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Science Marches On

560 statements
100 feature instances
126 referencing feature instances

Science Marches On	type	FeatureClass
Science Marches On	label	Science Marches On
Science Marches On	page	ScienceMarchesOn
Science Marches On	comment	Speculative Fiction often uses the real-world scientific knowledge that was actually available when it was written. There is nothing wrong with that, and indeed powering and justifying your world with Hard Science is, to many people, preferable to Applied Phlebotinum and Techno Babble. Basing your fictional science on real-world science is an excellent way to create Willing Suspension of Disbelief. There's one problem with this approach, however: Science progresses. Around the 1500s, some cultures thought that the sun revolved around the earth. Around the 1900s, there still were scientists who openly questioned the existence of subatomic particles, like electrons and photons. As recently as the start of the millennium, the existence of dark energy, and the corresponding fact that the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than slowing, was not widely known in the scientific community. And many of our current assumptions about Life, the Universe, and Everything will inevitably be questioned or disproven in the future. Therefore, when a scientific theory used widely in speculative fiction gets Jossed by new scientific discoveries, it's because Science Marches On. Scientific terminology is also subject to change, and it can be particularly jarring if a story set 20 Minutes into the Future uses names that were widespread a few years ago, but are obsolete now, and are likely to remain so. For example, the word "atomic" has been mostly supplanted by "nuclear". Likewise, older science fiction written in the US did not foresee the adoption of metric measurements. As a result, what seems like bad research in older fiction (in particular Artistic License â€“ Space and Artistic License â€“ Biology) is actually this: They did do the research; it's just that said research is now outdated. Technology Marches On is a subtrope. Zeerust may be considered a sub-trope of this, as the old ideas of "futuristic" look dated now due to new advances in unforeseen directions. For instances where the change is in the historical record, see Dated History. This can also include cases where writers predicted an advance in engineering that never happened for practical reasons, such as having our entire civilization powered by nuclear reactors by 1990 or having cities on the Moon in 2000. It's at least conceivable that such a thing could have happened in hindsight, but it would have been so expensive and unrewarding that it seems as absurd as things that have been actively contradicted by new scientific discoveries. See also I Want My Jetpack, Conviction by Counterfactual Clue, Artistic License. This can overlap with Accidentally-Correct Writing, where instead of being proven wrong, something presented in fiction is proven to be correct by science. Sometimes there is also overlap with Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale, when a number that might look ridiculously small/large to modern audiences made good sense in a previous scientific paradigm.
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Science Marches On / int_14f9297e	type	Science Marches On
Science Marches On / int_14f9297e	comment	While nowadays it is an almost universal consensus amongst scientists that the extinction of the dinosaurs was brought about by an asteroid, up until the 1980s this was not so much the case; for decades, the reason behind the disappearance of the dinosaurs was considered perhaps one of the world's greatest scientific mysteries, with many hypotheses devised by scientists to explain why the dinosaurs died out. Among these various explanations included solar radiation from a nearby star going supernova, mass volcanic eruptions leading to drastic changes in climate, and even a sudden evolutionary onset of new, poisonous plant species. The Far Side most famously spoofed this mystery in a comic depicting a group of dinosaurs smoking cigarettes. The hypothesis that the extinction was caused by an asteroid hitting Earth was first proposed in 1980 with the discovery of geological evidence that a giant meteorite had landed in Mexico at around the time that dinosaurs vanished from the fossil record, though it took the concurrence of many paleontologists and scientists, as well as popular writers such as Isaac Asimov, before the theory began to gain serious traction; it was only after the geologic mapping of a massive crater around the theorized impact site that the asteroid hypothesis became widely accepted and the extinction of the dinosaurs was no longer considered to be the puzzling mystery it once was.
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Science Marches On / int_160b4833	comment	Clone High: "A.D.D.: The Last 'D' is for Disorder" revolves around Gandhi being diagnosed with both attention deficit disorder and "its hyperactive cousin," attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Ten years after the show's first season ended, the American Psychological Association stopped using ADD as a diagnosis, instead merging it with ADHD in the DSM-5. The two variants are now distinguished as inattentive type ADHD (ADD) and hyperactive-impulsive type ADHD ("classical" ADHD).
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Science Marches On / int_162fcaab	comment	Dinosaur Train does its best to stay on top of current discoveries, but sometimes it finds itself the victim of this. For starters, in 2017 a study determined that Troodon was a dubious genus. As such, members of the genus have been reassigned to Stenonychosaurus Eoraptor might not have been a theropod, but a sauropod ancestor. Stygimoloch may not represent a distinct creature after all, but the subadult form of Pachycephalosaurus. Whether or not it is different, young pachycephalosaurs probably had flat (if somewhat knobbly) heads, growing domes as they aged◊. Brachiosaurus never lived in Africa. That was Giraffatitan. Many of the enantiornithines are depicted with a pair of ribbon-shaped tail feathers instead of a modern-style tail fan. However fossil discoveries have found that there was a much greater diversity of tail structures than previously thought. With some having elaborate tail feathers and some basal members possessing full tail fans akin to modern birds. The Hesperornis has lobed instead of webbed feet. The discoveries of Kulindadromeus and Psittacosaurus suggest ceratopsians might have had quills on their backs. The character design of Sunny Sauroposeidon is clearly based on brachiosaurids â€“ a group that the taxon probably doesn't belong to after all, instead being more related to titanosaurs. Granted, the largest macronarians would have had a brachiosaur-like appearance. Adult ornithomimosaurs are now known to likely have had wings of some sort. The limb proportions of Spinosaurus were far more unusual than depicted in the show. In 2020 it was discovered that their tails had tall neural spines that would have formed a newt like tail structure. The discovery that Dimetrodon may have been nocturnal casts doubt on the idea that its sail was primarily used for thermoregulation. The giant Shonisaurus material has been reassigned to Shastasaurus.
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Science Marches On / int_1a862e23	comment	Wolf (DOS) is a 1994 educational game that references "alpha" wolves. The concept of beta and alpha wolves became an outdated concept within fifteen years of the game's release.
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Science Marches On / int_2088ff32	comment	In the Astrid episode "Fulcanelli", at least two murders are committed to obtain the secret of the Renaissance alchemist Fulcanelli. It turns out that the "secret" is a method for preparing elemental phosphorus, which was a valuable secret in the Renaissance, but a fairly trivial chemical fact nowadays.
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Science Marches On / int_234b21a7	comment	In the 1950's sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), two doctors sit and discuss Klaatu's race's amazing health care — as they both smoke cigarettes inside the hospital.
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Science Marches On / int_2615df3d	comment	Fellow H.G. Wells book The War of the Worlds (1898) has a lot of this going on, being the very first alien invasion story and all. Like most alien invasion stories, it centers on an attack by creatures that are a massive step above the human military, whom the humans can battle and eke out a few small victories against, but who still outclass humanity by a wide margin. The thing is, his aliens were scaling to be stronger than the military of Victorian England, and as a result, the fearsome tripods in the original novel can look a bit silly now, with their pulley-driven mechanisms and habit of being taken down by old-school artillery cannons, making them look more like Insufficiently Advanced Aliens. As a result, many adaptations set in later eras tend to give them more advanced technology so they can still be a credible threat.
