Not anything. Magic won't become real, even if a Texas court decrees it.

Mod parent up. We need fewer students in university, not more. You really should only go to university if you're passionate about some subject and want to learn more about it, but that's not why most students are there.

It's called Pelagornis sandersi, and it lived between 25 and 28 million years ago.

As pushing is trivial, and both of your applications can be achieved by pushing, they were already covered before this discovery.

If the backwards flow of water is a result of a complex system of causal interactions, they couldn't have come to the conclusion that this would work based on what they already knew. So how did they discover it? Was it an accident? If not, can one of them look into the future? This is a pretty awesome result if it didn't depend on coincidence.

There, that moped is doing it. That one. That little moped is why 20 million people literally cannot live off the air they breathe.

... in science fiction. I hope you are aware of what "fiction" means, otherwise I fear there are greater threats on your horizon than evil AIs.

That sounds suspiciously like a decision to me, comrade. Do you have documentation signifying that you are 100% pure AI?

Everything currently run by committee should ideally be run by an AI with limited human oversight in the future. Groups of humans suck at the two things AIs are great at: remembering things and making decisions.

If only! Again, there is a small but important difference between imagining a size and imagining measuring a size. Size is a property, and measuring is an action. If there were no difference between properties and actions, everyone would be immortal, because instead of your heart beating it would have "beating" as a property, which it couldn't lose because "stop beating" would also be a property, and properties cannot causally interact with other properties.

That's sequentially imagining one subway car 40,000 times, but that's not what I wrote. It's the comparative size that's at stake. Imagining the size of a grapefruit is not the same thing as imagining a grapefruit.

so way is it used as an analogy? It doesn't clear anything up, so it violates the "omit needless words" maxim.

Your use of the word "selection" should have given it away: that's not evolution, that's natural selection. Natural selection is a part of evolution, but they are not identical, just as you are not identical to your liver, even though your liver is a part of you.

As far as I can determine "being slightly less in equilibrium" does not contain any semantic content. You're either in equilibrium, or you're not in equilibrium. The variation among individual creatures is what allows selection (driven by the environment) to establish an equilibrium, by lowering the chances of reproductive success of creatures that fit less well.

Whales shape their environment, just as their environment has shaped them. That's how evolution works. Evolution is nothing but the establishment of equilibria between niches and the creatures occupying those niches. When either the niche or the creature (or the number of creatures) changes, of course the other will follow suit.

The new information in this article is that scientists have discovered a way in which whales influence their environment. Engineering has nothing to do with it.

What's worse is your wilful misconstrual of an important privacy rights issue either out of malice or ignorance.