. They would also probably be drifters with little flight control. So...
- 131k
91
votes
What mechanism can prevent super-healing heroes from accidentally budding?
There is exactly one important cell - the Core
The Core is what coordinates the super-healing. Every other cell is unimportant and will simply die when cut off from a "normal" body. They can't really ...
- 17.7k
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