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Science Marches On / int_265fb1ea	comment	Quest for Fire has aged surprisingly well over a hundred years but it still shows its age in some areas. Most notably, the Kzamm do not closely resemble any human species, being hulking brutes with ape-like long arms and short legs. They are likely supposed to represent the "ape man", then represented by the now defunct species Pithecanthropus erectus or "Java man". Known from fragmentary remains, Java man was thought to be essentially a bipedal ape until more remains of the same species revealed a physiology closer to modern humans, resulting in reclassification as the familiar taxon Homo erectus.
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Science Marches On / int_26ef42e7	comment	Every Kevin & Kell strip involving lions has some reference to the idea that only lionesses hunt (Edgar and Frank are presented as highly unusual exceptions, and Edgar at least is ostracised by lion society as a result - plus he's incompetent). In 2013, it was discovered that male lions do hunt, but differently. And long before this study it had been known that male lions do at times assist on group hunts, especially when their extra bulk is helpful in finishing off large prey that the lionesses have restrained.
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Science Marches On / int_28c35f6b	comment	1/0: in an early plotline, Terra the earthworm is forced to the surface during a rainstorm to avoid drowning. However, it is now known that earthworms do not drown in moist soil — in fact, they can survive for several days fully submerged in water. Instead it seems earthworms come to the surface during rain simply because it takes less effort to move above ground compared to digging, and it is only when it is raining that they can be assured they won't risk drying out in the sun.
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Science Marches On / int_2b132158	comment	The original Buck Rogers novelette had a form of antimatter called "inertron" that flew towards the nearest vacuum rather than explode.
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Science Marches On / int_2ce70ac5	comment	In the Kung Fu Panda franchise, Master Mantis occasionally refers to his hope that one day he will find a female mantis he can settle down with and get eaten by. It is now understood that female mantises do not routinely kill the male after mating. They do so in a quarter of cases observed in the wild, but 100% of cases in captivity. Theories for this include diet and stress; if the latter, it's possible that it occurs even less often in the wild when they're not being observed by scientists.
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Science Marches On / int_31a8701b	comment	The Golden Age version of The Flash got his super-speed powers from inhaling hard water vapors. No, not heavy water (though that would be equally absurd), hard water, as in water that has a high mineral content. At the time it was thought that ingesting hard water would somehow heighten one's reflexes.
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Science Marches On / int_353bdeb0	comment	In Humanx Commonwealth novel The Tar-Aiym Krang, Flinx's adoptive parent Mother Mastiff is said to resemble the Terran canine, both in appearance and in her irascible, unfriendly personality. While this may have been the stereotype for the breed back in 1972, when Krang was published, breeders already saw this as a negative trait for mastiffs even then, and most mastiffs today are calm, good-natured, and easy-going animals.
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Science Marches On / int_35eedba2	comment	Joey: A 'Mechanical Boy' is about a boy who develops autism because of his refrigerator parents, then is completely cured through kindness and self-expression. It is now known that autism is a lifelong condition that has nothing to do with parenting.
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Science Marches On / int_3740c00a	comment	In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator is placed in solitary confinement ("the rest cure") for hysteria. Her condition is now thought to be postpartum depression, now easily treatable with medications and/or therapy. And, yes, the "rest cure" was one of the (many) horrible ways a diagnosis of "hysteria" was treated. (Others included cutting or burning the clitoris and/or labia, lobotomy, electroshock "therapy," and rape.) The story itself functions as a critical response to such medical treatment as we watch the main character lose her sanity.
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Science Marches On / int_39f7e793	comment	In Louisa May Alcott's Little Men, a boy with a severe cough of long duration is given cough syrup, which has honey in it. Then a healthy toddler is allowed to lick the sweet-tasting spoon. Luckily, the older child doesn't have tuberculosis, but he might have had it, and the toddler doesn't catch whatever is actually causing the cough. The novel was written before the germ theory of disease was generally known.
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Science Marches On / int_3b88d68c	comment	The Divine Comedy: In Purgatorio, we learn that the island of Purgatory is the only piece of land in antipodes (a.k.a. the Southern Hemisphere), surrounded by a huge ocean that covers one full hemisphere. To his credit, Dante always remembers that the sun would be to the north in the antipodes. (And remarkably enough, he describes a constellation of four bright stars that sounds suspiciously like the Southern Cross, even though he couldn't possibly have seen it, or even spoken to anyone who had. Critics generally think it's a metaphor for the Four Cardinal Virtues (fortitude, temperance, justice, and prudence) illuminating the life of the penitent sinner. Paradiso features a geocentric universe...sort of. Averted in one case: Inferno and Purgatorio clearly features a round Earth (proving that the idea that people once believed, especially during the Middle Ages, that the Earth was flat is completely wrong. The fact that the Earth is round is quite obvious to the senses and easily proven through basic geometry known since the days of Ancient Greece).
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Science Marches On / int_3e4fcdd3	comment	Moby-Dick himself was based on the sinking of the whaleship Essex, which is the first recorded history of a deliberate attack by a sperm whale on a whaling ship. The whale repeatedly rammed the ship causing it to sink and stranding the crew, who had to resort to cannibalism before finding rescue, which made the press worldwide. So it was a novel idea to throw about at the time.
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Science Marches On / int_3f633fb4	comment	Cracked's 42 Sci-Fi Movies (If They Were Updated for Realism) shows a retouched Jurassic Park scene with the feathers that dinosaurs are now known to have had.
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Science Marches On / int_3fbd173e	comment	Freefall: The Bowman's Wolf was designed as a genetically modified, intelligent wolf, and when first introduced, Florence was described as colorblind. Creator Mark Stanley has since invented in-universe reasons, but freely admits she is more colorblind than an actual wolf would be, because that was the popular understanding at the time the comic started.
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Science Marches On / int_41d55d7a	comment	The original Total Recall (1990). Mars having an ice core was pure fiction when the film came out, but later studies proved it to be partially Truth in Television. The latest research and pictures taken from satellites have proven that there actually is ice right under the surface in some areas of Mars. On the other hand, there is still a pretty huge difference between "ice right under the surface of some areas" and "ice core".
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Science Marches On / int_42b956fa	comment	In the first Ralph S. Mouse novel The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Ralph brings aspirin to a sick child. It wasn't known when the book was published in 1965, but aspirin can cause Reye syndrome in children, a very serious illness which can cause death or severe brain damage.
