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The Biology of B-Movie Monsters (2003)
- wrp 2y agoI highly recommend the books by Mark Glassy, The Biology of Science Fiction Cinema and Biology Run Amok!: The Life Science Lessons of Science Fiction Cinema.
- anthk 2y agoNow to the same with Pokémon, 1st and 2nd gens. There are tons of 'monsters' with real life counterparts, such as electric eels, an iron shell based snails (living on boiling, geisers?) and so on...
- yesfitz 2y agoAlways (usually) fun to read an expert talk about their field as it crops up in unusual places, at least when it's done without an ego. I've avoided the YouTube clickbait "real bank robber reviews movies" videos, but maybe I shouldn't. Meta: Unfortunately, even the earliest snapshot of this page on the Wayback Machine doesn't contain working images: https://web.archive.org/web/20040624122432/https://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040624122432/https://fathom.li...
- Renevith 2y agoIf you're looking for some good quality "expert reviews their field as represented in movies" videos without too much clickbait, Vanity Fair has a long playlist of them that I enjoyed: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ2lDrDpOLrusAYQFq2yVHf-HDhvtUsnp https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ2lDrDpOLrusAYQFq2yVHf...
- Mistletoe 2y agoI've always loved this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7qSiEKntQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7qSiEKntQA Alex Honnold Breaks Down Iconic Rock Climbing Scenes
- api 2y agoNow do space opera! The Expanse is probably the most realistic of fast-paced battles in the stars space opera, and I've seen analyses that show that the Epstein drive is at the edge of what physics would possibly allow. But those UN, MCRN, and Belter ships would need something you don't see at least in the series (or described in the books): heat sinks. They'd have to have radiators or they'd melt. Even if the drive was insanely efficient (like >90%) it would still generate hundreds of megawatts of heat at those power outputs. I suppose you could cool with propellant, but that would greatly reduce your specific impulse. To jet around the solar system like that would require very high specific impulse, meaning tiny amounts of propellant emitted at relativistic velocities. Speaking of propellant velocity: those Expanse fusion rockets would not look like blowtorches. They'd look a bit more like the "laser beams" depicted here -- rocket plumes that look like straight lines because they're made of particles accelerated to like 3-5% 'c': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8vh2ER3ao4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8vh2ER3ao4 Edit: ... and one more big inaccuracy: a torch rocket is also a death ray that would be horrifically effective even at very long range. The scenes where "they're trying to burn us up with their drive plume" would have to take place at much longer range or they'd just be dead. If you were near a ship all you'd have to do is flip around to hose your enemy down with X-rays and superheated plasma. You'd also never fire up one of those things anywhere remotely near a space station like Tycho unless you wanted to at least give everyone on board cancer. You'd have to use conventional rockets to get well clear before turning on the fusion drive. No space opera I've seen gets this right. Any sufficiently powerful space drive (fusion/antimatter torch, let alone warp drives) is a weapon of mass destruction. Does Star Trek ever even examine what happens if you point the Enterprise at a planet and say "warp 9, engage!"? In The Expanse if the belters wanted to stick to Earth and Mars they could do simpler things than throwing stealth rocks if you really think about it. Those drives would be insanely deadly in many different ways. It's one of the reasons I think war in space is gonna be rare. If it happens it's basically mutually assured destruction (MAD) given the power involved. Even a chemical rocket can generate velocities that make an impact have a yield comparable to a small nuclear device. For All Mankind is almost space opera and is probably the most realistic.
- thrtythreeforty 2y agoA Deepness in the Sky alludes to this, if I recall - something about it being bad for your health to be around a starship's torch, but I forget the details, and anyway it's never a plot point, just world building.
- pmags 2y agoLaB was my PhD advisor! A thoughtful, creative, and curious scientist and a teacher extraordinaire. For a slightly longer form take from Mike on B-movie monsters see: LaBarbera, M. 2013. It’s Alive! The Science of B-Movie Monsters. Univ of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo17841391.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo178413... For more about Mike and his impact on the biological sciences at the Univ of Chicago see: https://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/life-aquatic https://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/life-aquatic
- damnitbuilds 2y agoI always thought that the Hulk running fast and landing too gently makes him appear too light: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzceykTiwjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzceykTiwjs
- ViktorRay 2y agoThe camera does shake when he lands to give the impression of a hard landing. He probably should have also had a crater or something show up on the road when landing. Maybe that was a limitation of the CGI of the time though. If so maybe the camera shaking was a way to deal with that CGI limitation in order to make the Hulk seem like he had weight.
- alabastervlog 2y agoYou can see similar issues in the recent American Godzilla movies. In the first one, Godzilla seems huge and heavy. In the later ones, they keep making it faster and more agile and the result is that it seems light and small (and extremely fake) no matter how many buildings fall over or ships get sunk.
