Fannish scientific inquiry
1. Why doesn't (almost) any wingfic address the musculature changes required to operate several feet of wings? Seriously, the flight muscles that'd be required to make a human-sized thing flight-worthy would be substantial. And wings may just bust out of your back, but your entire thoracic everything is going to have to do something pretty crazy, too. (Ans: unsexy. No one wants Char A strutting around with a chest like a turkey's.)
2. Why is radioactivity so often portrayed as green? Some, hm, accessory reactions (Cherenkov radiation, criticality glow discharge) are blue, but there's no green. Or oozing. (ETA: Okay, green radioluminescent paint = point! But still, what's with the goop?)
3. Mpreg: forget the birth, or even the genetics, the hell is the physiology of conception? Ass-ovulation? Of spermatozoa? (Ans: Everything about this is unsexy. Everything.)
4. Has someone ever come up with a reason a plant would evolve the capability to make Homo sapiens want to hump something/one to death? Is sex pollen some sort of misfiring neurotoxin? Whatever it is, it's the new favourite lead candidate for psychoactive drugs. (Ans: Pharmaceutical chemistry. Unsexy?)
5. Shapeshifting: whither the mass?
6. Changing the cellular makeup of humans to make them heal faster or age slower or both is fun in theory, but how is it not cancer? (It's cancer irl.) I want some technobabble explanation for how we can bork everything we know about the cell cycle. Steve Rogers what are your telomeres doing?
7. Back with Marvel: what the actual fuck is the X-gene's supposed mechanism? It's like the immunoglobulin cassette of ridiculous. RECOMBINE INTO ALL THE THINGS. Maybe it's not even a gene, but rather a target for transposons. From aliens. Alien transposons. IDEK.
I AM CURSED TO THINK ABOUT THESE THINGS.
(In other news: ASFDGDHGSFZ you'd think graduate students would be smart enough not to hit reply-all on a list email but noooooooo. Everyone doing that is disqualified from the email system pilot on account of dumb and annoying. The people hitting reply-all to complain about it especially. I have thus decreed; make it so.)
2. Why is radioactivity so often portrayed as green? Some, hm, accessory reactions (Cherenkov radiation, criticality glow discharge) are blue, but there's no green. Or oozing. (ETA: Okay, green radioluminescent paint = point! But still, what's with the goop?)
3. Mpreg: forget the birth, or even the genetics, the hell is the physiology of conception? Ass-ovulation? Of spermatozoa? (Ans: Everything about this is unsexy. Everything.)
4. Has someone ever come up with a reason a plant would evolve the capability to make Homo sapiens want to hump something/one to death? Is sex pollen some sort of misfiring neurotoxin? Whatever it is, it's the new favourite lead candidate for psychoactive drugs. (Ans: Pharmaceutical chemistry. Unsexy?)
5. Shapeshifting: whither the mass?
6. Changing the cellular makeup of humans to make them heal faster or age slower or both is fun in theory, but how is it not cancer? (It's cancer irl.) I want some technobabble explanation for how we can bork everything we know about the cell cycle. Steve Rogers what are your telomeres doing?
7. Back with Marvel: what the actual fuck is the X-gene's supposed mechanism? It's like the immunoglobulin cassette of ridiculous. RECOMBINE INTO ALL THE THINGS. Maybe it's not even a gene, but rather a target for transposons. From aliens. Alien transposons. IDEK.
I AM CURSED TO THINK ABOUT THESE THINGS.
(In other news: ASFDGDHGSFZ you'd think graduate students would be smart enough not to hit reply-all on a list email but noooooooo. Everyone doing that is disqualified from the email system pilot on account of dumb and annoying. The people hitting reply-all to complain about it especially. I have thus decreed; make it so.)