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Science Marches On / int_460f1a4f	comment	The first Planet of the Apes (1968) movie kept the "chimps are intelligent and kind-hearted, gorillas are aggressive brutes" idea from the novel and portrayed the former as heroic scientists and civilians and the latter as more or less villainous soldiers and hunters. By the time the 2001 "reimagining" was produced, the idea had been so thoroughly debunked that make-up artist Rick Baker pressed Tim Burton to change the villainous General Thade from the script's Killer Gorilla to a chimpanzee. The second reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes still uses gorillas as shock troops, but Buck is portrayed as a misunderstood creature with Undying Loyalty to Caesar and is given a Heroic Sacrifice.
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Science Marches On / int_554fcf93	comment	A Little Princess: In the original book Sarah Crewe's father is said to have died of Brain Fever after becoming bankrupt. Science has since proven that "brain fever" is Victorian nonsense and not an actual disease, which may be why some adaptations give Sarah's father a Disney Death and let them reunite at the end.
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Science Marches On / int_569093cc	comment	An example would be Bubba the Cave-Duck and Tootsie the Triceratops in the DuckTales (2017) episode "Timephoon!". They clearly show corrections of the many outdated aspects seen in the original show: Bubba is now a Genius Bruiser and Tootsie is no longer bow-legged or dragging her tail. A later episode "Louie's Eleven!" shows Tyrannosaurus skeletons in the modern horizontal position, rather than the kangaroo-like stance seen in the Tyrannosaurus in the original series.
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Science Marches On / int_585e7a79	comment	In UHF in the restaurant scene at the very beginning, you can see a sign saying that they cook all of their meat medium with a pink center unless otherwise specified. This was in 1989 and not a joke, as it was before the 1993 Jack-in-the-Box E coli disaster in which four children died and hundreds of others became sick in the Seattle area as well as California, Idaho and Nevada, after eating undercooked and contaminated meat from Jack in the Box. These days all meat in fast food restaurants is cooked well done, while in dine-in restaurants, the menus have mandatory warnings against eating undercooked meats. This way no one eats undercooked meat unless they ask for it (and many restaurants have a required minimum cooking temperature as well), thus keeping the restaurant from being sued.
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Science Marches On / int_5e19cf08	comment	Orca: The Killer Whale: This movie, made back in 1976, is about a male orca seeking revenge on the fisherman he blames for the death of his mate. Since the film came out, much has been learned about orca social structure, and it's now known that orca males generally don't stay with their mates. That being said, the movie still works if one interprets the Orca as an enraged son avenging the death of his mother.
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Science Marches On / int_61f27b48	comment	John Varley's novel Millennium (1983) was about time travelers who go back to the past to rescue people who are about to die in accidents. If they have to, they take people off of a vehicle before its destruction but it's much easier to just bring the vehicle itself forward in time if it was historically never found after its destruction. Varley uses the Titanic as an example of a ship that the time travelers were able to bring to the future because it was never found. The novel was published in 1983, just two years before the wreckage of the Titanic was discovered.
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Science Marches On / int_6277095a	comment	Analog: Invoked. In the September 1940 editorial, "Full Cycle", Chief Editor John W. Campbell describes how he worried that the events of "Blowups Happen" would have been proven impossible (and it was), but then even more recent knowledge had been published in scientific journals that make Robert A. Heinlein's idea that reactors can have runaway explosions a valid concern again.
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Science Marches On / int_657f1ce0	comment	In Cherry Ames: Cruise Nurse, a little boy shows Cherry his stuffed panda. She pities him, because he had asked for a "teddy bear", and his grandmother had given him a panda, which "isn't even a bear." Since the 1940's, during which the book was written, DNA tests have proven that pandas are in fact bears.
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Science Marches On / int_68b8bdfe	comment	The original X-COM game introduced the alien element Elerium-115, so called because it is supposedly the 115th element on the periodic table. This was perfectly feasible when the game originally came out, but the 115th element has since been discovered. It was given a placeholder name (Ununpentium) until a proper name, moscovium, was eventually proposed. It is known that it would not display any of the properties of Elerium shown in the game (particularly the stability).
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Science Marches On / int_6b685721	comment	In The Mole People the characters reference the existence of a "Flood Layer", referring to the theory by Biblical geologists that there exists a geological layer formed as a result of the world-wide flood from Noah's story. Even at the time of the movie this theory had been rejected by the majority of geologists, though it has persisted to the modern day as part of Creationism.
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Science Marches On / int_70814599	comment	Referenced in the Stargate SG-1 episode "The Torment of Tantalus". A 1940s scientist, stranded on another planet for fifty years, discovers through alien records that there are 146 basic elements. The main characters (from the 1990s) tell him that Earth science only recognizes 107 basic elements, to which he nonchalantly replies, "only ninety when I last looked". note Ninety-two, to be exact.
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Science Marches On / int_72e7d7f6	comment	The solution of the Lord Peter Wimsey novel Strong Poison in which a particular character had a strong motive for killing the victim with arsenic, but had no opportunity since he'd eaten and drunk exactly the same things during the meal they shared, is that the person in question had built up an Acquired Poison Immunity to arsenic by regularly consuming small amounts of it. This was believed to be possible in the 1930s, but nowadays is considered not to work and to be an urban legend. In fact, nowadays murder mysteries will have small amounts of arsenic used to slowly poison someone instead.
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Science Marches On / int_73d7930f	comment	In one episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a clue to a bizarre phenomenon turns out to be the spin direction of the neutrinos on the station, working from the premise that "Given the laws of probability, from any point of view, about half of them should be spinning clockwise and the other half counterclockwise." It was later discovered that all neutrinos actually spin in the same direction, which cannot be accurately described as either (though that last bit would have already been known at the time).
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Science Marches On / int_753491f7	comment	Disney's Fantasia not only featured inaccurately-drawn dinosaurs, but at the very beginning of the "Rite of Spring" segment, the Earth is seen being formed from material thrown out from the Sun, the Sun itself being made of fire instead of hot gas, and at the end, the dinosaurs go extinct as a result of a global drought caused by climate change rather than by a meteorite impact.
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Science Marches On / int_77711848	comment	Journey to the Center of the Earth is a story about men of science journeying to the center of the planet that was written before any definite theories were made in regards to Earth's interior. The book (and subsequent film adaptations) depicted the center of the Earth as a large ocean in a world inhabited by long-extinct prehistoric life forms, which is accessible through a series of caverns starting with an extinct volcano. On the other hand, the narrator, Axel, who is a geology student, repeatedly lampshades how incompatible is their journey with then current scientific theories. More an example of the Rule of Cool and Artistic License â€“ Geology. Though what he depicts is still false, it wasn't as unlikely as it seems. Verne only used the title "Journey to the center of Earth" because his editor thought it would sell well. He did make enough research to understand that the literal center of the Earth would be uninhabitable due to pressure and heat. In Verne's vision, his underground world is nothing more than a very, very, very vast cave, deep underground, and nobody quite knows what's under the ground of that underground world. The title is itself a case of In-Universe Science Marches On. The heroes find a note by a 16th Century scholar where he claims to have journeyed to the center of Earth, and the narrator's uncle attempts to repeat it, insisting on taking the words literally. However, the more level-headed narrator notes that back then, the scholar would have had no means to know how deep he actually went.