- bitwize 2y agoThat could be because Japanese audiences complained that in Godzilla (2014), their favorite kaiju had gotten fat.
- voidUpdate 2y agoI often think this when there's meant to be a big heavy thing moving around. I think it's one of my problems with Pacific Rim 2 vs the first film. In the first film, the robots were slow and heavy, in the second they were nimble and didn't have any of the weight behind them
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoThe new director started somewhere how he did not like how big and bulky the original robots were. Which was the entire point of the movie! They are beefy tanks. It felt as real as you could imagine building sized robots to be.
- medymed 2y agoZombie physiology also seems a stretch—-how do organisms with so many open and often bleeding dirt-covered wounds maintain hemodynamic stability in the face of inevitable septic shock and/or blood loss? A movie where a virus just makes infected people seem normal and very friendly but want to furtively bite other people to spread disease and then have delayed onset terminal sickness, like a subtle version of rabies, would be terrifying and more plausible.
- jhbadger 2y agoThe "original" (in the non-Vodoo sense) zombies shown in George Romero's "living dead" movies made no claims that the undead were scientifically explainable -- it was later movies like 28 Days Later that tried to rationalize them as infected, living people, to their detriment, I think.
- dhosek 2y agoThere is a passing mention of a radioactive satellite falling to earth in the movie, so there is an attempt at providing some explanation.
- goatlover 2y ago28 Days Later is scarier because the infected, living humans can chase you down, climb and open doors, and the infection spreads much faster. I always wondered what The Walking Dead would have been like if the survivors couldn't clear out a prison full of zombies with hand to hand weapons. 28 Years Later is coming out this year, and they going to show what happens to humanity stuck in the UK that's been overrun by the Rage virus and presumably quarantined all this time by the rest of the world.
- jhbadger 2y agoTo me that makes it more boring though. The interesting part about the Romero movies is that the survivors underestimate both the zombies and their fellow survivors. They think because they can deal with individual zombies that they are safe. But they forget that zombies in mass are dangerous and that even more than that, their fellow survivors might be not be friendly.
- bediger4000 2y agoI worked as a stress analyst in aerospace for a while. Lots of good insights here about buckling of thin walled structures, with respect to arthropods and how to attack giant arthropods.
- curtisszmania 2y ago[dead]
- hydrogen7800 2y agoThe first section about "The Incredible Shrinking Man" reminded me of "Life At Low Reynolds Number", with the concept of "scaling". >It helps to imagine under what conditions a man would be swimming at, say, the same Reynolds number as his own sperm. Well, you put him in a swimming pool that is full of molasses, and then you forbid him to move any part of his body faster than 1 cm/min. Now imagine yourself in that condition: you're under the swimming pool in molasses, and now you can only move like the hands of a clock. If under these ground rules you are able to move a few meters in a couple of weeks, you may qualify as a low Reynolds number swimmer.[0] [0]https://cooperlab.wustl.edu/PracticalAdvice/Purcell%201977.pdf https://cooperlab.wustl.edu/PracticalAdvice/Purcell%201977.p...
- staplung 2y agoAnother scientific bit that's almost always ignored in the growing/shrinking trope is that the pitch of one's voice would change. The incredible shrinking man would presumably have an inaudibly high pitched voice. His own cilia are shrinking too so it'd be interesting to work out if he could hear himself. Variants like the Hulk also seem to violate the conservation of mass but it's amusing to imagine using that property to make an infinite power source. Put Bruce Banner/Hulk on one side of a teeter toter and a mass between that of Banner and the Hulk on the other, then get Banner/Hulk to alternate forms. Profit!
- fumufumufumu 2y agoJust the title reminds me of this wonderful talk Godzilla: History, Biology and Behavior of Hyper-Evolved Theropod Kaiju https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXgX2WErXQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXgX2WErXQo
- noob_justasking 2y agoFor Jurassic park, I always wondered about how quick these adult dinosaurs must have grown. The large ones must have been, I don’t know, atleast 10 years? But then the park must have been much older than that. Is there some average or maximum kilograms per year that an animal can conceivably grow?
- Jiro 2y agoMothra is a naturally large creature, not a small creature that was enlarged.
- adrian_b 2y agoThe point was that insects cannot be enlarged much, because their skeleton, joints, respiratory system and circulatory system are optimized for small sizes and they no longer work at big sizes. Also their nervous system becomes too slow at big sizes. To be able to live, Mothra would have to only look from the outside as an insect, but to have internally a structure like a vertebrate (and even that is limited in the achievable sizes). In general, when analyzing the differences in structure between arthropods and vertebrates, the solutions used by the former are better at small sizes, while those used by the latter are better at big sizes. Even if there is an overlap in size between the biggest arthropods and the smallest vertebrates, neither vertebrates can be made as small as the smaller arthropods nor arthropods can be made as big as the bigger vertebrates.