There are entire books about this (or at least chapters, such as ch. 2 in the Atlas of Feline Anatomy for Veterinarians at the Medical Center Library), which I won’t repeat here. But for starters, they have a fur coat and most humans don’t.

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Duke serves as a tree prison, and prisoners are given numbers.  Also, it’s part of an inventory to help monitor the health of and schedule maintenance on the trees.  The round metal tags identify a sample (certainly not all) trees in different stages in their life cycle, of different species, etc., and if problems are noted then the grounds people can tackle the problem on other trees with similar characteristics.

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ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: AP knows what needs to be known about light. You need good light to read a book, and also to keep from tripping down the stairs. I don’t quite have the room here to write the volumes of information that exist on the physics of light.

The way to figure it out is to ask yourself, if you were light, would you rather be a wave or a particle? Wouldn’t you really rather have characteristics of both? Any self-respecting light beam would.

When it comes to the physics, despite being much maligned by many academics these days, you might want to start with some of the Wikipedia articles, such as the article on Wave-particle duality, which has some nice links to discussions of this topic. Keep in mind that there is a difference between electromagnetic waves, like light, and mechanical waves, like a tsunami — light waves can exist in a vacuum.

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You need to remain permanently grounded so you don’t build up a charge.  I recommend walking around barefoot, and drinking lots of coffee so the soles of your feet stay sweaty.  You could also attach to your body those anti-static straps that dangle from some cars and trucks to keep the vehicle grounded.  You can find these next to the fuzzy dice and curb feelers in your friendly local auto parts store.

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And which fusa might that be? Do you refer to the fossa, the carnivorous beast of Madagascar? Besides disliking each other’s habitats, I don’t think these two would be much interested in each other (as a meal), so they’d probably leave each other alone unless fighting over a feast of fish. Being an aquatic mammal and able to dive deeply would enable the narwhal to easily run away, not bothering to impale the fossa on its tusk.

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A simple literature search in a database such as Biological Abstracts indicates some research in this area.  Just one example would be this article regarding one species of ant defending against another species, “Combat between large derived societies: A subterranean army ant established as a predator of mature leaf-cutting ant colonies” by Powell & Clark (Insectes Sociaux. 2004; 51(4): 342-351). The authors discuss strategies used by the defending ants, such as “Lancaster’s Linear Law of Combat.”  Also: “Do Lanchester’s laws of combat describe competition in ants?” by McGlynn (Behavioral Ecology Vol. 11 No. 6: 686-690); and “Ant defence system: A mechanism organizing individual responses into efficient collective behavior” by Sakata & Katayama (Ecological Research. 2001; 16(3): 395-403).  It’s unclear to AP whether ants will use these same strategies against humans.

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I suspect that it’s just as possible as a conservative or reactionary politics of science. Although some would say that everything involves politics, and AP won’t argue too much, I would hope that progressives would ostensibly try to keep politics out of science as much as possible (and that conservatives would try to do the same).

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