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Science Marches On / int_77e30f15	comment	The resolution of the Secret Squirrel episode "Quark" relies on Secret reading a dictionary and informing the eponymous villainous particle that quarks are only hypothetical, causing him to vanish in a Puff of Logic. The existence of quarks is no longer even vaguely controversial nowadays.
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Science Marches On / int_79a1465e	comment	A few decades after it was written, in Speaker for the Dead the very bright and well-educated xenologists seem terribly narrow-minded in what might be possible in alien cultures. In some ways, this is actually Science Fiction Marches On, as writers explore more ideas that might be used in the future.
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Science Marches On / int_7c113e3f	comment	The Black Stork is a 1917 pro-eugenics movie in which a man's affair with an unclean servant leads to a "blood taint" in his seemingly normal grandson, whose own son is born severely deformed as a result. We now know that this is not how genetics works.
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Science Marches On / int_7d5e591c	comment	In Camelot 3000, Sir Tristan's constant angsting about having been reincarnated as a woman seems bizarre in a series set a thousand years in the future. Apparently, doctors in that Verse were too busy finding ways to turn dissidents into Neo-Men to bother developing gender-reassignment surgery (which when this came out had been done for years).
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Science Marches On / int_7fc53da4	comment	The Magic School Bus episode "The Busasaurus" did its best, specifically going back in time to the Cretaceous Period to disprove Carlos's assertion that all dinosaurs were carnivores. All the dinosaurs are period-appropriate, but unfortunately they still had featherless theropods, and Troodonnote now called Stenonychosaurus has been suggested to have been either omnivorous or even an herbivore, rather than a carnivore as depicted.note This view is controversial and does not appear to be supported by analysis of troodontid tooth wear patterns
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Science Marches On / int_7fd1fd91	comment	The Brontosauri in King Kong (2005) were consciously called Brontosaurus as a homage to the old use of the name and (in associated in-story material) because the name was recycled for the newly discovered creatures.
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Science Marches On / int_8078fcbd	comment	Which is supported by similar events in his run on Supreme, where Billy Friday points out various scientific or logical flaws in Supreme's past adventures, seemingly ignorant of the fact that they still happened just the same.
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Science Marches On / int_81692f99	comment	In both the Star Trek episodes "The Naked Time" and "The Naked Now", both episodes' versions of the Enterprise comes under the influence of polywater, a syrup-like form of water created from massive compression of normal water that has a lower freezing temperature (which allowed it to stay fluid despite the environmental controls on the space stations the substance was on being set to freeze everyone onboard to death) and the ability to convert any other water it touches into more of itself (leading to the "drunken" states of anyone "infected" with it). Thing is, while polywater was debated as a viable substance in the 1960s (when "The Naked Time" was made), by time "The Naked Now" was shot, it has since been proven to be bogus (forcing an awkward change of the term used to describe the substance from a water to a virus).
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Science Marches On / int_87c2b177	comment	In several episodes of The Invisible Man series, the protagonist's invisibility gland takes over his personality with RNA injected in it. He essentially becomes that person.
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Science Marches On / int_891a219c	comment	At the time of its creation, The Land Before Time actually took several pains to be accurate (disregarding a few temporal mishaps). Now, a large portion of its portrayals — its elephant-footed Brontosaurus, single-horned infant Triceratops, flightless juvenile Pteranodon, and primarily aquatic Saurolophus — are outdated. (At least it can still find use as a historical document: "This is what we thought at the time....")
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Science Marches On / int_892aa56a	comment	In the Murdoch Mysteries episode "Shock Value", two psychologists are working on a predecessor to the infamous Millgram experiments (although with real electric shocks), coming to the same conclusion that most people really will electrocute someone else just because an authority tells them to. However, in recent years, doubt has been placed on Millgram's methodology and results.
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Science Marches On / int_8d814070	comment	MAS*H: Frank once voiced an intention to remove a patient's perfectly-healthy appendix, simply because the abdominal surgery he was performing gave him access to it. While this was once a common practice to avert the (low) risk of future appendicitis, it's now known that the appendix plays a role in immunity and in maintaining the bacterial flora in the event of severe diarrhea, so is no longer routinely done merely as a precaution. Invoked in "The Red/White Blues". Everyone was supposed to take chloroquine to prevent malaria. By mistake, primaquine was sent instead, but this causes anemia in black people. When Klinger and another Caucasian (Corp. Goldman, who is Jewish) suddenly got strange symptoms, they were found to be anemic; the doctors eliminated all but the medicine. Klinger and Goldman were fine once they stopped taking it. The credits mentioned the medicine was later found to also negatively affect those of Mediterranean descent.
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Science Marches On / int_908bebe0	comment	When Martian Time-Slip was first published in The '60s, autism was believed to be the same thing as childhood schizophrenia. It's now known that the two conditions are unrelated.
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Science Marches On / int_915fa8ff	comment	In The Man Who Evolved (1931), evolution is caused by cosmic rays and, therefore, concentrated cosmic rays make you evolve faster. Aside from the obvious Oven Logic at work here, the idea is (loosely) consistent with the early 20th century notion that new species arose as a result of large mutations caused, e.g., by natural radiation. The current view on evolution as a combination of natural selection and genetic variability (the so-called "Modern Synthesis") would become widespread in the following decades.
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Science Marches On / int_95a8a58a	comment	An actual plot point in the film version of The General's Daughter. In 1992, the Army leadership covered up a rape of a cadet, as they believed that there was no way to positively identify the rapists, and an unsolvable rape would destroy West Point's reputation. Seven years later, with advances in DNA testing methods, Sunhill convinces one of the rapists to rat out the others. No DNA test had actually been done; Sunhill only said that DNA testing could expose the rapists.
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Science Marches On / int_97ce01ba	comment	The opening to Bee Movie famously says that we have no idea how bees have been able to fly, although we've since figured it out. Turns out, bees should only be incapable of flight if you assume their wings are rigid boards. However, they can and do flex, which provides enough extra lift to get their fat little bodies off the ground.
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Science Marches On / int_98670fed	comment	Tom Strong references this trope and uses it in a Post Modern sort of way: Tom comments that scientists proved that â€œliquid heatâ€� could not exist after his nemesis Paul Saveen had successfully created it. The wink at this trope seems like Alan Moore making a statement about how everything is fair game in a story until science disproves it, and writers need not be ashamed of using a cool idea that was later discredited. Which is supported by similar events in his run on Supreme, where Billy Friday points out various scientific or logical flaws in Supreme's past adventures, seemingly ignorant of the fact that they still happened just the same.
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Science Marches On / int_988629da	comment	In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, released in 1982 and set in 2285, Kirk receives reading glasses from McCoy because he's allergic to the drug that's normally prescribed for vision correction, implying there is no other option to fix Kirk's eyes. Within 3 decades of the film's release, and over two and half centuries before the film is set, laser corrective surgery of vision is a routine procedure.
