About those toilets...

I’d actually planned a different post for today. It was a lovely, serious, scientific-y post that I went and researched and everything. But, as I sat down to write it, I kept having this question pop into my head.

Do vampires ever get more than a few feet from a toilet?

Think about it. Vampires have an entirely liquid diet, and they’re working with a basically human physiology. I mean, obviously something in them changed when they started being vampires and stopped needing food or being able to go out into the sun, but nobody ever told me about any vampire that grew an extra kidney.

The reason this bothers me so much is that our blood has a lot of crud in it. Damaged cells, metabolic byproducts, microbes, and a whole host of other nasty things swims around with our plasma. We have three whole organs dedicated to keeping our blood clean.

Then along comes this vampire. Now, I could understand a vampire not having to worry about the crud in blood if she always got it straight from the kidney. That would make sense. The stuff leaving your kidneys has been freshly scrubbed and is ready to go. Only, the vampire never does go for the kidney, does she? Nope. It’s pretty well documented that vampires go for the throat, where your blood is icky and mixed with hormones and lymph stuff and other metabolically useless junk.

So where does all of that stuff go? Do the vampires digest it? Even if they do, no chemical reaction is without a product. After they’ve slurped the energy out of their scarlet slushes, what happens to the leftovers?

Essentially, I want to know if vampires constantly need to pee, because science says they should.

And yes, I am four years old. Thanks for asking.  

And a Universe was Born:

When I think of baby things, I think of puppies and kittens. I do not think of baby universes born in the death throes of a collapsing star.  When I think of mutations and natural selection, I do not think of applying these concepts to cosmological constants.

But a guy named Lee Smolin thinks about this stuff so much that he decided to write a book about it.

Smolin points out that our universe, according to the Big Bang Theory, started out (maybe) as an infinitely dense… thing. This thing rapidly expanded into the universe we all know and live in.

When certain stars die, they collapse inward on themselves, forming a black hole.

A black hole is a thing so dense that not even light can escape it.

Smolin hypothesized that behind the event horizons of these black holes, the collapsed matter is re-expanding into new, baby universes. AND that these universes could, in time, spawn their own black holes, their own baby universes. Imagine it- Worlds within worlds, branching out across infinite dimensions, with time flowing through them.

This could actually be real.

That alone was enough to give me goose bumps, but what he said next completely blew my mind.

Smolin hypothesized that, like puppies and kittens and more stereotypical babies, infant universes would resemble their parent. They would resemble their parent, but they would not be identical. Tiny, random mutations could accumulate in their “genetic code,” the physical constants and laws that govern the nature of their realities.

Universes with physics that favored the creation of black holes would pass on their information to new generations of universes, and those with unfavorable physics would die childless. I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot like a biological process to me.

This brings up a final point. Scientists have never really settled on a definition of “life.” The best anyone’s ever done is something like: To be alive, a thing must have all or most of the characteristics of living things. A few of these characteristics are reproduction, metabolism, homeostasis, and exposure to natural selection.

So, our universe may reproduce itself, and its children may experience a form of natural selection. So, our universe converts energy and matter into other forms of energy and matter needed to maintain itself, which could be a sort of metabolism.  So, as far as we can tell, our universe maintains a stable-ish internal environment, which could be a form of homeostasis.

So, could that mean our universe is, itself, alive? 

Blobfish: The Name Says It All

Typically, I draw little caricatures for these posts, but when the thing I’m writing about looks like this, I don’t have to.

Allow me to introduce the blobfish- a swimming balloon full of jelly that makes its home in the briny deeps off the coast ofAustralia.  I think he looks kinda cute, actually. Well, until you take him out of the water…

Then he looks like a melted head.

The blobfish practically melts when it leaves deep water, because its flesh really is made out of jelly. While this may not work so well on land, it’s a great adaptation for a world under thousands of pounds of pressure. See, most fish have a gas-filled organ called a swim bladder that keeps them at the proper buoyancy. The problem is gas compresses under pressure. The farther down you go, the less a swim bladder does to keep you floating.  The blobfish’s jelly-flesh is less dense than water, letting it float where other fish would be squished. That’s why they start doing impressions of Marvin whenever they have to go out on the town.  

  And you know what? I think I know why they’re so sad all the time. (Well, other than because they’ve been dragged out of the water into an environment where their flesh melts and they can’t breathe.) It’s because they’re always getting caught by lobster fisherman, and the mean old fisherman just throw them back!

“Oh,” say the fisherman. “You’re not actually edible and you kind of remind me of my uncle Joe, so I’m just going to toss you back now.”

What do you think that does to an impressionable young blobfish’s self-esteem, hmm? How would you feel if you were constantly being called inedible and being compared to Uncle Joe?

No, seriously, how would you feel? I do have a comments section and people are welcome to use it.

Who needs silver when you have chocolate?

This has been bothering me for a while now. Humans can have a whole slew of allergies to chocolate, right? And dogs are really, reallyallergic to chocolate, right? Well, if dog(human) = werewolf, and allergic(allergic²) = allergic³, then it follows that a chocolate cake would be just as lethal as a silver bullet to your typical lycanthrope.   

Hear me out. First, let’s consider one trait all werewolves have in common: shape-shifting. To change shape on that scale, a body would have to rapidly generate new tissue and/or rearrange all or most of the cells in the existing tissues. Both processes put the body under manageable, but considerable, strain.

This is where the chocolate comes in. The compound in chocolate that kills dogs is theobromine, a close relative of caffeine. The wonderful scrub brush that is the human liver is more than capable of processing out theobromine before it can get up to too much mischief, but a dog’s liver (or, say, a liver that was busy rearranging its cells to fit into a new, more dog-like body) processes theobromine much more slowly. This means a substance that can stimulate the heart enough to cause seizures in dogs would be hanging out in a werewolf’s body while his or her cardiovascular system was already under stress.   

But that’s not even the best part. While scholars debate whether or not lycanthropy can be inherited, most people agree that it is transmissible by bite. Something in that bite does a serious overhaul of the human genome, giving the newly-afflicted werewolf’s cells the instructions they need to morph into a functioning organism, instead of a giant tumor.

Maintaining a new genetic code would be too much to ask of a venom, but retroviruses  hijack their host’s molecular machinery, going so far as to insert new instructions into their host’s DNA. So, this retrovirus forms a mutualistic relationship with its host, providing genetic info that makes the host stronger, faster, and generally less killable, in exchange for a safe place to live and a means for establishing new populations.

Then along comes theobromine, which (I kid you not) acts as a mutagen on single-celled organisms.

Chocolate simultaneously destroys both the werewolf’s cardiovascular system and the virus that’s keeping the werewolf running. All a silver bullet can do is poison him and make him bleed a little.

So, to any werewolves reading my blog, stop eating those death-chip cookies! Maybe the first couple didn’t get you, but they will!