The BBC and Yellowstone National Park have both recently released extensive archives of sound effects into the public domain; you never know when you might have occasion to know the exact sound of a grizzly crunching bison bones, the klaxon of a Romanian trolleybus, a shot from an 1870 17-bore twin-barrel shotgun, or the moaning of a frozen lake as ( Read more... )

My story takes place in a fantasy setting that is very similar to the Saharan Desert. My MC is a nomad, and a camel herder by trade. He and his brothers and sister own roughly a hundred camels, and move them between various markets, pastures, and watering holes as needed.

My question is, can four people effectively control a hundred large animals? ( Read more... )

I am working on a fanfic of the Martian, where (among other changes) NASA did not arbitrarily decide to send enough multivitamins to last a single astronaut for four years (the equivalent of sending over 8 months worth per astronaut) when the crew was only due to stay 30 days. He has a decent variety of vegetables to grow for food, and will be ( Read more... )

I'm really not sure how to research this one, so hoping ( Read more... )

Setting is fantasy, based on early 18th-century European cultures. My MC is the daughter of a lower-ranking army officer. She and her mother are allowed to accompany the regiment on campaigns, as camp followers, and are kept quite busy doing work that camp followers are expected to do (cooking, cleaning, nursing, etc ( Read more... )

Story Setting: Modern Day London

Details: My character’s family member bitten on the right forearm by an animal. The bite is very deep and went to the bone. The plan is that the wound later causes her to die due to sepsis (blood poisoning).

What I'm Looking For:
·       I assumed a wound like this would require surgery and maybe a hospital stay ( Read more... )

Hey there! Does anyone know of any wild animals (especially the type that might be found in a zoo) who would be able to sniff something that belonged to a person and then track them by scent, like a bloodhound? I know almost no wild animals would do this by choice, but the willingness of the animal to do it is not as important as the physical/ ( Read more... )

I'm trying to figure out how big a 18 foot python would be, just in the thickness of it's body, and then how large a space it would take coiled up, for a story idea about exotic animal smuggling ( Read more... )

I have a bit of a quandary here: in the world I'm writing, you can bind the magic of a pegasus by putting iron horseshoes on it. Logically this should work on other equine-type creatures, but I want to give my unicorns cloven hooves. Is it possible to make shoes of some kind for cloven hooves, or should I come up with some other device/make the ( Read more... )

Okay, this might sound like an easy question to answer but... I can't google it. Apparently my arachnophobia extends to pictures of spiders. (Learning this was... not pleasant ( Read more... )