Boffins build a tiny nanolaser that can be inserted inside our cells A tiny laser, a thousand times thinner than the average single strand of human hair, might be able to slip inside microprocessor chips or take closeups of human tissues one day, according to a paper published in Nature Materials. The system emits near infrared or visible light just 50 to 150 nanometers wide. A team of …
The fact that sharks have been hanging around the oceans for something like a half a billion years suggests they want nothing to do with this land-based life malarkey and would immediately return to the water and where would you be then? I'll tell you. Shark-based underwater football. And you don't want that.
1. Legs: by themselves no good. You need limb girdles to attach the legs to and you also need a suite of motorneurons in the shark spinal cord to send axons into the leg. Oh and donning my Muscleguy hat you also need to make shark muscle precursor cells migrate to fill those limbs with muscles so they are more than antlers*. You can't just plonk legs on a shark and expect it all to work you know. Just like plonking wings on Pegasus or a gryphon without any hint of a limb girdle doesn't make them biologically plausible.
2. Lungs: In parallel with the gills or in series? flow through as birds have or blind sacks like mammals have? If these are meant, in association with the legs discussed above to enable the shark to be terrestrial then we need lots more adaptations like a waterproof skin, a diaphragm to enable the lung to work (see above for migrating muscle precursors to make this). Some sharks are ovoviparous (they bear live young) so that might work.
*Antlers are basically muscleless, jointless legs. They even have the same branching structure of limbs: one, two, many. Moose antlers are even described as palmate. Yes, deer are hexapods but the extra limbs are non functional in locomotion: wrong direction, no limb girdle, no muscles, no joints.
Antlers are basically muscleless, jointless legs.
Really? And there's me thinking they were secondary sexual characteristics of certain cervids. Yes, they are bone, but they are discarded and regrown every year.
Moose antlers are even described as palmate.
They are described as palmate when they take on a flattened and spread out appearance, just like a human palm - or for that matter, the broad leaves of a palm tree.
For Clickety-clack, you want to look into (listen for) the computer on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
I swear one scene showed a step-by-step telephone switch. The console was recycled from EMERAC, a prop built by IBM for the movie "The Desk Set". (That feels to me like GM building props for "Unsafe at Any Speed", intentionally).
Anyway, "Because this was in a submarine with a big glass window" for all of you wondering
"What's the Elasmobranchii Angle?"
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