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Science Marches On / int_9af804ae	comment	20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: A great deal of biology is now known to be erroneous (evil sperm whales and the bottom of the sea being lifeless, for starters), but one of the more bizarre ideas to a modern reader is that the main characters find electricity so amazing, noting that their rooms wouldn't be out of place in a grand hotel if it weren't for the electric lights or that the Nautilus is powered by electricity instead of steam. It's likely for this reason that the Disney film has the Nautilus run on nuclear power instead. It is worth mentioning that the "evil sperm whales" is an idea actually held by Captain Nemo, prof. Arronnax doesn't necessarily agree with him on it, and is taken aback by Nemo's brutal and unprovoked slaughter of the animals in question. It was probably included more as a sign of Nemo becoming progressively unhinged with time than an actual scientific tidbit. Moby-Dick himself was based on the sinking of the whaleship Essex, which is the first recorded history of a deliberate attack by a sperm whale on a whaling ship. The whale repeatedly rammed the ship causing it to sink and stranding the crew, who had to resort to cannibalism before finding rescue, which made the press worldwide. So it was a novel idea to throw about at the time. Aside from the biology, there's also some very big geography/geology weirdness in how the Nautilus can sail straight to the South Pole under the ice when we now know the South Pole is over land. Exploration of the Antarctic continent was just beginning when Verne wrote the book, so it was plausible at the time, but now it just looks weird (even if the South Pole happens to be almost on a part of the ice that bottoms out below sea level). (The NORTH Pole is over water, and submarines regularly have and do travel to it under the ice — and the first to do so also happened to be named "Nautilus".)
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Science Marches On / int_a04b0ca3	comment	Tintin: In The Seven Crystal Balls: Up until the 1960s, scientists were skeptical of the very existence of ball lightning, putting them on the level of Flying Saucers and other hocus pocus. Hence their mystical properties as shown on the book cover.
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Science Marches On / int_a5549ed0	comment	In The Bible, many people are described as having Demonic Possession, such as a young boy who was suffering from Convulsive Seizures, and that their healings were exorcisms. Now that more is known about medicine than was known in the first century, most of them are thought to have been suffering from various mental and/or physical disorders, such as Epilepsy.
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Science Marches On / int_a672cc77	comment	Prior to the acceptance of plate tectonics, an elaborate series of prehistoric land bridges were posited to explain how similar species had ended up being separated by oceans. In Disney's Swiss Family Robinson, released in 1960, this land bridge theory is cited to Hand Wave the movie's use of Misplaced Wildlife (the original novel also features Misplaced Wildlife, but offers no explanation for it). In addition to since being proved wrong, this has the problem of the land bridge theory having not been developed yet as of the film's Napoleonic era setting. But hey, they tried.
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Science Marches On / int_a876ecdf	comment	In Felidae, "European Shorthair" is used as a synonym for "Domestic Shorthair". In the 1980s, this was commonplace. However, since then, "European Shorthair" has become known exclusively as a breed, while "Domestic Shorthair" is a fancy term for "mixed-breed/moggy cat".
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Science Marches On / int_aa954170	comment	Gundam X has a scene in which the protagonists meet an extremely intelligent dolphin, and Jamil says that dolphins have no concept of killing their own species. Well, this was a popularly-believed theory, but it turns out that it couldn't be more wrong...
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Science Marches On / int_af70f136	comment	Star Trek: Untold Voyages: In "Past Imperfect", Dr. McCoy refers to the unproven theory of the 20th Century that the outbreak of AIDS was caused by a mutation of the polio vaccine used in Africa several decades earlier. This theory has since been thoroughly debunked. In 2014, it was determined that AIDS originated in LÃ©opoldville in the Belgian Congo (which is now Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the 1920s.
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Science Marches On / int_b0282745	comment	One Buck Danny story set in the Korean war has a major antagonist codenamed "Ivan", an Ace Pilot so skilled he shoots down planes without the pilot seeing him coming or going. The big reveal is the enemy's use of guided missiles. Considering that the first Soviet missiles were straight copies of an AIM-9B Sidewinder that was captured after embedding itself in a PRC fighter instead of detonating, this seems questionable.
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Science Marches On / int_b36a4699	comment	In Exam, Black claims that urine is sterile. Because it's both amusing and surprising, urine being sterile is an oft-cited factoid in general, which until recently has enjoyed the rare vindication of accurately reflecting scientific understanding. In recent years, it's been discovered that urine isn't sterile after all.
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Science Marches On / int_b3b6eb47	comment	From the Earth to the Moon: The early silent film based on the book describes the astronauts and their spacecraft being fired from a giant gun. Launching a spacecraft in that manner would thoroughly kill the astronauts from excessive G-forces, which is why real manned spaceflight is done with staged rockets. (The space gun concept has been proposed in real life, but only for launching cargo.) This was thoroughly discussed by the characters themselves and Hand Waved away by Captain Nicoll inventing an ingenious shock absorber device (which wouldn't work anyway, really). Now it is thought that the gun thing was suggested to Verne by his publisher Hetzel, who thought that the rocket (which Verne envisioned originally) wouldn't be cool enough. The book also mentions zero-G environment only for a brief moment when the projectile was passing the point where the gravities of Earth and Moon cancel each other out. The better application of the mechanics well known even in Verne's time would show the zero-G state prevailing for the whole flight, as it happens in Real Life. There's is one even worse offender: in the book, the heroes get rid of their dead dog by opening a window on the bottom of the projectile and throwing it out. They are concerned about the loss of air, but they do it fast enough that "only a few particles" of air escape. It's mentioned they later casually get rid of litter this way throughout their voyage.
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Science Marches On / int_b56e7fd	comment	Endless Ocean and its sequel contain specimens of goblin sharks in deep-sea regions. Realistic enough. However, their jaws are depicted as permanently protruding, an out-of-date assumption as we have learned more about goblin shark physiology.
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Science Marches On / int_b7c3d6c5	comment	In Prince Caspian, C. S. Lewis writes that Reepicheep wanting his tail back was mainly a matter of mouse pride, and all the other mice are prepared to sacrifice their tails so as not to embarrass their leader. This book was written in the 1950's, before it was known that mouse tails help regulate body temperature. Then again, talking mice probably had to have their temperature regulation jiggled a bit due to their greater size.
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Science Marches On / int_b8e7bb8	comment	You can actually see Science Marching On in the dinosaur-themed seasons of Super Sentai and Power Rangers. In Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger and Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers from the 1990s, the Tyrannosaurus mecha had an upright kangaroo stance. Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger and Power Rangers: Dino Thunder in the 2000s later corrected this to make their Tyrannosaurus horizontally-oriented. And by the 2010s, the Tyrannosaurs in Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger have feathers (though its adaptation Power Rangers Dino Charge is inconsistent on this point). Comparison pic.◊
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Science Marches On / int_bf30abce	comment	A plot point in several I, Robot stories is that the positronic brain and humanoid robots were developed years before speaking robots. The first "speaking robot" is a room-sized supercomputer which can answer simple trivia questions and do basic math, and is first unveiled to the public when human-shaped robots capable of following complex orders are available for mass consumption. In short, it is easier to make robots think, reason, and perfectly replicate bipedal locomotion, than it is to make them talk. Nowadays, simple text-to-speech programs (and products like Amazon Alexa) are available for anyone, while scientists are still struggling with bipedal robots, let alone anything close to Artificial Intelligence.
