What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

by Randall Munroe

The interactive map, available online at welikia.org, is a fantastic snapshot of a different New York. In 1609, the island of Manhattan was part of a landscape of rolling hills, marshes, woodlands, lakes, and rivers.

The modern pronghorn (American antelope) presents a puzzle. It’s a fast runner—in fact, it’s much faster than it needs to be. It can run at 55 mph,

The answer is that the world in which the pronghorn evolved was a much more dangerous place than ours. A hundred thousand years ago, North American woods were home to Canis dirus (the dire wolf), Arctodus (the short-faced bear), and Smilodon fatalis (sabre-toothed cat), each of which may have been faster and deadlier than modern predators. All died out in the Quaternary extinction event,

a million years from now, an out-of-place layer of processed hydrocarbons—transformed fragments of our shampoo bottles and shopping bags—will serve as a chemical monument to civilization.

“Dating pools,” http://xkcd.com/314.

Amanita bisporigera is a species of mushroom found in eastern North America. Along with related species in America and Europe, it’s known by the common name destroying angel.

But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.

This condition, having the same genetic code on both copies of a chromosome, is called homozygosity.

Mutations pop up all over the place, but our redundant chromosomes help blunt this effect. By avoiding inbreeding, a population reduces the odds that rare and harmful mutations will pop up at the same place on both sides of the chromosome.

there’s an area in Venezuela that comes close. Near the southwestern edge of Lake Maracaibo, there’s a strange phenomenon: perpetual nighttime thunderstorms. There are two spots, one over the lake and one over land to the west, where thunderstorms form almost every night. These storms can generate a flash of lightning every two seconds,