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Science Marches On / int_c43df4d8	comment	Doctor Who has two prominent mentions of Brontosaurus in the 1970sâ€”a small one in the Fourth Doctor's "The brontosaurus is large and placid... and stupid!" speech (which at least has the excuse that he had no grasp of reality at the time), and a big one in "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" where a Brontosaurus is one of the main dinos encountered. While originally inaccurate, a study published in 2015 has concluded that Brontosaurus is in fact a valid genus and Doctor Who was actually right all along!
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Science Marches On / int_c7539344	comment	An in-universe case of this happens in Singularity; when the Russians discover a unique element with properties that put most Phlebotinum to shame, they classify it as Element 99, or "E99," and you can even see some periodic tables in the labs printed shortly thereafter with E99 in the correct place and highlighted. Despite this, the research is very secretive, and the discovery is made before Einsteinium, the element that actually goes into that spot. Shortly before the discovery of Einsteinium is made public, the research into E99 is shut down and completely buried, so the rest of the scientific world has Einsteinium as 99 in their periodic tables.
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Science Marches On / int_cb598662	comment	Lucifer's Hammer has a scene where someone attempts to escape a monster tsunami by surfing the wave. It is epic. It is also, unfortunately, impossible. Prior to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, tsunamis were only known through eyewitness accounts of survivors, who were generally more concerned with getting away than studying the nature of the phenomenon. The proliferation of digital cameras changed that: we now know that the old name of "tidal wave" is actually quite accurate, as a tsunami is akin to a rising tide, only much faster and higher, rather than the monster breaking wave that most people envisioned.
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Science Marches On / int_ce009416	comment	In one episode of Yakitate!! Japan, Azuma and Kawachi were tasked to develop a butter-less bread that could be eaten safely by those allergic to milk. Azuma completed his task by using goat milk in his butter. While it was once believed that goat milk could safely be consumed by those allergic to cow milk due to its lack of alpha-s1 casein, this has since been debunked since goat milk contains other milk allergens, i.e. beta-lactoglobulin and immunoglobulin-E, which would trigger cross-reactivity in people allergic to cow milk.
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Science Marches On / int_cec292c4	comment	In After Man: A Zoology of the Future, contains many instances of this, combining with Zeerust and Rule of Cool. Some of the most egregious examples is that many of the future animals are descended from "insectivores", as in the order "Insectivora", which is now considered a defunct wastebasket taxon of small, generalist, insect-eating mammals that aren't particularly closely related in reality, and the false notion that bats are poor-sighted and will eventually lose their eyes, but really, bats have pretty good vision, and no species is blind.
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Science Marches On / int_d290d18b	comment	At the time ...And Your Name Is Jonah came out in 1979, it was widely believed that a deaf child allowed to use sign language would become unable to read lips and speak, and thus be unable to function in a hearing world. It is now known that the earlier a child is exposed to language, the better, and knowing sign language increases a child's chances of gaining functional speech later on.
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Science Marches On / int_d4fdfff4	comment	An example concerns the discussion of anti-bacterial hand soaps, which carried over onto episodes of ER, Scrubs, and House. When the soaps came out in the late 1990s and early 2000s, nobody bothered to do the research to see if they worked better at killing germs than regular soap. It turns out that various studies have suggested little relative benefit. Additionally, it has been suggested that overuse of anti-bacterial soap is promoting resistance to Triclosan, the active ingredient, and has the potential to promote development of resistance to similar antibiotics.
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Science Marches On / int_d4fe015f	comment	QI had an episode where Dara O'Briain remembers and states the "Triple point of water" where water exists in all three states of matter, which was 0 degrees of celsius. Two series later the viewers at home had apparently sent in so many letters correcting him which had been adjusted to 0.01 degrees. They deducted points from his then-current score.
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Science Marches On / int_d57d63c5	comment	In The Neanderthal Man, a Mad Scientist cites Piltdown Man to demonstrate that humanity's ancestors had larger brains. Piltdown Man was exposed as a hoax about five months after the movie came out.
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Science Marches On / int_d888c467	comment	When Tailchaser's Song came out in the 1980s, domestic cats were seen as solitary animals who only sometimes live in clowders. This is why it gets repeatedly mentioned that it's uncomfortable and unnatural for cats to be in large groups for long periods of time. Since then, research has shown that cats are more social than previously thought.
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Science Marches On / int_db56a211	comment	"What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years": A widely-publicized set of predictions for the 20th century as seen from the year 1900 included the hope that all these annoying flies and mosquitoes, along with their breeding grounds in the swamps, marshes, and other wetlands, would finally be completely eradicated. Now scientists are fighting tooth and nail to preserve these areas in order to combat the loss of biodiversity and the protection these areas provide against flooding and coastal erosion. Meanwhile, wetlands and swamps are still being drained, paved over and polluted with alarming speed; and mosquitoes are killed en masse to this day. The loss of mosquitoes would kill off many animals that eat them and without wetlands serious pollution problems would occur to a lot of water supplies.
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Science Marches On / int_dd704ad3	comment	Change of Habit has an autistic child who is hiding behind a "wall of rage" to cope with her mother's emotional and later physical abandonment. She is cured using rage reduction, which involves deliberately causing enormous distress in order to "release the anger." It is now known that autism is biological and has nothing to do with parenting, and that rage reduction does nothing but cause PTSD. In fact, Robert W. Zaslow, who supervised the rage reduction scene, was stripped of his medical license in 1971 after a young woman was severely injured under his care.
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Science Marches On / int_df2122ef	comment	This was referenced in-story in the second looking Little House on the Prairie, which was set in the 1870s but published in the 1930s. One chapter has the family falling ill with something dubbed "fever 'n' ague". It's suggested by one character that the illness was contracted by eating tainted watermelons, while Laura's father believes it's contracted from breathing night-time air (the latter reflects the beliefs of miasma theory, see the Real Life section for more information). The chapter ends with a statement that they had malaria but no one at the time, not even the Frontier Doctor, knew it came from mosquito bites.
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Science Marches On / int_e270b7e1	comment	This trope is a major setting element in Genius: The Transgression. A Genius's inventions may very well work on outmoded principles, but that's because it's their inner madness fueling the devices, not any sort of consistent physical principle. Also, there are realms of existence where outmoded models of the Universe are the predominant mode, such as a Ptolemaic universe where the planets really are crystal spheres pushed through seas of phlogiston by humongous archangels, or a version of Mars that's a lot like Barsoom. The main antagonists, the Baramins of Lemuria, have a tendency to believe in outdated scientific, philosophical and/or political theories (ranging from Luminiferous aether to still being upset that Aristotleâ€™s organon replaced Platonic philosophy!). They don't realize their inventions are powered by their own madness; they just think something went wrong with human development, and work constantly to "fix" it. Which is a problem if you're one of the people that needs fixing... If a popular scientific theory held by a large enough proportion of the world is disproven, the universe will go ahead and create a version of that theory anyway in an event known as a Maniac Storm. This was how the alternative realms of existence mentioned in the first bullet point above came into being. It's also how a number of antagonistic factions were founded; the Viking lander reaching Mars in 1971 and proving there was no intelligent alien life on the planet was followed seconds later by a Martian invasion, and the first Lemurians came about when it was proven that there was absolutely wasn't a mystical island full of serpent-people with advanced technology who wanted to destroy humanity. Notably, while the "disproven" part is key to the effect, it can work at smaller, but cumulative scales, too, as demonstrated by the fact Santa Claus needs to be reigned in every year before he dispenses gifts that don't play well with mortals.
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Science Marches On / int_e409bb53	comment	True to its historical setting, The Sims Medieval has the Physician Sim using leeches as part of his/her repertoire. Unlike in Real Life, bloodletting is apparently an effective treatment in the game's universe.
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Science Marches On / int_e5de407c	comment	The XCOM series makes much use of a Mineral MacGuffin called Elerium, an element that forms in yellow crystals and has an atomic number of 115, and among other interesting properties is vitally important for the construction of anti-gravity drives. This was probably based on claims made about element-115 in the 1980s by a UFO enthusiast with the splendidly appropriate name of Bob Lazar. These claims were considered exceedingly dubious even at the time, but it wasn't until element-115 was successfully synthesised that they were fully debunked.
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Science Marches On / int_e5fd2cef	comment	The Lensman novels: E. E. "Doc" Smith justified both FTL and Constant Thrust Equals Constant Velocity with the inertia-negating "Bergenholm" device. At the time of writing, the negation of inertial mass, though hideously energy-intensive, was believed theoretically possible. Advances in relativity and quantum mechanics have since destroyed the concept's viability. Also, the first novel, Triplanetary, had fish-like aliens (more indifferent to humanity than actively hostile) raiding near-ish future Earth to steal iron to fuel their atomic star drives. Humans rapidly copied their tech and developed atomic iron star drives of their own. The problem is that there are two ways of getting energy out of atoms; fuse light ones together, or split heavy ones apart. As atoms' weights move away from the extreme light and heavy ends you get less and less energy out as you fuse or split them, and in the middle there's an element that's the atomic energy equivalent of a deflated balloon; fusing or splitting it releases no energy, and you actually need to pump energy in to change it in any way at all. That element is iron — the absolute worst possible choice for a nuclear fuel. At the time the specifics of the nuclear binding energy curve wouldn't have been well known, so there's every chance Smith chose iron simply because we use a lot of it on Earth, making it a good candidate for a material avaricious aliens might want to steal. Complete mass to energy conversion is also possible by the mutual annihilation of matter and antimatter. This concept does appear in the Lensman series in the form of the negasphere, which is essentially a planet-sized sphere of antimatter which is used to "eat" planets (in the process disappearing itself). In terms of Science Marches On, this point is affected by Smith's idea of antimatter being much closer to the tentative ideas that Dirac came up with when first considering the concept than to the modern conception of antimatter. It is also affected by Smith plain getting it wrong, in that while he correctly states that the energy is released in the form of floods of energetic gamma rays, he does not envisage these as having any effect other than radiation poisoning for anyone nearby — whereas in reality the gamma rays would be absorbed by nearby matter and their energy converted into heat, resulting in a massive explosion as opposed to the spooky silent disappearance of matter which the books describe.
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Science Marches On / int_ed05da21	comment	The 2007 documentary series Prehistoric Predators made significantly more effort to be accurate than many other prehistoric life documentaries of the time. However, some of its claims have been cast in doubt or outright debunked. The episode on the dire wolf claims it to be a close relative of the modern grey wolf. This was believed to be true at the time, but a 2021 DNA study indicated that it was more distant than previously thought, causing it to be reclassified under the genus Aenocyon. Arctodus simus, aka the giant short-faced bear, was hit with this twice over. Based on then up-to-date molecular isotope analysis, the bear was assumed to be hypercarnivorous. However, the specimens tested were uncovered in Alaska, a place where non-meat dietary options were severely limited during the Ice Age. Since the bear's range extended as far south as Mexico, it was determined that a broader sample was needed. Indeed, examining remains from other areas found that it was more omnivorous than previously thought and would eat plants when they were available. The series runs with the then-popular theory that it was an obligate scavenger that engaged in kleptoparasitism (in Layman's Terms, stealing other predator's kills). This model has been cast into serious doubt, since it's hard to imagine that a large, warm-blooded animal that couldn't fly would have been able to gain enough calories just by scavenging. While it almost certainly did at least some scavenging, that's probably not how it obtained all of its meals, especially since (as mentioned above) it didn't only eat meat. Entelodonts are repeatedly described as "pigs", since they were believed to be pig relatives at the time. Since the show's airing, however, morphological and molecular studies have indicated that they were more closely related to hippos.
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Science Marches On / int_eef69f10	comment	In "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone", Sherlock Holmes justifies his habit of eating little or not at all while he's on a case, claiming that he's denying blood flow to his stomach so more will be available to his brain. Although blood flow to the digestive and urinary organs does decrease when in a state of excitement, anger or fear (sympathetic activation), such blood is redirected to the skin, heart, and skeletal muscles. The brain is the one organ from which blood flow is never diverted, even when the body is starving or hemorrhaging.
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Science Marches On / int_ef86b9d1	comment	While Paleo Pines was in development, Troodon was considered a valid dinosaur genus, so it was included in the game. By the time it was released in late 2023, it had been deemed invalid, with most specimens being reclassified as Stenonychosaurus. The developers acknowledged this in a tweet.
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Science Marches On / int_f631badc	comment	Dinosaurs: The Most Complete, Up-to-Date Encyclopedia for Dinosaur Lovers of All Ages was indeed one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date popular texts on dinosaurs... when it was published in 2007. As the author himself admits, palaeontology is a rapidly changing field, and within a decade most of the information presented had become outdated. A website was maintained with updated information... up until 2015, at which point updates stopped and that also became outdated!
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Science Marches On / int_f7f974ba	comment	Any discussion of "pack dynamics" in wolves (Julie of the Wolves comes to mind.) Modern research has shown that wolf packs are more or less nuclear families, with the "alpha" male and female simply being the parents of the rest of the pack. They still let strangers in, but it's mostly based on one family. The original study that created the idea was done with captive wolves, who take on more of a prison-style hierarchy. Even the researcher who popularized the idea has long since rejected it in the face of better research.
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Science Marches On / int_f858847a	comment	PokÃ©mon X and Y introduced Amaura and Aurorus, PokÃ©mon themed on the Amargasaurus. Though it is quite accurate in other regards (such as its toe structure and head shape), both PokÃ©mon have a characteristic pair of membraneous sails on their necks, which is now less popular among paleontologists than the idea that the spines were bare and used for intimidation and combat. Then a 2022 study on the morphology of the neural spines came out stating that Amargasaurus and its relatives probably did have sails on their necks.
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Science Marches On / int_f8ac88ad	comment	Contact has Green Rocks in the form of power cells made of "element 117". Inevitably, the discovery of the real element 117 was recognized by IUPAC almost a decade later, and naturally, tennessine has none of the properties shown in the game — the most obvious difference, as usual, being the stability.
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Science Marches On / int_f9d4e89f	comment	In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Watson ponders the Neolithic stone artifacts of Dartmoor and feels a bit sorry for their builders, whom he presumes had been forced onto such poor land by aggressive neighbors. It's now understood that millennia of human agriculture created the acidic soil conditions in Devon, which had previously been covered in forests.
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Science Marches On / int_fb5347d8	comment	The Dracula Tape, Fred Saberhagen's snarky Perspective Flip of Bram Stoker's Dracula, hangs a lampshade on the fact that Lucy Westenra receives blood transfusions from four different people. The initial scientific discovery of blood type groups came four years after the original novel was published, so Saberhagen's Count — as something of an expert on matters of blood by necessity — turns her into a vampire only to save her from immediate death brought on by the inevitable complications, of which van Helsing's companions, if not necessarily the doctor himself, were blissfully unaware. (It's actually implied that van Helsing, a less heroic figure in the retelling, may have inadvertently killed other patients in this fashion before.)
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Science Marches On / int_fb9c177d	comment	One strange example and correction of this is the designs of the Dinobots in Transformers. In the original designs their alt-modes showed many inaccuracies to fossil records that later counterparts corrected: they're no longer bow-legged or sluggish and Grimlock is no longer in the "kangaroo stance" but the proper bent-over position. The Age of Extinction Dinobots do have inaccuracies, but they were deliberately introduced as Artistic License to make them look more fantastic.
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Science Marches On / int_fc612179	type	Science Marches On
Science Marches On / int_fc612179	comment	In the foreword to The Skylark of Space, also by Smith, he states that he is aware of this new theory of relativity, but that it's unproven and he doesn't personally agree with it. The book had been started in 1915, before general relativity had been published in its finished form (Einstein's seminal paper being published November of that year), and special relativity was still not universally accepted among physicists at the time. On the other hand, the series provides a surprisingly accurate view of antimatter, with the Applied Phlebotinum at the heart of its science being an alien substance that annihilates with copper to provide huge quantities of power.
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Science Marches On / int_ff9ab17f	type	Science Marches On
Science Marches On / int_ff9ab17f	comment	In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Worf comes down with a disease most Klingons get as children. Dr. Pulaski compares it to measles, implying that even centuries into the future measles is a common childhood disease, while in actuality measles is now almost unknown in the US at least thanks to vaccines. Although thanks to anti-vaccination campaigners, measles outbreaks are on the uptick again.
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Science Marches On / int_ffc6c28f	type	Science Marches On
Science Marches On / int_ffc6c28f	comment	Robert Heinlein again. In Starship Troopers the planet Sanctuary has very low radiation level and colonists supposedly risked to "stay frozen at their present level while the rest of the human race moves on past them", but "it's a bit safer — leukemia and some types of cancer are almost unknown there". While "more advanced" Terran wheat beats local weeds. There are problems. First, usual set of bugs with Evolutionary Levels. Second, while major radiation poisoning causes particular forms of cancer, there's no compelling reason to tie most cases to the normal radiation background. Third, a result of the previous two: conditions for evolutionary adaptation include gamma rays just like everything else, so modern radiobiology pulled the low end of the scale out of Oven Logic.note It's better known for the plants, as their optimums are already orders of magnitude higher, so fallout levels dangerous to humans may still be stimulating to them. For algae, it was known from 1898, the "radiation hormesis" hypothesis appeared in 1981 or so, and at least from 1983 it's about specific numbers for mammals. E.g. rats grown (not even born) in a low radioactive background have health and development problems, thus some background seems desirable. Sanctuary's choice could boil down to "eat radioactive isotopes or slowly die out". There is some discussion in the book about detonating nuclear weapons on a regular basis to increase the background radiation, but there is a difference between steady but low-level radiation and acute, high levels. An even more fundamental error: the main driving force behind evolution is competition for survival and for mates, the only needed force is a means for introducing genetic diversity (spontaneous mutation will occur without radiation present), and therefore Sanctuary will not be a stable island of unchanging organisms. All the details of DNA replication were not known in 1959, as its structure had been announced only in 1953. In Starship Troopers at least these could be in-universe mistakes made by the protagonist, who is narrating the story in the first person. While he's a top-notch Space Marine and definitely not stupid, he is explicitly stated not to be strong in science (particularly mathematics). In any case, it's now known that a fairly small amount of cross-breeding between two breeding groups that are mostly separate will prevent species divergence. So even granting all that is said in the novel as true, interstellar travel will keep humans on all planets in regular contact with each other the same species. Stars!, on the other hand, got it: whether gravity, temperature or radiation on a planet are out of the species' acceptable band to either side, you're in the same amount of trouble.
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Science Marches On	processingCategory2	Artistic License
Science Marches On	processingCategory2	Artistic License â€“ Biology
Science Marches On	processingCategory2	Older Than Dirt
Science Marches On	processingCategory2	Speculative Fiction Tropes
Science Marches On	processingCategory2	Time Marches On
Science Marches On	processingCategory2	Trivia
Science Marches On	processingCategory2	Tropes on Science and Unscience
Pangea – The Neverending World (Animation) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
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Fantastic Four (1961) (Comic Book) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Sensation Comics (Comic Book) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Strange Tales (Comic Book) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
The Blackblood Alliance (Comic Book) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Tom Strong (Comic Book) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
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Rise of the Galeforces (Fanfic) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Dinosaur! (1985) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
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Swiss Family Robinson / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
X-Men: Apocalypse / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
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Tintin (Franchise) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
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A Romance of Two Worlds / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Anarchist Cookbook / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Caffeine / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
CoDominium / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Contact / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Cryptozoologicon / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Destroyermen / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Dinotopia / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
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Extraterrestrial Civilizations / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Flying Saucers Have Landed / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Have Space Suit â€“ Will Travel / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Little House on the Prairie / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Malleus Maleficarum / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
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The Martian / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
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20,000 Leagues Under the Sea / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
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Tropes G to M / Real Life / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Edge Town (Roleplay) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
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Constantine (2014) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
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FlashForward (2009) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Grimm / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Innocent UK / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Koreanosaurus / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Land of the Lost (1974) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Life (2007) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Manifest / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
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Battlezone (1998) (Video Game) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
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Sins of a Solar Empire (Video Game) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
Star Control (Video Game) / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
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Walking with Dinosaurs / int_c309f9d1	type	Science Marches On
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